He was able to rescue the existing deep discharged battery in his car, but the steps would be roughly the same to replace a submodule (readily available from totals cars).
There are also people looking into replacing the individual prismatic cells (the 500e is built with 63AHr samsung SDI cells, and there are now 120AHr cells available in the same form factor) but so far the only success story is from an outfit in Europe building custom packs out of banks of cylindrical cells https://www.fiat500owners.com/threads/upgrading-battery-for-...
Not sure where you live, but there were a lot of 'compliance cars' in California which were factory EV conversions of their traditional offerings.
As an example, the Fiat 500e (2013-2019, it has since been replaced by a ground-up electric version with the same faults as described in the article) is a normal 500 fitted with a Bosch SMG 180/120 motor and associated support components.
The 500e is virtually identical to the ICE version of the car, with a very hacked up looking shifter filler panel with buttons to control the motor and charger jack inside the gas filler door. The main downside with the compliance car life is they are all very short range, generally 50-100 miles. Also now that the program is shut down you don't get the rebate anymore so they are all discontinued (but readily available used).
There is no DRM on the Bosch SMG system, I have an android app and bluetooth adapter that lets you view all of the CAN messages, and many people online have successfully rebuilt their batteries with more modern cells to increase the range.
I was personally hit by this back in 2015 as a grad student. We called up our process gas supplier and asked for a k-cylinder of Neon and were laughed off the phone, so we ended up running our experiment on krypton for setup and used a lecture bottle of Neon that a partner lab had left over for the few minutes of data collection we needed to get our result[1].
At the time, we were cursing the semi industry for using up all of the remaining Neon with their billion dollar operating budgets...
Somewhat counterintuitively, the primary gas species used in excimer lasers are noble gasses. A typical gas mix for a 193nm excimer laser would be ~97% neon and just a few percent of the actual argon/fluorine excimer mix. [1]
Since you mentioned them -- as hard as it may be to believe -- HeNe lasers are only just beginning to be phased out in the semi industry in the somewhat esoteric use case of precision position measurement using interferometry. The output wavelength of a HeNe lase is extremely stable--with a simple feedback loop on the cavity length (ie, temperature) a HeNe laser is essentially an atomic clock locked to the 473.612248 THz 5s2 → 3p HeNe line. Interferometers built around such systems can accurately measure sub-nanometer displacements and are able to achieve a lifetime absolute stability of better than 10ppb--comparable to a rubidium atomic clock! [2]
Absolutely amazing writeup, and I love that he released the work in jupyter notebook format (which is rendered perfectly by github no less) which only needs numpy and matplotlib so basically anyone can dig in and start messing with it with minimal effort.
I wish more SDR projects were documented in this form, it is so much more accessible than gnuradio or matlab etc based projects (albeit, these don't run in realtime so it is a bit different usecase than the gnuradio ecosystem).
Keep watching -- he gets more into the period appropriate tools later in the series including home made drills, files, layout ink, soldering tools, etc
He was able to rescue the existing deep discharged battery in his car, but the steps would be roughly the same to replace a submodule (readily available from totals cars).
There are also people looking into replacing the individual prismatic cells (the 500e is built with 63AHr samsung SDI cells, and there are now 120AHr cells available in the same form factor) but so far the only success story is from an outfit in Europe building custom packs out of banks of cylindrical cells https://www.fiat500owners.com/threads/upgrading-battery-for-...