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Comment by azernik | Hacker News Reader

Gasoline's advantage is not in speed and power; electric engines can produce quite enough torque, and get maximum speeds well above the legal and practical limits for highway driving.

It's in range and fast refueling on existing infrastructure - for example, the Tesla Model S gets only about 200-250 miles on a charge, after which it needs somewhere more than half an hour to recharge on a Supercharger. Compared to much cheaper gas-powered vehicles that can run 400 miles on a tank, and refuel in minutes, this is pretty bad, hence the BMW statement hedging the all-electric promise with things like range extenders and hybrid technology, rather than power-boosters of assorted types.

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The solution to the refueling speed issue is so obvious to me that I think I'm probably missing something about the economics of it.

All they have to do is swap out the whole battery pack, you wouldn't really own your car's pack. It'd be like propane tanks where you exchange your empty tank for a new one. The whole car would have to be manufactured around this idea to make it easy to lift out the battery pack, probably with some kind of forklift.

Tesla have started doing this, but I do not recall the details.

They've implemented it, but Musk says it'll probably be discontinued: http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/news/a25...

It turns out that for real world long distance driving, stopping to charge for 20-30 minutes every couple of hours isn't a big deal for most people. There are some who are really in a hurry, of course, but the reaction from most Tesla owners hasn't been very enthusiastic. The superchargers do the job well already.

Most of the manufacturers have demoed variations on that theme. The big problem is that you have to get all the manufacturers to agree to use same battery pack on all their models. If every gas station has to keep a stock of dozen different batteries with a dozen different swapping procedures it will get too expensive to implement.

Another aspect is a question of manpower. I don't know what it's like in the rest of the world, but here in Sweden more and more gas stations are completely unmanned. And at the ones that do have staff they're are basically just there to run the large convenience store. No gas station today employs people who actually knows anything about cars. Unless this procedure is completely automated, it will require the gas station to take on extra, trained, staff.

Well, why must there be "a" station? You can just have manufacturer-specific battery swapping stations. Since these will mostly be located outside cities, the extra area is probably not that big a problem.

That sounds horribly inefficient and expensive, and doesn't really solve the problem. Standardised battery packs would be a much better solution than making each manufacturer operate a national/global network of recharging stations.

Better Place tried to make this happen in a few small test markets, and failed spectacularly. Turns out building out that kind of infrastructure is quite expensive, and only works if a large number of cars on the road are compatible with your batteries. It might take off when electric car deployment is much higher than it is now, but it doesn't help with bootstrapping.

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