Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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I wonder how expensive it would be to scrap pretty much everything but the battery and chassis and then build a decent vehicle around it. I'd rather have a smaller EV than that, but I bet the range would be pretty great on that with a lighter build that isn't fugly and stupid and prone to failures.
Very. It's a lot more complicated than just a battery, it's a complex management system that, despite the reputation of Tesla for manufacturing details and their CEO for...well, himself, is very impressive. You'd need to keep or reinvent most of that to avoid cell failures (and fire).
If you're really serious about a small DIY EV, look into the kits that are available to modify existing ICEs into EVs. Not quite the power level, but they do work pretty well if you don't mind the complexity of the work in strip down and rebuild. And often times they do use used/refurbished Tesla batteries in their makeup.
I'm very excited about Edison Electric's work truck conversion kits. You keep the body of the truck and put a small diesel generator, a battery pack, and an axle with electric motors. So you can convert existing vehicles to be very efficient, and they claim 8,000 lb ft of torque. So instead of buying a brand new hybrid tow truck or whatever, you do a swap for half the cost and get all the benefits.
And this is okay for /fuckcars because we all agree we'll still need work and delivery trucks.
I hope it works better than this did!
Well the engineers at Edison are also one of the end users of the trucks. One of the reasons new tech often sucks is because the designers/engineers/managers are just collecting a paycheck and don't care past the advertised specs. They don't care about real world use and don't think they'll even be in the company for all that long anyway.
I feel like that can be a good explanation for boring new tech like B2B middleware or enshittification schemes or whatnot, but I feel like folks working at something like an EV startup would tend to be true believers and thus excited about their jobs.
A lot of tech is terrible because the designers aren't the users. You can be sure that if every engineer and manager at Tesla was forced to drive them daily, they'd have a lot more safety factor built in. Simple things like doors that worked in the event of a power failure or built in fire suppression to give the occupants more time.
The fact that Edison is being built by people from a logging company that operates away from parts warehouses means it will be designed with "In The Field" fixability in mind and wont have anything tied down to an internet connection.
If the EV conversion kits work with refurbished Tesla batteries, what makes it difficult to work with refurbished Cybertruck batteries?
Probably size. Often times that seems to be the problem, where to put the battery since Teslas are built with it already part of the chassis. OP's question stemmed from just tearing down to the battery and frame, and there's a lot more to it than that. The question would be, what is the minimum needed of a Tesla to work?
Also, I don't know much of a Tesla battery is internally managed vs. outside, but I think the interface is a lot more than just a red and black wire.
Also-also...in the spirit of this particular forum, moving from a ICE to an EV is a very small percentage of a solution since it's still a car with all the baggage, just a bit less pollution in the air.
Why not just keep all that hardware? At the end of the day, it all communicates over a CAN bus or equivalent, and there are a bunch of DIY projects to effectively communicate with the various ECUs. Thank god Tesla is yet to go the way of Apple in locking down hardware against “unauthorized” modifications. I think worst case is they cut you out of supercharging.
I think the more challenging bit would be separating the battery from the vehicle. If it’s built anything like the “structural pack” in the Y, the only way to remove it is with a hacksaw.
The Rivian R1 exists, as well as a Hummer EV truck.
Of the three if I had to get one, probably the Rivian right now. But they're all ridiculously oversized and I'd rather get something good for what I do, which is mostly city driving.
Doesn’t the Rivian have an upcoming smaller lineup of EVs? I’d be interested in those if they weren’t expensive.
R3 is being fast tracked for late 2026, r2's aren't coming off the line yet but are slightly smaller, r3 is supposed to be midsize sub size and around 40k before incentives.
You'd be better off with an Edison kit, a MustangE "crate motor", or pulling a Tesla transaxle out of a wreck and going from there.