This article is a bit confusing because its talking about the theoretical use cases of structural battery packs in EVs, the possible problems, and possible mitigations.
The Tesla Model Y has been using a structural battery pack for over 2 years (since 2022 model year, I think). While Hyundai/Kia may make different choices, the pros and cons from Tesla's choices can be used as at least one path for what Hyndai/Kia want to keep or what they would want to change from Tesla's choices.
Here's the articles cited problems:
However, placing cells inside load-bearing components would also make them hard to replace, offsetting this practice.
In practice almost no service of the battery is done at the shop where the car is. If there is a fault anywhere in the pack, from a cell to a BMS component, the entire pack is swapped.
Most EV drivers rarely use all of their battery range; they only need it on long trips. Therefore, batteries built into load-bearing automotive components would not be needed for daily use; they could be maintained at the ideal charge level for the battery formulation and rarely used except for long trips.
This is such a strange description. This isn't how EV batteries are used at all today, as far as I know, because it would be very inefficient in regular use. You wouldn't want to put extra strain/stress/charge/discharge on specific cells in the battery. That would lead to unbalanced packs. Further it would be much less efficient and slower to charge the segregated pack that the article is describing. The more full a cell gets of charge, the harder/more power you need to work it to take additional charge. Also, deep discharge of cells significantly shortens their life. The author's design description of a segregated pack would also experience much worse cold weather range reduction.
if the carmaker were to use modular battery packs, it would reduce the related cost of repairs across all of the car batteries; if they had better batteries, the need to replace them would be substantially reduced
Several automakers have tried making modular packs the way the author is describing them here. They turn out to be a bad choice because of all the extra stuff you have to do to make it flexible to accept fewer or more modules. This same thing happened to mobile phones. You used to have a removable battery, which was nice. However to make the battery removable, you had to add spring contacts, a separate tray to hold the battery, and a battery door. All of these things took space. The only time you'd ever use these, practically, would be years into the phone's life you'd open it up to replace the battery once, maybe twice in the phone's entire life. Manufacturers could just put a larger battery in and make it cheaper. Many phones don't live long enough to ever kill their first battery.
The author of the article is well credentialed and has worked in the tech and automotive industry for years, so I'm very confused as to the content of this article. Its almost like it was written 3 years ago, even though it is showing a Feb 14th 2025 dateline.
