Interesting tidbit about the 22 kWh / 26 kWh

Video blogger Alloam, in his latest “Living with my Renault Zoe” episode mentioned something very interesting. A Renault battery engineer basically told him the extra capacity is added most of all because the LiPo’s have a fairly rapidly decreasing capacity (SOH) in their early life. With the extra headroom, they have been able to accomplish two things (at the cost of that headroom no less!):

• The customer doesn’t experience that rapid capacity decrease in early life. To me that is an argument that is slightly in the “to avoid complaints about customer service, we will not be providing customer service any more” category, but I do see their point. You want to avoid customers complaints about that, especially in early life. But……
• By not using that headroom, the overall SOH curve is higher than when using it all. That is no surprise really. It is no secret that topping a LiPo to the rim does stress it quite a bit. It was interesting to see the effect in a graph, even while it was unit-less.

Also the cumulative SOH of all Zoe’s graph is quite revealing. Dig in at 08:30

Edit: I had not read the link to the original presentation by Masoto Uriguchi.