I dont need a 200kwh + battery pack 98% of the time in my soon to be Tri Motor CT. What I really want is just dual motor 300 mile range CT with the option to rent a 100kwh battery pack at my local Tesla service center for a week of camping. Rivian is planning to do it. Rivian patents "removable auxiliary battery" for its R1T electric pickup truck - Electrek What do you think the chances Tesla would do something similar? Can they? Seems wasteful to have 200kwh parked not being utilized 98% of the time. I think a better design would be a electrical/ coolant connector on a cord from the aux battery pack that you plug in to the inside of the CTs bed would be batter than fixed hole in the bed that could get stuck with debris ( rivian) We know the CT will have a 240v plug in the bed, why not add in/out cooling ports for an aux battery right next to it. Thoughts?
I would rather Tesla enable V2G on the CT so I can use the big battery to power my house when needed. That would make the plaid CT battery more useful.
Such options come with nontrivial engineering, costs, & consequences. The demand for such a physically massive feature is too low to bother with. Tesla is shaving every cost possible in this.
I would just get the 200kw pack and call it a day If the max mileage of the pack is 500 miles you dont want to use all 100% on a consistent basis. You want to keep between 20-80%, so 60% of the 500 so 300 miles. A good rule of thumb is to buy as much battery as you can afford The bigger the battery the more energy you can charge with DCFC in a shorter amount of time
In this case, a portable generator that would plug into a port in the truck bed would actually make the most sense. A mini version of the range extender on the Volt. Many people already own one for outages and emergencies.
Sorry, old thread. But this is precisely correct. The ability to onboard a small generator with a fuel tank would be extremely versatile. Not having to carry the weight always is huge. Sadly, the economics for this probably don't work out. Though actually, having a small generator permanently built into a truck is a fantastic product to make as well (Tesla won't). The ability to charge the battery at home but then to run the generator while driving (even though it would not power the entire vehicle at freeway speeds) will slow down how quickly the main battery depletes. Then if you stop due to traffic or for food/bathroom/stretching then it continues to run and fill the battery back up a bit. I am sad that nobody has really built a hybrid truck like this yet.