I agree, I would have thought that by the time the pack start exhibiting serious degradation all the cells would be getting pretty tired. This is the case with most battery packs, unless one or more cells are defective and cause the pack to fail prematurely. If that happened you could gather many of them together and make rebuild packs out of the tested-as-good modules, but since that's relatively rare then it's most likely going to be Toyota or Panasonic managing that operation.

What I think will be interesting is to see if they can make a new battery with the latest technology (lighter, higher density) to the same physical and voltage specifications for the car so that when you do finally replace the pack it's upgraded, maybe even to a plug-in variety, who knows? It's going to be fun watching all the Prius geeks modify and upgrade their cars as they age.

2001 Prius Photos       2005 Prius Photos
1992 Mitsubishi Delica Diesel-WVO Hybrid Photos

I have always considered the inverter and ECU's to be the weak links in my Prius; I don't worry about the battery at all.

The car will be warrantied out to 100K miles. We'll all be more informed then, circa 2010.

R2-E2, 2G Prius.
Highway/City/Husband/Wife MPG: 56.5, as of 12/2005, 26K miles

Jac Nasser, Ford President: "We are planning to launch a hybrid version of
this car [P2000] within this year [1998]. We will also make FCEV available in
2004."

Lakedude,

Great thread. I tend to agree that the IMA might fair better in the older used car category, but it really is probably too early to tell. I'll get to find out - have a Prius II coming in a couple weeks to complement the Insight!

I would think an old IMA would fare better than the synergy drive because there are fewer mechanical and electrical components involved. Don't get me wrong: I think they're both awesome systems. But the more complicated a system is, the more things that can go wrong.