As you know, our van is a fully electric 2015 Nissan e-NV200 with a 24kWh battery pack, this was the only size battery available 7 years ago. We bought the van 2nd hand 6yrs ago in 2016 and converted it to a campervan.
The original 24kWh battery gave the van a range of 60-80 miles depending on driving style and road conditions. Despite the relatively low range it's not stopped us clocking up 63,000 miles including several long campervan trips around Europe as far as Slovenia, Hungry, several trips to Southern Spain and many to Northern Scotland. As we've proved and documented in this blog, the van with the original 24kWh battery is quite capable of long-distance travel provided this is done at a relaxed pace, and on the whole we’ve found public charging to be available and reliable even in more remote parts of continental Europe.
In 2018 Nissan introduced a 40kWh battery pack for the e-NV200 with almost double the energy capacity. Even though our original 24kWh battery pack is still very functional with currently 83% of its original capacity remaining, the prospect of upgrading our van to double its current range at a reasonable cost was very appealing. When the opportunity arose to obtain a 40kWh battery from a salvage vehicle, we decided to go ahead with the upgrade. I enlisted the help of an EV friendly local garage to help with the heavy lifting to do the physical swap then I did the electrical wiring work myself.
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| Removing the old 24kWh battery |
Part 1 Video:
Replacing the 24kWh battery with a 40kWh battery:
Part 2 Video:
Installing a CAN bridge in the correct location, I obtained the CAN bridge from https://dalasevrepair.fi/
Part 3 Video:
Disassembling the old 24kWh battery, I still have a few battery modules for sale. Get in touch if you're interested.
Resources
Thanks to Dala's EV Repair for advice and providing the CAN bridge battery translator device.
Dala's battery upgrade user manual is a very useful resource for battery swaps https://github.com/dalathegreat/BatteryUpgrade-UserManual
HEVRA registered EV friendly garage that did the swap: B&K Williams in Caernarfon, Wales: https://www.facebook.com/evnorthwales
Salvage battery packs: https://www.evbreakers.com/