Possibility Of Milwaukee Creating A New M18 Battery That’s Physically Larger Than 12.0

Ok so before you guys get all hyped up, I want to mention that what you will read in this article is purely speculation on my part. I have not heard anything from the pipeline to confirm this and neither have I heard any rumors. But I have good reason to believe that Milwaukee might create a new battery that is physically larger than their current M18 12.0 battery which is physically larger than even the then large 9.0 when it came out.

When I was reviewing the Milwaukee M18 Fuel 16″ Chainsaw (check out the review by clicking here), it’s battery holder surrounds the battery on all sides except for the front entry and I noticed that there is space below and to the sides of the battery when the massive M18 12.0 battery installed. The additional spacing was most likely done to future proof the tool because if they made it so that it barely fits the current 12.0 and then they make a physically larger battery, the newer larger battery wouldn’t fit. So if they made the battery holder larger than need be, they probably might make a physically larger battery in the future.

What type of larger battery could they make?

Obviously it would be an M18 18 volt battery since that’s what the M18 Fuel Chainsaw runs on. I have three ideas of what Milwaukee could make for a newer larger battery.

The first option would be to make a 15 cell battery similar to the current HD batteries such as the 9.0 and the 12.0 ah models but with larger individual battery cells. Larger cells than the 21700 cells would result in a overall larger battery. Larger cells could provide better performance like larger runtime capacity per cell, less heat build up and possibly better power output.

The next idea is could be a 20 cell battery with an extra fourth row of cells. If this is a possibility, this means that they could make a 16.0 ah battery today just by adding an extra row of cells using existing battery tech.

The last possible idea would be not using ideas one and two but keeping the same amount of similar sized cells but spacing them out for better heat dissipation and added electronics like additional circuit boards. This is exactly what happend to Ridgid’s 5.0 ah battery and Ryobi’s 6.0 ah battery where they used same sized cells as before but spaced them out further to compensate for better heat dissipation with more amp hours.

Regardless of which of the above three methods are used, the results are a physically larger battery and higher runtime capacity in amp hours.

As mentioned in the opening paragraph, this is purely speculation on my part that they might do this some time in the future. Is this planned for production? I do not know and can not say but one thing is for sure, that all three of the above conclusions are totally possible today. And not just from Milwaukee but any power tool manufacturer. I am simply mentioning Milwaukee because they seem to have over engineered the battery compartment to fit a larger battery.

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2 Comments

  • Josh The Tooldude says:

    While it wouldn’t surprise me if they are working on a bigger battery, the extra space could also be to allow good cooling when pushing the saw and battery to the max. either way it’s a good thing.

    • Javier says:

      I agree that could be a possibility and very well could be.

      If you look at the spacing on the sides, it is very minimal so proper venting makes perfect sense here but if you look at the bottom spacing, it’s more than necessary for venting purposes in my opinion and looks like they over engineered for futureproofing the tool in case they ever make a larger battery.

      They’ve come into this problem with some tools not accepting the larger batteries such as one of their radius light and the m18 wet dry 2 gal vac where they actually had to update those models to accept larger batteries.

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