Good move, but another thing this brand does is charge you a monthly subscription to unlock the full battery range on your bike. If you don’t pay, you lug around a dead weight extra battery you cannot access. Overall this brand is notoriously unfriendly to consumers.
I'd been considering getting a Zero versus other brands for over a year, and you comment got me to reconsider, thanks! I wasn't are of this scummy behaviour of theirs until now.
I am not disagreeing with you - I believe that you should be able to use something you bought however you wish - but I think it is worth noting that the lower you allow depth of discharge, the more cycles you can squeeze out of a pack. So it’s not dead weight per se, its trading weight and range for pack longevity, which equates to economy over the life of the motorcycle.
Eh, no it's not. It's getting a monthly fee out of what could be a button or switch, a monthly fee that could be just an unpaid, free to use feature of the bike.
This is some serious "c-suite message to help you fall asleep at night territory".
How will you un-wear a battery with a press of a button?
I don't see anything inconsistent with a subscription if the manufacturer is responsible for replacing the battery during a warranty time. I prefer large ecosystems with 3rd party parts to dealing with proprietary manufacturing and warranties though.
It's the monthly fee I have a problem with. Unless the monthly fee guarantees a new pack if the battery degradation from an increased DoC, then it is good. As it currently stands, it is literally a jerk move on the company's side.
Even the phone in your pocket isn't using it's full battery potential (by design). You can hack this with software to "get more out of your battery", but really all you're doing is shortening the length of your battery life and creating a fire hazard.
He doesn't care how long the total life span is. It's perfectly capable of it (access to the option can be paid for so it's not equivalent to a hack) and he wants to go further on a single charge, so this is a perfectly reasonable tradeoff to make.
Just let the user make that choice without an absurd subscription.
Right. "By design" is doing all the work there, because the design goals are different.
Phones are designed that way as a way to prolong the longevity of the phone. This bike is designed this way as a way to extract a subscription. These two things are not the same.
It's the other way around, you can hack it and get longer battery life. But that is not an option because phone manufacturers prefer that their non-user-replacable batteries get worn out.
Oh my god, this should be illegal. What an environmental waste to block what hardware can do for business reasons, is there any global lobby fighting bullshit like this?
This kind of thing has existed forever. Cars are starting to do it, too, as it gets cheaper to make them all the same and disable some features in software.
HEVs also use only about 50% of the battery to reduce wear on it (go from 30 to 80 charge, no more).
But anyway, I won't buy a vehicle with a subscription based feature list that isn't something like a concierge service. If it's in the vehicle, I've already paid for the gear. (This changes once there's a community of moto hackers that can disable the lockouts... ish)
Ehh, you're never supposed to drain an old school lead-acid battery below 50% either. And car engine controllers won't let you give it more gas to go past the redline.
The evil here is purely "pay monthly to unlock a configuration option", not the existence of such wear limiters. And that part is new.
Zero SR/F owner here. I was also put off by this before buying a Zero. They did back off of this a bit, but most of the stuff floating around online is from when they initially did it.
Now, if you purchase any premium Zero like the SRF and SRS, every software upgrade comes unlocked and is apart of your purchase as you’d expect.
If you purchase their cheaper tier models like the DS and SR, then the “upgrades” can be software unlocked. I’m not a fan, but it is a one time fee from what I understand. It’s not a subscription. (correct me if you have conflicting data)
That in mind, my SR/F came off the lot with everything already enabled. I checked the app and there are no “upgrades” that can be purchased.
Zero also had a reputation of being one of the less repairable bikes, but they’ve been slowly going in the other direction.
I walked into a dealer being dead set on buying an Energica bike and not buying a Zero. They had no problem selling it to me, but after updating me on where the current state of Zero was vs Energica, I decided to buy the Zero and didn’t regret it in the least.
If the actual cost to the consumer to unlock the features isn't more than other brands would charge for something with everything enabled, I don't really see a big issue, aside from that it requires closed firmware.
Seems like it could allow higher quality and cheaper products because they don't have to spend the money on keeping track of multiple hardware versions. Fewer models means the ones that do exist will be more tested and mass produced.
Then again, I've never ridden a motorcycle or even a bike, maybe things are different.
Not sure that's fair - the battery packs come with a 5 year warranty. If you increase the 'full range' - you're increasing the odds you'll need to claim on that, which needs paying for.
it does, generally the deeper lithium ion batteries are discharged, the higher the likelihood of dendrites forming on the anode.
basically the more time that is spent not in the fully discharged state, the longer li-ion will last.
(this doesn't mean you want to leave it 100% charged either, that can also damage the pack; if leaving for extended non-use, leaving it at ~50% state of discharge is the generally recommended advice)
The disagreement is not with the science but with the idea that "because the company will have to honor more warranties, it is okay for them to charge more for features of the things they have already sold consumers". Maybe they should make less money, instead. Perhaps they can split the difference by amending the warranty to take into account the health of the battery. I don't really care! I (we. everyone.) hate a world where people retain control over things that they have ostensibly sold you and, predictably, scummily, attempt to extract more profit from them.
What if they did it the old way and simply never implemented deep discharge in the first place? The product would never tap into the extra battery performance, you'd retain control over what you bought, and they wouldn't extract more profit.
Industrial battery packs extract a fair bit more value from their cells than consumer packs because those customers pay for the extra expense to the manufacturer and they're willing and legally able to accept more complex warranty terms. It's tough to bring something like that to consumers. The fact that this is an option at all shows that competition is increasing along this axis.
I wonder how this works in practice. Is this, in practice, equivalent to some laptops' and newer androids' setting of never fully charging the battery in order to improve the overall battery lifetime if you know you won't use the 100% anyway? Or is it just dead weight which is never touched and you just use fewer cells, but always the same?
You can't mix and match batteries varying in wear, or address and charge arbitrary inividual cells, so it has to be just lower state of charge, e.g. 80% true charge displayed as full.
It’s literal dead weight. It’s especially bad because the bikes already don’t have great ranges (and the estimated ranges are often pretty optimistic), and extra dead weight cuts into your limited range even further.
I'd be surprised if it was literally dead weight. It's much easier to design a software control system that uses a common set of cells and caps the full charge than one that switches different cell blocks in depending on what's enabled.
It is not as simple as it seems. If you connect the "unused" cell in a series, it could alter the battery's output voltage by as much as 4.2 volts, which has the potential to damage the voltage regulator.
On the other hand, if you connect the "unused" cell in parallel, it's absolutely crucial that it holds the same charge as the other cells at the time of connection. This is because the parallel pack's voltage will level out, leading to a substantial flow of current (essentially causing rapid charging/discharging of the cell). This can result in a fire or even a battery explosion if the cell voltages are too different.
All in all, physically detaching a battery might not be the best approach. The cells will experience different levels of wear, and variations in internal resistance will lead to problems with cell balancing and longer charging times.
No that would be more complex. You’d have to add a relay and something to control it. Much easier to just map 80% to “100%” on the display and in the BMS.
Every cells have to hold roughly same charge for the concept of battery pack to work. Else the weaker cell becomes overcharged as others take in the charge, and (in the absolute worst case) the entire thing goes kaboom. Not worth doing.
I’m fine with subscriptions if it provides value to me as a customer. If it enables a consistent stream of new content or features, or covers things like cloud storage where there is clearly an ongoing cost to the company to provide a service then I understand and accept the fees. Otherwise, it’s just rent seeking.
