I interpreted that to mean out of warranty battery replacements would simply be refused. [ . . . ] According to the same service manager, as of 2019 Toyota/Tesla don't have any new batteries to give you - all replacements have been refurbished, as mine was.
Well said. Nobody has reported obtaining a
new HV battery for the RAV4 EV, ever. Oh, several have said they received a new battery (when a contactor failed under warranty), but when pressed the paperwork always showed they were "Reman" (repaired, hopefully) batteries instead. I say "Reman" because while my blue car's was
replaced in Aug2019, five years old and 73k miles -- due to a failed contactor -- and under the original 8-year battery warranty, I just had another contactor failure on the "Reman" battery in 2024/123k miles, and when I opened up the Reman, it has
the original problematic high-failure TE contactors and not the later Gigivac-sourced replacements that a true Reman battery should have received in 2019, by which time Tesla (who supplies the Reman parts for our cars, not Toyota) had been replacing the original Model S/X contactors for several years and well knew of their high failure rate.
So, even if you could persuade Toyota to sell you a HV battery -- and I'm sure you can't, they will say that it's NLA -- there haven't been any new ones made for years, and the Reman ones weren't truly remanufactured, so they'd be a bad buy, IMO.
Outside of physical damage and neglect (leaving the battery at a very low SOC for years, for example), the HV batteries have held up pretty well. Used packs have come on the market in the last two years for well under $2k (I've nearly bought one, twice) but they're expensive to ship, and of course you never know what condition they're in at that price. Packs sold by battery repair facilities, such as Recell, are a lot more expensive, but have been scrutinized better than random JY packs at bargain prices.
No, Model S battery modules will not fit the RAV4 EV.
