I own a 2020 Kona EV. The battery cannot be upgraded. Eventually, I'll have to replace the entire car to get a longer range. BEVs should be mandated to have upgradable batteries and modular interfaces so that the shell can continue to be reused, the batteries (and BMS) upgraded, and old batteries easily recycled.
Should I be able to eventually replace gas tank with the larger one in my ICE vehicle?
Why not ask me my motivations instead of assuming them?
I'm not fine with the range; I bought an EV to stop burning fossil fuels, my 24-year-old RAV4 was on its last leg, and there was a $6K bonus for trade-ins (my RAV4 would have been about $5k in parts).
Plus, the long-term cost savings kick in after about 8 years, which I blogged about at: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/08/06/typesetting-markdow...
> Why you have to replace it with longer range?
Because I want to explore the interior of BC, drive across Canada on fewer charges, visit family, go on road trips, etc. Just yesterday I spent 30 minutes trying to charge my Kona. It's a long and boring story, but suffice to say our charging infrastructure here sucks, and is not as simple, quick, or convenient as "tap-to-pay" (with a credit card) at petrol stations.
FWIW, that is actually a thing you can do. It is mostly done for SUVs and pickups since the primary use case for the extra range is off-pavement driving and the upgrade is simpler.
Focusing on being able to upgrade battery (and to be clear - upgrade, not replaced/repair) is solving 1% problem.
The main enemy of cars is rust, but for that there are cost effective mitigations now. The real reason people ditch cars is always they get tired of the old car and want something more modern, not because the car is at the end of its "useful life".
Batteries are not like that. They actually have a useful life that degrades over time, which makes them non-servicable.
What I would like to see is serviceable batteries, where you can replace individual damaged cells and keep the battery going. Everyone would benefit from that, especially the used EV market, which would help stem the massive depreciation hits EV buyers are facing now.
I don't know why is this even an argument really, like.....in a petrol car, do you expect to be able to fit it with a bigger fuel tank after 10 years? or a more powerful engine? Until very recently even software updates to the infotainment weren't really a thing, if you wanted a newer interface you had to change the entire car(I'm not saying this was a good thing, just that generally the expectation is that the product will work the way it was when you bought it).
That was totally a thing for phones in the past. Depending on the model you could get a larger pack that had a bulge on the back of the device to have extra battery time. There was a similar thing with a number of laptops.
I do agree its kind of a questionable thing on something like a car. I imagine packaging concerns would really get in the way of adding a bit extra.
