How are the new enginer kits?

I don't know enough about battery behaviour to say for sure, but i believe in buddy cell setup a defective cell would slowly die, bringing it's buddy down enough to bring overall voltage low enough for the BMS to shut down the converter. with no buddy, the cell goes from 3.5 to 2v, not enough to drop the string (48v) to a point where the converter shuts down, and the cell cooks itself.

an active 32cell balancer would be better, but a 16cell with buddies is more resiliant than two strings of sixteen.

 

I have thought about Getting a kit. My needs could easily be handled by the kit. 90 percent of my Driving needs Could be handled by 15 to 20 miles Of the EV range.

The lack of active balancing is 1 of the biggest reasons why i have not done so as of yet. Implement an effective system That will make it much more User friendly. That alone Will greatly increase market value For a lot of people

 

I've gone months without needing to manually balance my string, and even then it was just a couple of cells. Active balancing is decidedly not necessary on a daily or even weekly basis. In terms of price, no other PHEV kit even comes close. For $2500, you could be pushing into 100 MPG territory if 90% of your driving is low speed city streets.

 

Well i have not ruled out the plug on a pri yet. But the Leaf will cover 98% of my driving needs. Right now my very limited Zenn covers more than 80% of my needs and its only good for ten miles at a time. (dwell i could. Go farther but it gets slow at that point. The pitfalls of cheap batteries ).

 

Sounds very promising Scott, I can hardly wait untill the kit arrives. Most of my daily route is in city streets and 50 mph roads. If I get 85 mpg over the total 24 mile stretch I am a happy man.

I got my 4 kWh even cheaper for $2250 by bidding on ebay. Since shipping to Europe cost me an extra $250 what better price could I wish for.