You can almost never justify a new vehicle vs repairing what you already have. Diesel, gas, electric, doesn't matter.
If you're looking at a new EV compare it to a new gas or diesel.
EV thread
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You can almost never justify a new vehicle vs repairing what you already have. Diesel, gas, electric, doesn't matter.
If you're looking at a new EV compare it to a new gas or diesel.
I ran a lot of numbers, trying to figure out a way to financially justify an engine swap and the only way that made sense, was compared to a new vehicle. I even added recreational amount, because there is a certain aspect that I'm willing to pay just because I want something, plus once you start adjusting that amount, it's easy to see the cost to play.
A lot of these batteries really aren't crazy complicated. In many cases it's like something similar to a 18650 and then the specs are the actual shape and then lists of how many series and how many parallel and if you know the battery it's based on you know, voltage and all kinds of stuff.
You can't say this when & if you are trying to stay legal in some instances. My example is when I was looking at keeping my 2006 Ram 3500 but wanted to stay legal when towing a trailer that was 21K lbs. The 2006 Ram 3500 was only rated to tow 17K lbs. Wouldn't have mattered if I'd put duals on the rear or rebuild the transmission & added a exhaust brake plus increased the size of brakes. But none of that would have changed the sticker on the door that stated what it had been rated for from the manufacturer. Now you can buy more tonnage from the state you live in but that is just a road tax. If you get into an accident you can be sued on the civil side.
I've only ever bought 3 brand new vehicles in my 45+ years of owning and driving vehicles.
How many years can it be under warranty?
I've seen some stuff about the old battery in the Prius and not only can it be repaired, but I think it can be changed in useful ways. I've been starting to do more reading on Li batteries and lead acid and stuff too so I can play around with some systems. The only issues are that it's easy to drop A LOT of money on batteries and controllers and I'm nervous that any mistake can lead to damaging batteries and worse, fires, so no experiments will be ran in my absence.
I'm hopeful that I can figure out a pretty cool Aux battery for the Jeep and some other vehicles I've got, so IMO it's fun and maybe I can figure out a way to make something useful and safe. Also I'd like to figure out how to get max cycle and time life from these batteries too. Maybe in combination of playing with the tech, I can get MUCH cheaper used batteries that I can get life from, but maybe many of the issues will have been solved by the time I really need another truck.
The whole LI battery thing is changing how I look at storage and what works or doesn't anymore. And now that I have a RV the whole world of LI is opening up. And trying to understand what works or doesn't work and how to integrate it into my use so far has been interesting.
Being they are so expensive I can't just jump in with both feet first so I'm trying to learn how to do this slowly.
What is the average life span of a battery in a vehicle? And I get that this would depend on usage and how often it was fast charged plus I'm sure many otehr factors.
key word is "repair." Your truck was never legal to tow 21k. Upgrading is a whole 'nuther story...
Well I guess my idea of repair is not the same as yours.
Yes the idea of going to battery and not having to hear the generator (and I have relatively quiet generators) would be nice. I'm off-grid in the camper and yeah I could easily drop a $3k on a couple server rack batteries and probably just run part time, but I'm trying to be cheaper than that and possibly going with some lead acid, but I'd prefer to keep batteries in the truck and being a bit lighter vs ~500 lbs makes sense IMO. I still wonder if I can mix some battery chemistries for slightly different roles too. If lead acid is better in certain temps, maybe I can integrate them for different circumstances.
I'm also very interested in life, since I can limit cycling pretty easily and there's a lot I can do like maintaining the batteries, but how long of a shelf life can I really get out of Li vs Lead-acid. And as I've described before, there are instances where I have lead acids I almost never cycle and just keep them charged for backup, watered and the right acidity or whatever it is I'm checking, I forgot and how long will they last with what capacity remaining?
Honestly it’s so new that it’s all speculation. With good charge habits Elon claims this tech should reach 300-500k. 300k would be great. 500 seems optimistic
That would be pretty amazing if you could get 300k. I guess the next question would be how well does the rest of the vehicle hold up? And only time will tell on that.
Not to derail this but what about during natural disasters for charging your rig? Since Florida is having a hurricane, can you charge with solar panels and a solar generator?
It was funnier when I posted it earlier... Except I posted the article that went with the meme....
OP
I’m not sure. The only natural disaster we have to deal with here in AZ is cleaning our pools after a dust storm. Here’s my dads pool after the last one.
It kinda sucks, but in a disaster, I haven't seen an EV I'd leave with unless it was on a trailer. I just wouldn't trust chargers to not be affected by large groups of people travelling or simply how much energy required for fast charging.
For bugging in, I think they'd be great. Unfortunately the amount of solar required to power these things is pretty miserable.
Eventually I think they'll come up with some good generators to charge EVs. Though maybe you could get a few hundred miles away and then slow charge for half a day, at a rest stop or something until you can get further away. But I'm talking about this in a very ignorant way. Maybe you could use a 30amp RV plug to get a bit more miles per hr during off grid charging. But if that's 30A x 110V, I'm not not sure that's really getting you far, maybe 10 miles/hr of charging? From my experience with my generator powering my camper that's about 2 ga of gas, but the time is kind of an issue.
Likely there's some generators that can somehow get ~ 30a (I think there's a 50, but don't remember) from 220V, but that starts to get into bit larger generators.
OP
The TFL guys drove a Lightning to Prudhoe Bay and used 30 amp chargers in places to do it. They also charged it using the F150 hybrid when they had no other option and it was really slow.