[andyp-kw]

Is this because Hyundai simply don't want you to replace the battery, and would prefer you buy a new car?

Batteries are not like most other car parts which can be manufactured by a dozen different companies.

It sounds like a right to repair issue, where car companies should be able to supply replacement parts at reasonable prices for n number of years after the car was sold.

[wongarsu]

Even if you force companies to provide them at cost, they could conceivably end up more expensive than a new car.

If you sell a vehicle model for 5 years, you don't keep the production lines for spare parts around for another 20 years. Instead you predict how much you will need and put that in a warehouse somewhere to ship out over the years. That's naturally expensive, often more expensive than the production cost. Not a massive issue for the smaller stuff, but if you take a part that is massive and makes up a significant fraction of the cost of the vehicle you get headlines like this.

Imho that's a sign it shouldn't be a replacement part, its something that should be serviced and have smaller individual replacement parts (EV battery packs are more than a bunch of cells, after all)

[LeifCarrotson]

> you don't keep the production lines for spare parts around for another 20 years

As a controls engineer who supports a number of automotive manufacturing lines, this is not accurate. They're still running many of those production lines, just at lower volumes, or just shuttled to less important locations. They may eventually transition to alternative (more manual) production methods, and yeah, some new-old-stock exists, but they don't stop after 5 years.

In particular, I loathe the lines where they used polyurethane moisture-cure hot-melt adhesive. It's awesome for bonding wood veneers to plastics, and it's not a huge deal when you're in production running 2 or 3 shifts weekdays and one on weekends (it somewhat reacts with itself and cleans out the lines), but even when the supplier buys the expensive purge compound from Nordsen and purges it after they run the line for one shift a month, the next time they go to start it up after sitting idle and cold, something's going to be plugged up.

When you sell equipment to an automotive manufacturer, you have to design it for a service life of at least 10 years. And they'll use it for every one of those, and they'll hold you to it.

[maushu]

So what you mean is that we need an standard compatible with multiple brands and later versions. Like AA batteries.

[nradov]

We do have a standard. Most EV manufacturers use the 18650 battery cells, which are cylinders 18 mm in diameter and 65 mm long. You can buy a wide range of 18650 batteries from different sources.

The problem is that those have to be assembled into packs for vehicular use, and it's not really practical to develop an efficient standard form factor for packs given the enormous variance in vehicle designs. When a pack suffers collision damage then in theory it could be possible to reuse any undamaged individual 18650 batteries in a replacement pack, but in practice this is just too risky and labor intensive. So, the entire pack has to be replaced.

[robocat]

> Most EV manufacturers use the 18650 battery cells

Is that still true?

Manufacturers have moved onto a variety of larger cells: 21700, 26650, and Tesla's 4680 (46mm diameter 800mm long).

And there are non cylindrical battery formats too: https://www.electrive.com/2021/03/15/power-day-volkswagen-pl...

[robocat]

Or the 1 meter/yard long BYD cells:

https://pushevs.com/2020/05/26/byd-blade-prismatic-battery-c...