Tesla has chosen to make the battery a structural part of the automobile. This is going to add cost to the battery and make replacement A pain. The car body is diecast in the worlds largest diecast machine. Car batteries are of course the source of batteries being repurposed by people like us. Lithium and sodium battteries can’t be charged in the cold. The solution to this is to add a smaller battery that can be charged in the cold then use the heat of charging that battery to warm the rest of the batteries. I’m wondering who is in charge of Tesla.
Why not just add a heater element to the battery pack? When the charging starts the heater turns on until the battery pack is at the right temperature, then the batteries starts to actually be charged.
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And that’s what this probably is about. Make it as hard as possible to make the car usable for more than 15 years.
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BYD has structural battery packs too, and yet they can be somewhat easily removed and you can replace single cells in them (which are still huge, because they use enormous prismatics).
Structural batteries are the way forward, because they lower overall car weight (good for tire life, braking, and overall efficiency) and they lower center of gravity. It just needs to be well executed. Not sure if Tesla did/does so. They’ve been quite behind the competition from an engineering point of view for a while now, apart from their really cool thermal management where every component that produces heat can be used to heat others that need heat with some crazy cooling loop valve system.
Those heater elements in electric stoves are nichrome less than a mm across. The Celeston Thermotourch flashlights used them as a hand warmer. No idea if these are safe but yes they would work and are lightweight.
They’d be doing it to save wasting power running any dedicated heating element.
I’ve got a Tesla Powerwall 2 on the house, it’s got built in heating and cooling for the cells. I’m guessing that would be a similar system to what their older vehicles use.