New Batteries for Old EVs : 150% more range for a Nissan LEAF | FULLY CHARGED

[Music] hello and welcome to another episode of fully charged coming to you from cheltenham a beautiful town in the west of england and we've come along here to see what happens when you change the battery in an electric vehicle before we start that i just want to mention how important it is for us us at fully charged that you the lovely audience subscribe to this channel it makes a huge difference to us very little commitment on your part doesn't cost anything just click that subscribe button it will increase the number of our subscribers which really helps us because the lovely people at youtube will give us a little bit more help with the more subscribers we have don't want to talk about it anymore just want to ask you to do that for us if you can be bothered that would be lovely what we're here to see today as i said is this battery swapping so let's get on with it and stop waffling okay this is a nissan leaf that is cleavly eevee and this is fully charged don't forget our great eb giveaway subscribe and enter for the chance to win one of several electrifying prizes including one of four electric cars [Music] [Music] so matt thanks very much for letting us come along and see what you're up to now so just to can you explain to people so this your company has been going a long time used to service petroleum diesel cars but now you started to do the battery swapping yes which is is that a fairly recent addition to the business yes it is so it's a supply and demand type thing really we were getting asked a lot to do battery swaps could we do battery swaps we'd established ourselves cleveland ev's been going for three years now so we established ourselves in the ev community um as the trusted ev independent to go to to get an honest device and we're getting a lot of inquiries can we change batteries can we improve battery health can we change uh battery cells so it started with a battery cell and then we teamed up with moxanne in holland to be able to do the battery swaps because the uh the communications part of it between the battery management systems and the the new battery and the car needs various communications to be so it isn't quite as simple as taking out a couple of double a's from a radio and putting another two in no i wish it was it's a little bit more complex than that that the the the battery management software ecu within the battery housing is actually needs to communicate with the rest of the car and uh rather than swap over the bms's from the packs because they're of different age and everything's coded to the cars there needs to be a communications interface right and various software bits of trickery and that's what muksan and holland provide to us right right and so what you're doing then is you're getting uh i mean let's let's sort of clarify what this is because it's not sort of batteries of all it's fair is it mostly nissan early nissan leafs is that what you've mostly done yeah currently we're working on a leaf platform or muksan provide kit for the leaf platform right um we are generally swapping gen one batteries um in leafs not to say that we can't swap a gen two or three or four but um they're the ones that we're seeing with the most degraded batteries are the very early japanese leafs yeah with the cream interiors that uh have been on the road nine ten years um they've had a use already we've seen some that have done a hundred thousand miles plus right why not put another healthier battery in it so we're going from a 24 kilowatt hour battery that wasn't the best battery chemistry in the first place and has degraded slightly um might have 16 to 20 kilowatt hours now usable right and the owners love the car that it does everything they need it to do so they want to step it up so we're putting 40 kilowatt-hour batteries out of um crash damaged leafs where the the battery is good we're sourcing them from salvage yards all over europe bringing them in and swapping them so that this car has the earlier car has a second lease of life right so then you take the battery out you got the new one in customer happy they drive off with their massively improved range but you've got a battery pack so what happens to that um so i'm looking for a second life for those my aim and my goal and when i get time my sort of side project will be to create some battery storage for our facility here our workshops here so i'm about to have 30 kilowatts of solar put on the roof right we're fairly low consumer so we will not use all of that energy certainly in the summer that's being produced um i've got solar at home so i'm well aware of how it works i've got battery storage at home so if i can create battery storage here yeah with batteries that we're removing out of leaf and we can have them all racked up to have to say it's got 20 kilowatt hours of usable room in that in that pack we've removed daily cycling it where it's on a charge discharge cycle is perfect use case for that battery [Music] and so what you're seeing in that case then from the experience i've got with my leave is a range increase from i'm trying to be sort of realistic 55 to 60 miles i've got in mine now if it's on a nice day two well well over a hundred then i mean yeah the the gen one leafs actually seem to really like having a 40 kilo or hour battery or perhaps be the way it's that the owners get used to driving them very efficiently and things like that that you end up with um a range of 160 plus miles on occasion out of a 40. so uh how that's i mean and that is a massive you know for people who don't drive electric cars the difference between having a car that will do 60 yeah which you can use i use mine all the time i mean it's not like you can't use it it still works perfectly all right but you just don't want to go too far but to have that the jump from that to 160 puts it in a whole different it makes a massive difference just to take those numbers that take the number game off the screen and give it so much range that you're not going to make it a concern so and then so okay so say you've got an a that well we're going to see that we're seeing that today but a nissan leaf of that era yeah they cut they bring it in so how long is it here for how long does that process take so it's around about four hours three to four hours so we get it in um initially just check the original battery do a leaf spy report on it have a look at all the cells what state of health it's at we print a report at that stage before we remove it next it will be then putting in what's called the can bridge so that's the communications interface um we install it into the car so that it sits in line with the communications network and then i pull data off of that cambridge send it off to holland where they modify that data send it back to me in order for a 40 kilowatt hour battery to to fit and work whilst that they're doing the swap and modification of the data i get the battery out of the car so up on the ramp under trays off battery out new battery in they fit the same right so there's not really any modifications extraordinary isn't it so the the the the actual pack size yeah between a 24 kilowatt hour and a 40 kilo is the same there's no difference in that no it's progress in technology so it's the same physical presumably a bit heavier is it a bit heavier a tiny bit i assume but not a noticeable amount if you jump from a 40 to a 62 the pack is physically bigger but it will still fit with different brackets and things into a gen one leaf as well wow the only other thing we need to change is um the communications low voltage cables from the car to the battery because nissan changed it when they swapped from gen 1 to gen 2 right and so we need that's manageable that that yeah it's a it's best part of an hour's soldering changing of wiring and that's the longest part of the job to be honest [Music] so [Music] so matt that looks i mean i'm saying that looks fairly straightforward there's no way i could do it but you know essentially you're undoing a load of bolts you're dropping down a big battery pack unplugging it yes so um the underside thing so once we've got the cambridge installed in the footwear we took the data off so that's right you did that did that first that's the key thing first whilst the car is in in its initial state we need to tap into that communications network and get the specific way the binary way that the communication network works send that off to holland but is that different with every car they've all got their own coded that's right yeah so you can't ignore that you've got to do that or you've got to do it no it'd be great and a lot easier for me if we had a standardized way of fitting that cambridge just with a pre-battery change and a post-battery scene software but each one is individual and tailored to the car's communication so but then yeah under tray is off battery out once disconnected yeah obviously make it safe as well first and then batch out of the way change the wiring because it was a gen one so it's got that different low voltage communications connector that goes on the front of the battery once i've changed that over battery back in re-bolt it and um plug it all up and test it right so i can't imagine what we don't know what that one what uh the one you've just changed what its old battery pack would have been when it was full but roughly what do you reckon would have been like probably this time of year uh probably in the region of about 50 miles max i would have thought yeah it was what you've done has made a really big huge huge difference yeah and what did it say 132 130 134 and i don't know the overall state of charge that battery because it's just come over on a on a boat so right yeah um we'll probably well we will be able to charge that battery and get some more range on top of what's showing on the guessa meter at the moment yeah yeah just yeah so then the batteries are here after you've done it yes so you know what what's going to happen to these because you've got i can tell you're going to build up stock yes the um most importantly the customer is free to take it if they want to right if you've got your own use for the battery take it that's fine but we will find a second use for it whether we there's hobbyists that are creating their own diy cars evs so we'll break a pack and sell a number of modules out of it right or sell a complete pack if someone's in trouble we had somebody inquire for one of the packs we removed had an 85 state of health wasn't good enough for the owner of the car right there and then but for somebody else who's down to seven bars for instance if they want a cheap way of actually getting um their car back up to a usable amount of range then there's a used battery here that's ready to go in because that's the thing i have got no idea is roughly what the cost is so like what it would cost to replace them because it's difficult because you're not putting in a brand new product you're putting in a second hand that's right yeah they're not um cheap to source right um so once we get into the country our price is eight and a half thousand pound including that fitted right so that's everything that you've seen me do today yeah for to convert to a 40 kilowatt hour battery right that is slightly price dependent on availability of the battery yeah but um the 62 that we'll be doing at some point soon um that's 13 and a half thousand right but when you think about um the price difference between an old 24 what it's worth if you're going to part exit in for a 40 kilowatt hour battery for instance which are around about 18 19 000 to buy still what if you were going to buy new i mean is it possible to buy a brand new battery pack from nissan i mean is it even i believe so i haven't required as the right because uh yeah yeah i can't imagine what they would charge for it but i've heard rumors that a 30 is somewhere around about 15 000 right for a 30 kilowatt hour so i don't know what they charge for a 40 but whilst there are still batteries out there yeah from crash damage cars and things because there's now like half a million nissan leafs on the world's roads yeah so there's going to be a few yeah it's inevitable isn't it and there but i mean that so presumably there there are crashes that are severe enough where you can't reuse the battery but i would assume so i haven't seen any ass yet but if it was wrong i mean they are very well protected within the car aren't they so they're generally going to survive that yes yeah and so that's the i suppose that's the other side of it is what the sh the supply is like you know whether that's likely to drop i mean i think it sort almost feels like it's a a temporary measure in terms of the long-term view of electric vehicles because i think in five years time if you buy an electric car the battery is going to outlast the car you know one thing you probably you might be replacing a lot of other things but probably not the battery yeah what we're doing now is keeping the first generation first generation of evs on the road yeah and making sure that they're still usable for the customers by fitting in some of the later technology and like you say five years time it's going to be different again yeah so but we'll keep our eye on things we'll constantly change our business business model to help other eevee owners and drivers and users yeah and yeah that's what we're all about here brilliant so i think that's been really amazing to see uh i think it is as we discussed with matt you know very specific to these early electric vehicles that came out ten you know between eight and ten years ago they're still going they're still fine they're still really usable and the fact that you can upgrade it and suddenly get a car with proper decent range is really brilliant so it's been great to see this happening i'm definitely going to keep keep in touch with matt to find out what he does with the battery packs we know there's other companies that are using these battery packs for static storage in their factories and their houses and stuff like that uh you know so it there's a it's a it's a really interesting world that we're entering together as we move forward in the energy transition i think it's time i shut up i'm gonna quickly mention subscribing because we're really trying to get a load more subscribers on the fully charged show so if you haven't subscribed please do but other than that we just think you're brilliant for watching so i really hope you enjoyed this battery swap episode and as always if you have been thank you for watching now some of you may know i have a nissan leaf my battery has already been swapped and we're making another episode about that as soon as we're able coming later this year i will be test driving my beloved 11 year old nissan leaf that has i have been told hugely increased rate stay tuned

Channel: Fully Charged Show

Views: 558,960

Keywords: robert llew, electric car youtube channel, why should i buy an electric car, green energy comment, grid storage technology, renewable energy youtube, new transport ideas, green technology review, renewable energy comment, renewable energy electric vehicles, electric vs ice cars, latest news on renewable energy, ev show, fully charged show, robert llewellyn, electric cars, fully charged, batteries, battery swap, Nissan, Nissan Leaf, Nissan Leaf battery, battery change

Id: C4nS_tSQiVQ

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021