As battery technology and prices get cheaper and cheaper, do you think there will be cheap(let's say $5,000) plugin conversions that can add 70 or even 100 miles of EV only range to a regular Prius and reprogram the software for better acceleration in power mode and not kicking the car out of ev mode in ev mode with even just mild acceleration? If something like that becomes cheap in 8 or 10 years, I'd probably do that over buying a used Prius Prime at that time.
No. It would require a compete re-engineering of the system. Could a conversion like you mention be done to a Pius? Sure, with enough time and effort. Hell, people have converted all sorts of vehicles to electric, and one guy even put V8 in a Prius... but these are not kits, they're major conversion projects that require hundreds of man-hours and serious fab and engineering skills.
I don't think you'll ever see anything like that. Think about it: who spends $5k on modifications to a 15-20 year old car? (model year 2010-2015 in 2030) Besides, you'll see used Primes under $5k by then anyway. Why not just do that?
I would speculate that if you want a vehicle with more EV range and capability in the future, on a budget, your best move is a used Prime. But you can wait 8-10 years and take a look around.
unfortunately (or fortunately) there are too many plug ins being made by big manufacturers for anyone to be able to compete. think about it, the cheaper and smaller batteries become for an aftermarket conversion, the cheaper and smaller they become for oem. and the cheaper used plug ins become. there aren't enough customers with non plug ins, who aren't willing to trade up to a plug in, and want to convert their non plug in. that's why they all went oob in the first place. and, on top of all that, the car mfgs get a federal tax credit on the sale price, further reducing the oem cost to buyers
There have already been at least 2 companies selling plug-in conversions for Gen 2, and one of those for Gen 3 as well. They're both out of business now, as far as I know, driven there by the arrival of OEM plug-in hybrids. I wouldn't expect them to come back or anyone to take their place in the future. A relatively expensive conversion on an older car with unknown quality control and longevity testing and requiring DIY work won't be able to compete with used OEM plug-ins with factory parts support and reliability for a similar price IMO.
Well the battery cost for a conversion like this equalls toy's original bat... The problem is to make the car use it as ev... As far as I've come one big battery can replace the normal hv even straight without further modifications to the car, just screw the terminals to the toy's bms unit and maybe a tap emulator to show the bms that modules are equally charged to each other but this is reversible at anytime just take them out and put back the original modules... of course the battery will need to have a separate bmsnto manage the pack but the car will ignore it there is not reason to make them communicate. But even if the bat fails and the external bms deside to cut the pack out the car will see a blown fuse trouble and continue drive inngas mode until it gets turned off ... of course the external bms will inform the driver for the contrition before it cuts the system out... But I see only one restriction... the protocol of coms between the battery smart unit and the hv motor ecu... If this trouble gets solved somehow it is possible to allow operations like ev 45 -50 km or 20 to 25 miles I think with battery that cost almost the same to original also someone could charge hvbat by choose or just use the car as regular hybrid but with a battery that could last for another great amount of years maybe... Because if the car use only 3ah out of 50ah or so... The soc% usage is too little so the battery would last 10.000cycles?maybe more? The only change is a bigger capacity battery... Of course there would need to be built a wooden or metal box to enclose and allow air to cool the cells but that would be reversible as I mentioned at anytime... But that needs more people to expirament on this... I do expirament on this and hope for the best Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.
