The big thing with electrical cars is, that they can be plugged in while parking. So every morning, you start off with the full range of the car, and often you can plug in at work too. Battery capacities keep growing, so you get more range awailable this way and fast chargers get faster, reducing the recharge times on the road. This progress shrinks the szenarios in which a battery swap would be needed.
Put an outlet at every parking spot for topping up while you work or shop in a more remote location, and you'll solve the problem for 95% of all urban cars.
(If your commute is > 80 miles, you have a bigger problem!)
Can you substantiate this claim? It seems a little Alex Jones-y without any evidence to support it. My understanding from reading the Wiki page is that this phrase popped up 20 years ago in a newspaper actually talking about a GM-made EV.
Frankly the chicken-and-egg scenario between charging infrastructure buildout and EV takeup is a very well-known dynamic of the market for this technology.
There was a time about ten years ago when many market participants were diving headfirst into EVs, but rapid-charging infrastructure was totally nonexistent and EVs didn't come anywhere close to the range of gas-powered cars, no matter how much you paid.
The median car journey in the US is just over 12 miles each way. 93% of households drive less than 100 miles on any given day. Current electric cars have more than enough range for the vast majority of users the vast majority of the time, but people have been trained by marketing to place excessive weight on abnormal journeys like road trips.
The majority of households have more than one car, so it would make perfect sense for them to have one electric car for routine journeys and keep an ICE car for those rare longer journeys. People who do actually take the plunge and go electric consistently report that they charge much less often than they thought they would need to, especially away from home. If we had a realistic sense of how we actually use our cars, EVs could achieve >50% market penetration without any infrastructure at all.
But it’s not the same 93% of households driving short trips every single day, while 7% of households drive long-haul day in and day out.
I might commute to work and back for less than 100 miles every single work day. But every weekend or so I might take a longer trip - short getaway to the beach, mountains, skiing resort, wine country, theme park, national park, relative out of town - you name it.
What am I supposed to do for that weekend or two? Take an Uber to Yosemite? Show up at Avis/Hertz and request to be raped on prices for a hot holiday weekend?
For single-car households people would still seek comfort in the fact that even if they have one long trip a year, they’re covered. And the costs of ownership of a compact gas/hybrid vs compact electric still lean in favor of the former.
Owning an electric car oftentimes means rather extensive coordination with my wife on the one day a year where both of us need to travel a long trip. That's the one day a year that we absolutely have to have charging infrastructure.
On extremely cold days in the winter my wife occasionally had to stop at a Chili's to top up on her way home. Without public charging she would have been stranded.
Don't even get me started about the time that we had to move and live in a vacation rental for a week. The grounds in the outdoor outlets were faulty. Electric vehicle Chargers verify the presence of a working ground, so I had to hunt through the rental property to find the best outlet and use a long extension cord.
So if you think electric vehicles will work without public charging infrastructure, you're delusional.
1. Battery packs are structural - if you make them removable the car will be less rigid.
2. You have $X to spend. You can spend it on improving rechargeability or making batteries swappable. 10% of your customers will swap battery packs ever, and 1% regularly. 10% of your customers will benefit from faster quick-charging times
That’s the bet of Tesla’s Supercharger Network, and in their view on a road long trip you still stop to take a leak, get coffee, stretch a bit, so why not do all that with the car parked at a charging spot for 20-30 minutes. The charger can also accept a credit card or do in-app billing, like Tesla or Chargepoint do.
Any shopping plaza or road stop can add chargers at fairly minimal (frequently taxpayer-subsidized) costs. Setting up a battery swap operation is just more difficult logistically - you have to dedicate real estate just to that, hire employees, train employees, manage employees, get compensated from car owners somehow, which would involve getting a cash register, running a cash register, etc.
The benefits to this are that the cost of the battery is spread out over time for the customer. And since the customer is always effectively paying the difference in cost of the deposit on the battery, the battery in their car will never exceed the value of what they have paid already. This also makes it way easier to recycle batteries once they have reached end of life as well.