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posted by chromas on Saturday November 13 2021, @06:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the You-don't-own-what-you-own dept.

Zero Motorcycles announced their groundbreaking new battery "technology", in which they sell you a large capacity battery in a motorcycle with powerful motors and advanced traction control systems, and then lock all that away behind a software paywall that you can unlock (for a fee) in their app.

https://newatlas.com/motorcycles/zero-motorcycles-2022-battery-paid-upgrades/

Zero is not the first vehicle company to do this sort of thing. Notably, Tesla sells vehicles with capabilities that can be unlocked via software "upgrades". This strategy is also common in the CNC machine tool industry; it's long frustrated machinists that they can buy a machine with all the hardware, but then have a sizable portion of memory, advanced motion smoothing, and other functions locked behind activation keys, which often cost several thousand dollars. In that industry at least, if you know the right people and have a machine with a common control, you can get what you need to unlock it through other sources.

I anticipate a similar approach in the vehicle market, which has long sold "tuner" chips and has a great deal of modding enthusiasts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIJiXNzpRMY


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 13 2021, @01:49PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 13 2021, @01:49PM (#1195924)

    These are batteries, there's not much extra engineering necessary to not put so many cells in the battery pack. You'd be looking at increasing the amperage, so they last longer, not the voltage, and a bit of engineering to ensure that both models are safely balanced. That's about it.

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday November 15 2021, @02:28AM

    by Immerman (3985) on Monday November 15 2021, @02:28AM (#1196240)

    Parallel cells don't just change the amount of power stored though (the Amp-hourage). They also change the upper limit on your instantaneous amperage.

    I have no idea what the numbers actually look like for modern EV batteries - but depending on the design it's very possible that not damaging the batteries by drawing power too quickly is the limiting factor on how hard you can accelerate. If that were the case, then reducing the batteries for a lower-range model would be also make it less powerful, and leave a good chunk of the motor's potential unused.