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Nearly brand new 90 kWh Non-Ludicrous battery pack, v3 - LIMITED TIME

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There's not many people with the knowhow to do these swaps correctly, as in all of the software and hardware changes needed to truly upgrade the vehicle.

I've done quite a few of these upgrades, and pretty much have it down to a good routine. There's a lot of "gotchas" we've run into over the years, and a lot of things that most folks thinking they can handle this have run into only to be stuck dead in the water part way through. We've fixed at least two upgrades botched by third parties, including cross-country vehicle shipping from west-coast states.

Long story short, unless whoever you're thinking of using to do an upgrade has definitely and successfully done the exact same upgrade before (like 60 to 90 or 75D to 100D, etc), I'd suggest not being the guinea pig because it's likely to result in some major headaches. There's a lot of caveats to do this right, and very few people understand it well enough to do so correctly. Like variations in pack type with cars with or without air suspension... done incorrectly, you'll end up with premature tire wear.

There's a specific company that I won't name who's come up every time I've talked about Tesla battery upgrades/repairs/etc... seems they're spreading based on a few popular YouTube videos on the topic that are actually filled with a lot of misinformation on the subject that seems to be geared towards luring people in for unnecessary "repairs" at huge profits for them. They have been mentioned here as well on this forum a bunch of times. I'll point out that one of the botched upgrades we took on for a customer was started by this company. So... yeah.

Anyway, we have customers doing upgrades all the time. We do one or two per month nowadays now that a lot more packs are coming out of warranty. I actually almost almost try to talk folks out of them, too, since to me the upgrades seem kind of silly when you could sell the car and buy something new with everything upgraded.... but we still get a lot of people wanting them regardless. The only upgrades that I won't do anymore are rear-wheel-drive upgrades to a 100 pack, because there's no standard firmware for this and it causes other headaches. Everything else is doable one way or another. For every upgrade we actually do, probably 10 people are turned off from the idea either from sticker shock or realizing a sell/trade path may be better.

We're definitely in a unique position to offer the most reasonably priced pack upgrades/replacements possible in most cases. A caveat to that is the original 60 packs... at this point most of these are well beyond our degradation threshold for module resale, so we have to price things accordingly. If your car gets 140 miles at 100% charge, we're not going to be able to recoup the costs from your core pack like we can with an 85 that gets 250 miles, so your upgrade cost would be higher.

For folks with what appears to be excessive degradation or other pack issue, I'm planning on making a device to collect pack diagnostic data, for people serious about an upgrade, which we can ship to them for a deposit so we can come up with a net cost for an upgrade that fits the specific cases. For the most part we can price things over the phone.

That said, I may have an upgrade deal coming up (100 kWh Q1'2020 ludicrous capable 1700A pack), if any dual motor folks are interested. Would personally like to see this go a 2014-2015 P85D owner.
I understand your point of view on the P85 to P100 conversion. I was hoping that someday I could have a P100+, but alas, just have to get a P100D+ instead.

I will also comment that the Supercharging speed increase of going from a current 85 pack to a 100 pack can be noteworthy for long trips. If you find your charging times have increased beyond acceptable range, but still want to keep the car, the 100 upgrade might be the way to go. I haven't looked into the Supercharging speed changes on a 90 pack???
 
Not sure what EPA rated is for 14 P85, but if it is 265 new, I think that 5% degradation is normal. 90s might have higher range, but degrade quickly to about the 85 range.

Best cure for range issues is drive down lower, below 20%. You are not going to hurt the pack even if you go to zero per latest guidance.

If nervous about doing this get SMT. It will show you if you are approaching the cut off of 3 VPC, as well as power limit.
I would consider 10% more of a "normal range for a car that's ~4 years old. 15% is starting to get on the upper end and 5% is pretty exceptional on the low end. For a 2014 I'd say that above 10% a couple of points is to be expected and shouldn't alarm anyone.
 
I would consider 10% more of a "normal range for a car that's ~4 years old. 15% is starting to get on the upper end and 5% is pretty exceptional on the low end. For a 2014 I'd say that above 10% a couple of points is to be expected and shouldn't alarm anyone.
Agreed...per Telafi battery beta the average for 40k mile 2015 85D pack cars is about 265 RM.
 
For folks with what appears to be excessive degradation or other pack issue, I'm planning on making a device to collect pack diagnostic data, for people serious about an upgrade, which we can ship to them for a deposit so we can come up with a net cost for an upgrade that fits the specific cases. For the most part we can price things over the phone.
This would be a great service. I have a weak string per SMT. I could record some data, and send you a file.

Please keep us posted on when you can provide such a diagnostic service.

One thing I miss about ICE is oil changes and Blackstone labs reports, this could be just as soothing...lol
 
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That said, I may have an upgrade deal coming up (100 kWh Q1'2020 ludicrous capable 1700A pack), if any dual motor folks are interested. Would personally like to see this go a 2014-2015 P85D owner.

dr-strangelove3-new.gif
 
If someone is shopping for a 2015 P85D+ to put this in there is a pearl white with black interior that is for sale. I can't point you to a listing, but it's a member here who recently contacted me late last week. I don't know exactly what he is thinking for price but I it should be reasonable based on our discussions. You could ship it to wk057, get the upgrade and then have them ship it to your home and save a leg of shipping.
 
Not sure what EPA rated is for 14 P85, but if it is 265 new, I think that 5% degradation is normal. 90s might have higher range, but degrade quickly to about the 85 range.

Best cure for range issues is drive down lower, below 20%. You are not going to hurt the pack even if you go to zero per latest guidance.

If nervous about doing this get SMT. It will show you if you are approaching the cut off of 3 VPC, as well as power limit.
What's SMT?

And my pain point right now is the EXTREMELY SLOW supercharging speeds I'm getting with thie 85 pack. I don't think I've seen over 62 kw while charging at a urban charger or a 150kw charger. IIRC, the 90 pack doesn't suffer from this "chargegate" feature Tesla decided to bestow upon older Model S owners.
 
SMT is a app that is used to report CAN bus data to your phone.
Ah, Scan My Tesla. Just looked it up. Interesting. I don't think I have a need for it at this point, I was just curious about possible upgrade paths for my P85 to increase its longevity (90 kwh pack being most interesting in anticipation of slower SC speeds). I'll keep an eye on it.
 
Ah, Scan My Tesla. Just looked it up. Interesting. I don't think I have a need for it at this point, I was just curious about possible upgrade paths for my P85 to increase its longevity (90 kwh pack being most interesting in anticipation of slower SC speeds). I'll keep an eye on it.
Long term I would speculate that Tesla will offer a program for the older S's. They aren't right now because their battery production is capacity constrained, however if that ever changes, then I would imagine they will aggressively market that upgrade. They did a program for the Tesla Roadster so I am hoping to see something similar for the S market some day.
 
Long term I would speculate that Tesla will offer a program for the older S's. They aren't right now because their battery production is capacity constrained, however if that ever changes, then I would imagine they will aggressively market that upgrade. They did a program for the Tesla Roadster so I am hoping to see something similar for the S market some day.

Given the trajectory of things to-date, and the sum of all of my experience and knowledge about how things work at Tesla... I'd say this is highly unlikely.

Tesla would much rather sell you a new car. As far as I can tell, the only reason they have any service at all is because they have to have it in order to convince people to buy the cars in the first place. If there's no pressure on them to do anything about something (like the MCU1 eMMC issue), they're not going to do anything about it.

Obviously if they stopped servicing cars at all, people would frown upon that and it would impact sales. But upgrades are a different story. Sure, they've offered upgrades/retrofits of minor things in the past, and things like the MCU2 retrofit... but the take rate on these things is minimal, the impact on their new car sales minimal (if any).

Offering battery upgrades was pretty officially nixed at Tesla long ago. Musk promised it off the cuff when the 90 came out that they'd do upgrades, and immediately this was backpedaled. I personally tried to get this done officially when that was announced, and was given the runaround for months before they eventually said it's not something they'll do.

Long story short, I'd bet almost anything that you're not going to see battery upgrades becoming an official thing, ever. Considering their long term plan is to fully integrate the battery pack into the body of the vehicle in an unserviceable manner... I'd say that it pretty definitive reasoning that upgrades are not on the roadmap, either.

Most likely production of the existing form-factory S/X packs will cease in the short term, and only refurbished packs will be available for warranty work.
 
Given the trajectory of things to-date, and the sum of all of my experience and knowledge about how things work at Tesla... I'd say this is highly unlikely.

Tesla would much rather sell you a new car. As far as I can tell, the only reason they have any service at all is because they have to have it in order to convince people to buy the cars in the first place. If there's no pressure on them to do anything about something (like the MCU1 eMMC issue), they're not going to do anything about it.

Obviously if they stopped servicing cars at all, people would frown upon that and it would impact sales. But upgrades are a different story. Sure, they've offered upgrades/retrofits of minor things in the past, and things like the MCU2 retrofit... but the take rate on these things is minimal, the impact on their new car sales minimal (if any).

Offering battery upgrades was pretty officially nixed at Tesla long ago. Musk promised it off the cuff when the 90 came out that they'd do upgrades, and immediately this was backpedaled. I personally tried to get this done officially when that was announced, and was given the runaround for months before they eventually said it's not something they'll do.

Long story short, I'd bet almost anything that you're not going to see battery upgrades becoming an official thing, ever. Considering their long term plan is to fully integrate the battery pack into the body of the vehicle in an unserviceable manner... I'd say that it pretty definitive reasoning that upgrades are not on the roadmap, either.

Most likely production of the existing form-factory S/X packs will cease in the short term, and only refurbished packs will be available for warranty work.
"and only refurbished packs will be available for warranty work."
That seems to be the case already for 85's from the people I know that have had a pack replaced in the last year.

While it is unfortunate that they will effectively write off the classic S as the packs degrade out of service it would make them just like any other car company so I wouldn't be surprised.

Good thing we have you to do the upgrades then!
 
There's not many people with the knowhow to do these swaps correctly, as in all of the software and hardware changes needed to truly upgrade the vehicle.

I've done quite a few of these upgrades, and pretty much have it down to a good routine. There's a lot of "gotchas" we've run into over the years, and a lot of things that most folks thinking they can handle this have run into only to be stuck dead in the water part way through. We've fixed at least two upgrades botched by third parties, including cross-country vehicle shipping from west-coast states.

Long story short, unless whoever you're thinking of using to do an upgrade has definitely and successfully done the exact same upgrade before (like 60 to 90 or 75D to 100D, etc), I'd suggest not being the guinea pig because it's likely to result in some major headaches. There's a lot of caveats to do this right, and very few people understand it well enough to do so correctly. Like variations in pack type with cars with or without air suspension... done incorrectly, you'll end up with premature tire wear.

There's a specific company that I won't name who's come up every time I've talked about Tesla battery upgrades/repairs/etc... seems they're spreading based on a few popular YouTube videos on the topic that are actually filled with a lot of misinformation on the subject that seems to be geared towards luring people in for unnecessary "repairs" at huge profits for them. They have been mentioned here as well on this forum a bunch of times. I'll point out that one of the botched upgrades we took on for a customer was started by this company. So... yeah.

Anyway, we have customers doing upgrades all the time. We do one or two per month nowadays now that a lot more packs are coming out of warranty. I actually almost almost try to talk folks out of them, too, since to me the upgrades seem kind of silly when you could sell the car and buy something new with everything upgraded.... but we still get a lot of people wanting them regardless. The only upgrades that I won't do anymore are rear-wheel-drive upgrades to a 100 pack, because there's no standard firmware for this and it causes other headaches. Everything else is doable one way or another. For every upgrade we actually do, probably 10 people are turned off from the idea either from sticker shock or realizing a sell/trade path may be better.

We're definitely in a unique position to offer the most reasonably priced pack upgrades/replacements possible in most cases. A caveat to that is the original 60 packs... at this point most of these are well beyond our degradation threshold for module resale, so we have to price things accordingly. If your car gets 140 miles at 100% charge, we're not going to be able to recoup the costs from your core pack like we can with an 85 that gets 250 miles, so your upgrade cost would be higher.

For folks with what appears to be excessive degradation or other pack issue, I'm planning on making a device to collect pack diagnostic data, for people serious about an upgrade, which we can ship to them for a deposit so we can come up with a net cost for an upgrade that fits the specific cases. For the most part we can price things over the phone.

That said, I may have an upgrade deal coming up (100 kWh Q1'2020 ludicrous capable 1700A pack), if any dual motor folks are interested. Would personally like to see this go a 2014-2015 P85D owner.
So what is the ballpark price on an upgrade like this. I have a 2014 p85d with 149k miles on it. Actually still charges to 244, so it's doing pretty well for it's age and mileage -- still can't help but wonder.
 
Not sure how much weight this carries but in this video Pete Gruber “leaks” that Tesla is working on a solution regarding the high cost of battery replacement. Forward to 4:30.


Even if the guy isn't just talking nonsense and Tesla actually did say such a thing......... Tesla's said a lot of things.

I'm still waiting on my faster-than-using-a-gas-station battery swaps for road trips, to name one example from left field.
 
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So what is the ballpark price on an upgrade like this. I have a 2014 p85d with 149k miles on it. Actually still charges to 244, so it's doing pretty well for it's age and mileage -- still can't help but wonder.
If you check the first post of this thread there is a google doc spreadsheet link. I don't know if he is keeping it up to date or not, but it should get you started.
 
Given the trajectory of things to-date, and the sum of all of my experience and knowledge about how things work at Tesla... I'd say this is highly unlikely.

Tesla would much rather sell you a new car. As far as I can tell, the only reason they have any service at all is because they have to have it in order to convince people to buy the cars in the first place. If there's no pressure on them to do anything about something (like the MCU1 eMMC issue), they're not going to do anything about it.

Obviously if they stopped servicing cars at all, people would frown upon that and it would impact sales. But upgrades are a different story. Sure, they've offered upgrades/retrofits of minor things in the past, and things like the MCU2 retrofit... but the take rate on these things is minimal, the impact on their new car sales minimal (if any).

Offering battery upgrades was pretty officially nixed at Tesla long ago. Musk promised it off the cuff when the 90 came out that they'd do upgrades, and immediately this was backpedaled. I personally tried to get this done officially when that was announced, and was given the runaround for months before they eventually said it's not something they'll do.

Long story short, I'd bet almost anything that you're not going to see battery upgrades becoming an official thing, ever. Considering their long term plan is to fully integrate the battery pack into the body of the vehicle in an unserviceable manner... I'd say that it pretty definitive reasoning that upgrades are not on the roadmap, either.

Most likely production of the existing form-factory S/X packs will cease in the short term, and only refurbished packs will be available for warranty work.
I think this is probably right. In Gruber's video, he mentioned that Tesla was selling 90kwh packs for $20-25k. Is this information accurate? Are these brand new 90kwh packs or refurbished ones? Where is Tesla getting their refurbished packs from? Cars that swapped them out or were totalled? Extra inventory they had lying around?
 
I think this is probably right. In Gruber's video, he mentioned that Tesla was selling 90kwh packs for $20-25k. Is this information accurate? Are these brand new 90kwh packs or refurbished ones? Where is Tesla getting their refurbished packs from? Cars that swapped them out or were totalled? Extra inventory they had lying around?

Gruber just re-released that video saying that they received reports from people that the price is now ~$14k + ~$2k install for the new 90 kWh packs.