Nissan Leaf Battery Upgrade Project
Please help support our Nissan Leaf battery upgrade project!
Auckland
New Zealand owners of Nissan Leafs have no options to upgrade their car with a new battery pack to extend the useful life of their car. At Blue Cars we recognised this looming environmental problem years ago and started working on a solution.
Our first big step was in 2017 when we launched our pilot project with co-funding from EECA. This allowed us to design, build and test our own replacement battery module for a Nissan Leaf. Our new module achieved 45% greater capacity than new original Leaf modules and gave us the confidence to set our sights on a full upgrade solution.
Since then we’ve continued to develop further designs and we recently finished building our first full Nissan Leaf upgrade prototype. Our prototype pack has achieved over 200 km in run-out tests and could get over 230 km or more once we’ve tweaked the design. There are still integration issues to solve and lots of testing to prove the long-term reliability, but we are pretty excited by our recent progress!
The project will benefit not only the ~8,000 existing Nissan Leaf owners in New Zealand, but all EV owners (we plan to adapt our solution to other makes/models), future EV owners and anybody who enjoys clean air, less pollution and a greater chance that we might yet solve this pending climate catastrophe.
We're a young startup company looking for support to see this project through. Our fundraising target matches the level of co-funding we need to contribute if our latest application to EECA's LEV Fund is successful (we'll find out in December).
All donations and messages of support will be greatly appreciated by myself, Bill and our team of cheeky, geeky engineers!
Peace, aroha and all that jazz :)
Blue Cars' involvement (page creator)
Blue Cars was founded to help support the uptake of electric vehicles. We launched New Zealand's first rental EVs in 2015 and then opened the country's first specialist EV workshop. Our founder also co-founded the Better NZ Trust and #LeadingTheCharge.
Use of funds
Money raised will directly support final integration, endurance testing and proving of our battery upgrade solution. Our funding target matches the level of co-funding we need to contribute if our latest application to EECA's LEV Fund is successful (we'll find out in December).
Other page links
Latest update
Prototype displays 227 km of range! 1 July 2020
We posted a video update for our project on our Facebook Page on 27th May and then realised that our Givealittle page had just been closed... unfortunate timing!
The project has made good progress over the last few months with our two project engineers able to continue working from home during the COVID-19 lockdown period. We are happy to report that our solution now displays the correct increased battery range in the car's dashboard - excellent!
We have all the new battery modules for two pre-production upgrade packs and recently ordered the brackets and other parts to complete the first few upgrades. The first of these should be assembled and ready for testing by end of July.
Again a huge thanks to all who have supported the project this far - we are getting there!
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