Thread: Trial complete: electric vehicles can work in Australia

Originally Posted by Homestar

I had a mate buy a used Prius for peanuts - still gets very good milage and the batteries still perform moderately well even though they are well past their replacement date and it was sold to him as 'batteries needed' - the Dealer told the previous owner this, but my mates had it 3 years and thet are still going fine, although not perfect. It owes him basically nothing so when they are finally stuffed it's not going to hurt him.

My mate has done the same but his battery pack started to fail. He bought (for next to nothing) a couple of packs from the local taxi depot and using a multimeter and simple load test determined which cells were faulty. Swapped out the cells with some good tested ones from the spare packs and all is good now.

He has a multitude of vehicles including an 80 series 4.5l petrol on 35s and dual lockers, a HJ45 trayback with stroked chev 350 on nitrous and a D4D Prado for his wife. He drives the Prius to work as his daily and gets 4l/100 and is very happy with it. From memory it has over 350K now.

Originally Posted by Geedublya

My mate has done the same but his battery pack started to fail. He bought (for next to nothing) a couple of packs from the local taxi depot and using a multimeter and simple load test determined which cells were faulty. Swapped out the cells with some good tested ones from the spare packs and all is good now.

He has a multitude of vehicles including an 80 series 4.5l petrol on 35s and dual lockers, a HJ45 trayback with stroked chev 350 on nitrous and a D4D Prado for his wife. He drives the Prius to work as his daily and gets 4l/100 and is very happy with it. From memory it has over 350K now.

It only takes one bad cell to pull down a whole pack , The cells don't degrade so much as they are not created equally. In service complete battery packs are discarded because of one cell . I have 45 x 200ah cells in mine and one is faulty from new, I estimate that cell has a real capacity of about 120 Ah so effectively brings the capacity of the entire pack down to 120ah I know this because my Battery Management System monitors the voltage of each cell , This one bad cell drops to 2.8V whilst the rest are on 3.1V From 2.8V there is a steep drop off to 2.6 from whence there is no recovery so I have my BMS shut the car down when the bad cell is at 2.8 .

As well as that one bad low cell , I have two cells that go high (I have BMS set to stop the charger when a cell reaches 4.5v) before the rest of the pack , so they fully charge before the others , thus again limiting the pack capacity. If you charge too high you can kill a cell, Thus a BMS is vital.

I have 4 new cells on the way from China , Rather than waste the bad cell I'll pick out the 4 worst cells and use them to make a 12v lithium pack for my caravan. Should last for ever.

Used Nissan Leaf packs are a really good way to go , only the low & high cells will be abused the rest will last another lifetime.