Nissan Leaf Battery Upgrade Project
New Zealand owners of Nissan Leafs have no options to upgrade their car with a new battery pack to extend the useful life of their car. At Blue Cars we recognised this looming environmental problem years ago and started working on a solution. In 2017 we launched our pilot project with co-funding from EECA. This allowed us to design, build and test our own replacement battery module for a Nissan Leaf. Our new module achieved 45% greater capacity than new original Leaf modules and gave us the confidence to set our sights on a full upgrade solution.
Image 1 – Inside a Nissan Leaf battery pack with original modules (24 kWh)
Prototype Status
Since completing our pilot study we’ve continued to develop further designs towards our goal of a commercially viable solution. In July 2019 we built our first full Nissan Leaf upgrade prototype, which fits 38 kWh of new cells into an existing Leaf battery pack (58% more capacity than the original pack). We still have some technical issues to solve, but initial run-out tests have been promising with our test-car achieving nearly 200 km in winter conditions and mostly highway driving. We believe we can increase this to 240 km with further tweaking of the design and better cell balancing.
Funding
We are a small startup company with limited revenue from our core activities to fund development and trial projects. Our initial pilot study was made possible thanks to EECA, but our applications for further funding since then have been unsuccessful. We can still keep the project moving forward, but any support we do get will help us to finalize and prove our solution and scale up to volume production much quicker! We have just submitted an updated application into Round 7 of the LEV fund and also just launched a Givealittle crowdfunding campaign.
The project will benefit not only the ~7,000 existing Nissan Leaf owners in New Zealand, but all EV owners (we plan to adapt our solution to other makes/models of electric cars), future EV owners and generallyl anybody who just enjoys clean air, less pollution and a greater chance that we might yet solve this pending climate catastrophe.
Expressions of Interest
We have previously advertised that we are looking for Leaf owners in New Zealand who may be interested in participating in a trial study of our Leaf battery upgrade solution. So far we have received ~70 expressions of interest, including a dozen or so enquiries from around the world. To express interest or even if you just want to be kept informed, please email us at pilot@bluecars.nz.
Please email us with:
– Your name and contact details
– Details of your Nissan Leaf vehicle
– A recent LeafSpy screenshot (if possible)
Criteria for trial participation:
– Owner of a Nissan Leaf in New Zealand (priority for cars with SOH < 70%)
– Allow us to collect performance data from your upgraded battery pack
– Willing to pay around $20k for the trial upgrade pack (see notes)
Deposit required to secure place in queue:
– Positions in the queue are according to the order deposit payments are received.
– Option to request a full refund if the project doesn’t proceed.
– Deposit amount is set at $3,000.
Notes on upgrade pricing:
1. The earlier target price of $15k depended on co-funding from the LEV contestable fund (our application was unsuccessful).
2. Our latest application doesn’t include funding towards pack costs (only integration and testing costs).
3. Sufficient demand and volume production should enable lower pricing longer term.