HV battery pack replacement questions

[chl]

I'm guessing that if I outlive my battery pack warranty (Jan 2032) there will be an aftermarket of replacements, maybe with better technology - that happened with the Leaf, although the Leaf sales were many more vehicles than the Lightning.

There are already battery swap companies around for fleet companies, but that might be another alternative if they move into the personal EV market.

Or maybe the new Ford truck, or a competitor vehicle, will be so compelling I'll replace the Lightning with that?

However, I waited a long time for EVs to become a thing and commercially available, I bought a 2012 Leaf in Dec 2011, but had to wait another 13 years to buy an EV pickup, so things do sometimes move slowly.

Sponsored

 

[djwildstar]

I am probably going to hit the 100k mile warranty limit in less than three years. [...] Would I try to hang on to the Lightning and replace the battery or just junk the Lightning and try to find something else?

I'm not concerned about gradual battery degradation. Ford has stated that the vehicle is designed for the same overall lifespan as an F-150 truck: 15-20 years and 200,00-300,000 miles. Cycle-testing of lithium-ion batteries suggests that we should see between 10% and 20% reduction in capacity over that projected lifespan.

If your 1% per year figure is accurate (and I have no idea where that number comes from or how it was derived), about 82% of F-150 Lightnings will hit that lifespan without a battery pack failure. Of the rest, about 44% will fail in warranty, and 55% will fail out of warranty. I suspect that we will have decent availability of replacement battery packs for the foreseeable future, as trucks are totaled for non-battery-related reasons, making those packs available for swap, in addition to OEM packs from Ford's stocks, and 3rd-party packs like the ones you link.

A lot depends on how the rest of the truck is aging, and what my options might be for a replacement. I'll likely be under battery warranty until sometime in 2029 or 2030 when I roll over 100,000 miles. At that point, there may well be new-technology EV pickups on the road that tempt me. If not, a new pack and another 100,000 miles would be a good investment.

 

[Texas Dan]

If your 1% per year figure is accurate (and I have no idea where that number comes from or how it was derived), about 82% of F-150 Lightnings will hit that lifespan without a battery pack failure. Of the rest, about 44% will fail in warranty, and 55% will fail out of warranty.

Here is the link to the Insideevs article that I got the 1% from, https://insideevs.com/news/720398/study-battery-replacement-rates-evs/. Here is also a link to where battery pack longevity was discussed extensively, https://www.f150lightningforum.com/forum/threads/how-long-will-our-batteries-last.19528/

 

[chl]

On this subject... does anyone know if you can replace a standard range battery pack with an extended range one? What are the software implications?

How it is done:

 

[callistus]

How it is done:

That was an excellent video, Thank you for sharing. I think there should be a cottage industry repairing at the battery module level

 

[chl]

That was an excellent video, Thank you for sharing. I think there should be a cottage industry repairing at the battery module level

Even better would be sub-module repairs since sometimes only a few bad cells out of the 360-480 total in a module depending on module size. However the design of the modules does not make that practical/possible.

I watched a video of someone replacing a bad module in a Nissan Leaf battery a while ago, a different animal of course. The 24kWh battery in the early Leafs has 48 modules each with a cell pair. He was just doing it for the 'fun of it' so to speak, a kind of dangerous job and not for the faint of heart!

But the Leaf battery was designed to be serviceable down to the module/cell pair level. Ford's battery "modules" has "cell groups" each with 4 or 5 cells (according to what I have read - someone here might know more about it) and were not designed to be easily worked on down to that level - not sure if when the "modules" are scrapped what happens, do the recyclers take them apart or what?

This is not the one I was thinking of, but same idea - they determine which module has a bad cell, then take the battery apart and locate the bad cell:

Part 1:
Part 2:

 

[callistus]

In the video didn't the guys Autel indicate the bad cell? with the right lift equipment battery removal and replacement on the Lightening would be a 'done by lunch job'.

 

[chl]

This video is titled "Ford Lightning's Serviceable Battery Pack Modules" but Ford does not, as far as I know, service the modules, they just replace them.

 

[chl]

In the video didn't the guys Autel indicate the bad cell? with the right lift equipment battery removal and replacement on the Lightening would be a 'done by lunch job'.

Yes, once they got it open, but before that, when still in the vehicle, I think they ran the Leaf Spy program which told them there was one bad cell and it's location, but maybe that was the other video I watched.

 

[chl]

In the video didn't the guys Autel indicate the bad cell? with the right lift equipment battery removal and replacement on the Lightening would be a 'done by lunch job'.

What most Leaf owners do, is buy an whole new and larger pack, going from 24 kWhs to 68 or 69 kWhs, that are plug-n-play replacements.

They come from China so there could be a big tariff hit depending on the status of the tariffs, but for about $6k a Leaf owner did the upgrade, including shipping across the Pacific.

My Leaf gets around 4.8 miles per kWh local driving so that would be over 300 miles range.

 

[chl]

I'm not concerned about gradual battery degradation. Ford has stated that the vehicle is designed for the same overall lifespan as an F-150 truck: 15-20 years and 200,00-300,000 miles. Cycle-testing of lithium-ion batteries suggests that we should see between 10% and 20% reduction in capacity over that projected lifespan.

If your 1% per year figure is accurate (and I have no idea where that number comes from or how it was derived), about 82% of F-150 Lightnings will hit that lifespan without a battery pack failure. Of the rest, about 44% will fail in warranty, and 55% will fail out of warranty. I suspect that we will have decent availability of replacement battery packs for the foreseeable future, as trucks are totaled for non-battery-related reasons, making those packs available for swap, in addition to OEM packs from Ford's stocks, and 3rd-party packs like the ones you link.

A lot depends on how the rest of the truck is aging, and what my options might be for a replacement. I'll likely be under battery warranty until sometime in 2029 or 2030 when I roll over 100,000 miles. At that point, there may well be new-technology EV pickups on the road that tempt me. If not, a new pack and another 100,000 miles would be a good investment.

Large studies determined that the average capacity loss due to aging is from 1-2% per year.
The rest is due to various factors, like how often they are DC charged, the depth of discharge, ambient storage temperatures, how often it is charged to 100%, and so forth.

The Ford warranty numbers give you a good idea of how long they think it will stay at 80% of original capacity or above - 8 years or 100k miles under normal use.

 

[WileyKyle]

I would seriously consider a battery upgrade if it increased the range of my truck to 500-600 miles. Hopefully that kind of upgrade will be available in 3-5 years.

 

[RickLightning]

I would seriously consider a battery upgrade if it increased the range of my truck to 500-600 miles. Hopefully that kind of upgrade will be available in 3-5 years.

I would not expect that, if for no other reason than the Ford software is setup for 98, 123, or 131kWh, nothing more.

 

[djwildstar]

Here is the link to the Insideevs article that I got the 1% from, https://insideevs.com/news/720398/study-battery-replacement-rates-evs/.

The 1% figure mentioned in the article is over the entire vehicle lifetime, and not per year.

So that means for "recent" (2016-2024) EVs, excluding battery recalls, fewer than 1% have ever needed a battery replacement. For the vehicles in the study, this is also within the battery warranty period, which at minimum suggests that carmakers have gotten very good at engineering a battery that will not need replacement under warranty.

We don't know how 2022 and newer batteries will age once they're out of warranty, simply because we have no examples that are old enough. That said, it isn't unreasonable to assume that they will age at least as well as the average over the 14 years studied. This suggests that you have a less than 2.5% chance of ever requiring a new battery.

This is on the same order of magnitude as ICE vehicles that require a new engine or new transmission during their useful life. In general, worrying about EV battery replacement cost is a lot like worrying about gas vehicle engine replacement cost. Yes, it is something that sometimes makes sense, but no, it isn't normal, usual, or expected.

 

[chl]

I would not expect that, if for no other reason than the Ford software is setup for 98, 123, or 131kWh, nothing more.

Software can be modified.

Sponsored