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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

>Is it possible/financially doable to make charging mostly a thing of the past with a standard replaceable battery pack? Tesla 3 gets 9, Prius uses 5 etc. You got to a charging station and they swap your batteries out for fully-charged ones if available, and charge if not.

The problem with swapping is that switching out a battery is not at all the same as switching out a gas tank. Batteries degrade over time, and with various different usages (lots of fast charging, high heat) can degrade much more severely. You would have to have some kind of system that grades the battery being turned in and credits/debits the account based on its condition. On top of that it's just not necessary. A full charge from 20% is less than 30 mins at a 100kw charger.

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Swapping a fuel tank is actually not a bad analogy to swapping the battery. Both are much more involved than a simple refill, the fitment is limited to a single model (or a few similar ones), and I wouldn't want to replace my known good unit with a random used one.

It just takes about 10x more time to refill a battery than a fuel tank. Eventually gas stations will start to be replaced with more useful establishments (grocery, coffee shop, offices) that happen to have a charger at every parking spot.

Yeah, if you can find charging spots with no hassle, then this becomes a moot point. Buying some groceries? Plug it in. Going to the movies? By the time your movie is done you'll be ready to go. Work, school, etc.

Then only actual need for quick charging is road trips. And given a decent range, it is no big deal to stop every few hours. People do that even today, as they need bathroom breaks and the like.

I agree with the infeasibility of switching out batteries, but saying it isn't necessary? 30 minutes is a /long/ time. It takes like 2 minutes to go from 0-100 with gas.

tesla already build and ran this for a while in cali. not much interest for those reasons, plus tesla superchargers are fast enough.

I agree with the sibling comment that it won't be the eventual solution because charging will be good enough. That said, the battery thing just isn't a problem with the right market setup.

Battery deterioration over a fleet is predictable enough. You could just buy a "never-ending battery subscription" when you buy a car or something.

The Renault Zoe does something like this. You buy the car, but you lease the battery from Renault (at least, thats how it used to work)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Zoe

I think all the Renault lineup is like this.

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