Renault customer service phoned me. We had a 15 minute chat.

Renault confirmed Lookers Chester have two Zoe cars. Both have zero miles left on their battery packs. Lookers plans in installing a compatible charge point in six months.

I explained that Zoe needs dealer support to succeed and that the two closest dealers to me have absolutely no interest in selling the car.

Person I talked to said she would be sending my comments and concerns up the chain. We’ll see if it makes any difference.

If it’s that easy to change / remove a battery that suggests there is a risk of theft.

It is important to insure both the car and the leased battery pack.

I doubt Renault will want to remove ‘good’ battery packs after 3 or 4 years when they could keep getting lease payments for them. But who knows. Anything is possible.

If it’s that easy to change / remove a battery that suggests there is a risk of theft. The criminal elements do a good trade in catalytic converters, weighing them in to equally criminal scrap dealers; and batteries cost rather more that CAT’s.

Another idea; regarding battery life in the winter. Consider the wind chill factor from spray thrown onto the underside. Could an insulating jacket be fabricated to keep in the heat produced on charging and to insulate the battery from the heat loss due to water evaporation. It would need to clip easily into place and be removable for the summer.

With regard to physically swapping the battery, it is possible to get an idea of how it is attached from this photo (actually taken after a crash test):

– it looks a bit like 4 connectors/quick-release (?) fittings, one near each corner. It should certainly be feasible for a dealer to swap the battery.

• This reply was modified 12 years, 6 months ago by  Trevor Larkum.

I have no specific details of the Zoe but the general trend in battery tech is to have a pack with integrated sensors and management unit (calibrated at the factory). In theory, a higher capacity battery could be fitted and should work as expected with a few conditions. First there would be a limit on the ability to charge the battery any faster than the existing one. It might be possible to increase it as little but in general all the electrics have been spec.d for the charge rate of the original. Secondly, there might need to be a firmware update to cope with the different discharge properties of the new battery. A good example of this could be if the chemistry of the battery has changed. Because of the on-battery management unit things like charge level, charge controlling and ‘gid’ data should work fine and so the estimated range and expected time to full charge data should still work fine.

So DC High can support more than 100kw charging (200×500) and ‘ac high’ can support 95kw charging (3x63x500) which is all nice and good – but at those numbers either you have a *really* big battery or you are going to try and charge it in a really short time. A really big battery would suggest a very expensive and heavy car (using current technology) while charging a 22Kwh battery at 95Kw would allow it to charge in 13 mins – generating a huge amount of heat and damaging it in the process…

I believe the eGolf has a 27Kwh battery pack.

All seems like a lot of expense when DC Mid can do 70Kw and DC low can do 40kw. Remember, also, that the DC chargers are much more costly to develop because they need to convert AC to DC at these very high currents. Same problem with the Chademo chargers.

I say roll on induction charging (no pun intended!) 🙂