A golf cart seems like an unlikely place to find a new model for industrial electrification, but a technical shift playing out on golf courses is pointing toward something larger. Swappable lithium battery packs are now replacing lead-acid units in legacy electric golf carts without any modification to the vehicles themselves: no controller swap, no wiring changes, no new charger required.
That shift reflects a broader strategy taking hold across industries: engineering lithium battery packs that slot directly into older, smaller electric vehicles—golf carts, forklifts, scissor lifts, airport ground support equipment—without requiring those vehicles to be rebuilt or replaced. The appeal is straightforward: Lithium chemistry charges faster, lasts longer, and costs less to operate than lead-acid. But until recently, getting those benefits meant expensive modifications or buying new equipment entirely. Now battery makers are trying to change that by putting all the compatibility work inside the battery pack itself.
Trojan Battery Company, headquartered in Santa Fe Springs, Calif., recently expanded compatibility for its OnePack lithium battery to include legacy versions of the E-Z-GO RXV golf cart. Dakota Lithium of Seattle, Relion Battery of Rock Hill, S.C., and Roypow Technology of Huizhou, China, are pursuing the same strategy across a wide range of vehicles and industrial equipment—all smaller than passenger EVs, but collectively representing enormous markets. The global forklift market alone was valued at roughly US $82 billion in 2024, according to Grand View Research, a San Francisco-based market research firm. The aerial work platform market—which comprises machines such as scissor lifts, boom lifts, and vertical mast lifts, added another $11 billion that same year, according to Imarc Group, a strategy consulting firm headquartered in Noida, India.
The size of those markets matters because the installed base of lead-acid-powered machines is not shrinking on its own. Warehouses, construction yards, and airports have no strong incentive to scrap equipment that still functions—which means the opportunity for drop-in lithium isn’t tied to new vehicle sales. It’s tied to the replacement cycle of batteries already in the field. That’s a different kind of market, and the companies pursuing it are betting it’s a larger one.
Lithium Battery Retrofits for Golf Carts
The obstacle to replacing lead-acid with lithium was electrical rather than mechanical. In a standard 48-volt lead-acid system, pack voltage starts near 50 volts when fully charged and declines into the low 40s as the battery empties. Older motor controllers use that descent as a signal, reading the voltage curve to regulate power delivery and estimate remaining charge. It was a design assumption so fundamental it was rarely documented, because no one expected it to change.
Lithium packs break that assumption. They enter a discharge cycle at higher voltages—often in the mid-to-high 50s—and hold close to their nominal level before dropping sharply near the end of the cycle. That flat profile confuses controllers calibrated for a lead-acid curve, producing inaccurate state-of-charge readings, erratic performance, and abrupt shutdowns. Anyone who wanted lithium performance in a legacy machine faced a cascade of modifications: replacing the motor controller, installing a new charger, modifying battery mounts, reworking wiring. For large fleets, the economics rarely justified it.
The solution was to push all of the complexity into the pack itself. As Darren Brittain, Trojan’s vice president of lithium commercial strategy for motive applications, says, the first step is “designing the lithium system around the electrical reality of the legacy platform, not asking the vehicle to adapt to the battery.” Trojan’s 48-volt, 105 ampere-hour OnePack is a 51.2-V lithium iron phosphate system with a working voltage range of 40.48 to 58.40 V, calibrated to stay within the tolerance of many legacy 48-V platforms. An onboard battery management system monitors cell voltages, balances charge, enforces thermal limits, and modulates output autonomously. Legacy machines read pack voltage, current demand, and charger behavior—nothing more. The battery management system handles everything else.
“A good drop-in battery should not be the most aggressive lithium battery possible,” Brittain says. “It should be the best-performing lithium battery that the legacy platform can safely use.” The OnePack is rated at 180 amperes continuous discharge and 300 amps pulse—limits designed to keep the system inside an envelope that legacy vehicles can tolerate. That restraint is the point. The battery is engineered not to maximize what lithium can do in isolation, but to maximize what it can do inside a machine that was never designed for it.
Lithium Forklift and Scissor Lift Retrofits
The installed base of lead-acid-powered industrial machines is vastly larger than the world’s fleet of golf carts. Warehouses run electric forklifts kept in service for a decade or more. Construction and rental companies operate scissor lifts, boom lifts, and vertical mast lifts under the same constraints. Airports run baggage tugs, belt loaders, and cargo tractors on 24-V and 48-V systems unchanged for decades. Flux Power of Vista, Calif., has deployed more than 30,000 battery packs into forklifts, walkie pallet jacks, and airport ground support equipment that previously ran on lead-acid. Roypow and Trojan cover additional equipment categories as well: floor cleaning machines such as ride-on scrubbers and sweepers, and aerial work platforms such as scissor lifts and boom lifts.
The operational advantages of making the switch are substantial. Lead-acid batteries take 6 to 8 hours to charge and require an eight-hour cooldown before reuse, according to Relion. Lithium-ion batteries charge in one or two hours and can be topped off during breaks without affecting lifespan—a practice the industry calls opportunity charging. A single lithium pack can therefore power equipment through multiple shifts, whereas lead-acid systems require a dedicated battery for each shift, along with the space, infrastructure, and labor to manage the rotation.
“‘Drop-in’ does not mean ‘universal with no validation’... It means the system is engineered to minimize vehicle modifications while still requiring the right battery, charger, mounting hardware, firmware, and application match.” —Darren Brittain, Trojan Battery Company
The long-term economics reinforce the case. Trojan’s OnePack delivers up to 4,000 charge cycles at standard operating temperature, replacing three or four lead-acid sets over a ten-year service life. For multi-shift operations, the transition typically delivers a return on investment within 36 months, according to LithiumLift, an Indianapolis-based forklift equipment and services company that compiled the figure from data drawn from hundreds of warehouse conversions. That timeline makes the decision relatively straightforward for high-utilization operations—the kind that run equipment around the clock and feel every hour of downtime directly in their margins.
What makes that ROI figure significant is what it doesn’t require: new equipment purchases, retraining operators, or overhauling facility infrastructure. The machines stay. The batteries change. That simplicity is what separates the drop-in model from conventional electrification strategies, and why the companies pursuing it believe they can move faster than approaches that start from the vehicle up.
Future Battery Chemistries and Legacy Gear
The limits of the drop-in model are real, and the companies involved are careful to say so. “‘Drop-in’ does not mean ‘universal with no validation,’” says Brittain. “It means the system is engineered to minimize vehicle modifications while still requiring the right battery, charger, mounting hardware, firmware, and application match.” Compatibility claims must hold across different vintages, firmware versions, and usage profiles — a battery validated for one model year of a platform may behave differently in another. That validation work is ongoing, and it is not trivial.
The challenge will only grow more complex as equipment ages through multiple technology generations. Vehicles that shipped with first-generation lithium systems are already reaching replacement cycles of their own. E-Z-GO RXV Elite models from around 2016 and 2017 are among them. The problem doesn’t disappear as equipment gets newer. It evolves. Each new battery generation may push voltage profiles, communication protocols, or packaging requirements further from what the previous generation assumed, narrowing the window in which engineering for legacy compatibility remains viable.
Emerging chemistries add another layer of uncertainty. Sodium-ion and solid-state technologies are advancing, but chemistry is only part of the problem. The next battery must still match voltage windows, packaging, charging behavior, communication protocols, and safety requirements of the machines it replaces. A sodium-ion pack with superior energy density is useless in a legacy forklift if its discharge curve triggers fault conditions in the controller. The engineering burden doesn’t shrink as the technology improves—in some respects, it grows.
That tension points toward the central bet the industry is making. When battery makers accept the burden of compatibility rather than passing it to the operator, the retrofit math changes, the upgrade decision simplifies, and a machine facing retirement gets a viable second act. At the scale of the global installed base of lead-acid industrial equipment, that’s not a marginal improvement, but a different theory of how electrification spreads. For decades, better battery technology meant buying new machines. That assumption is now the thing being replaced.
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