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Comment by yholio | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the solution is to have better business practices around the technology that we do have. Why does the battery needs to be part of the car at all? It clearly depreciates and is technologically disrupted on a different time frame than the car itself. A Tesla Roadster is a fine car and will continue to be for decades, if you can only refresh it's battery pack every 10 years or so.

I'm thinking of a modular battery that is hot swapable at the charge stations and where you only pay it's depreciation based on what you actually use. This would significantly lower ownership costs for light users and drastically increase efficiency and flexibility for heavy users who are no longer dependent on charge times. Since it's modular, you load the number of units you need, say one battery unit for a Leaf, two for a Model S or 10 units for a light truck, all in standardized format and with their own computing that tracks things like life span, charge cycles performed by the user himself for proper billing etc.

I know Tesla experimented with and later abandoned battery swap, but that's predictable without the proper business structure in place, no one is going to leave the most expensive part of their car back at the charge station. If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics.

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Actually, Tesla's batteries don't degrade that much (10% average after 160,000 miles [0]). Turns out, with proper thermals and not charging/discharging fully vastly decreases their degradation according to other hacker news people on the topic [1].

[0]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-ba...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15144315

Same reason batteries in your phone or laptop are each a different shape and non-removable. They are an integral part of the design, a significant part of the weight & volume, with significant thermal concerns, etc... many electric cars today even use the battery as a "stressed member", aka the battery provides rigidity to the frame. How exactly will that be hotswappable in two minutes by John Doe?

Basically, the point is a standardized, easily removable, hotswappable widget makes a lot of sense when it's a minor item. But when it's half the weight, value, volume, and engineering challenge, you have to sacrifice all of those attributes to use the hotswap widget.

This originally made me think, if only we could pump fluid electrolyte in & out of the car, and let the battery take whatever form it likes. Then I realized that's called a flow battery, and then I realized that a hydrogen fuel cell is a type of flow battery.

>>Same reason batteries in your phone or laptop are each a different shape and non-removable.

What? Most laptops on the market today have removable batteries, to the point where you can buy spare battery packs for them for long trips. Same with a lot of smartphones.

Unless of course you mean Apple products.

A lot of smart phones? Maybe I'm not a discerning enough Android fanboy, but none of my phones have had removable batteries:

* Nexus 4

* Nexus 5

* Nexus 6P

* Samsung Galaxy S7

* Samsung Galaxy S9

The only recent phones I was aware of with removable batteries were the LG G*, but I don't think the latest model of those has a removable battery anymore either.

Up until last year at least swappable batteries were still common in lower-end smartphones. Generally none of those OEMs sold spare batteries though; even when many high-end models had swappable batteries, up until 2015/2016-ish, almost no OEMs sold spare batteries. I think it was the beginning of 2016 that LG actually started selling spare batteries, the same year they produced their last two high-end smartphones with swappable batteries.

Even though swappable batteries do continue on the low-end, I think maybe [in the US] only Motorola actually makes spare batteries available for consumers to purchase, even for devices that don't have readily swappable batteries. I think this year Motorola will ditch swappable batteries, pretty sure, but will supposedly continue to make spares available for select models via Ifixit.

User-serviceable and removable are not the same.

There are few consumer laptops with removable (pops right out) batteries these days. I haven't seen one since the early 00s.

At best there are still those which are user-serviceable (requires a screwdriver and some finesse at the least). And Apple products where you cannot do even that.

Some business models still have the external removable battery, but have lower specs and higher price than consumer counterparts.

Almost no modern smartphones have removable batteries. It's rare enough that the LG G5 tried to make it a selling point a few years ago.

Most laptop batteries are standard lithium ion cells in a specially molded case.

While the 18650 Lithium Ion cell is a standardized shape, the chemistry between Lithium Ion implementations is different from company to company.

A big reason for Tesla's design was that Panasonic's Cells (a partner of Tesla) was superior on power-density / weight.

I expect that power-density / weight will continue to be an important factor in electric cars, especially when you need thousands of these cells to power an electric vehicle. As such, I don't expect lithium ion cells (even "standard" 18650 ones) to become a commodity.

How are they not literally already a commodity?

I get that you said that they each have their own chemistry, but are the owners of all of the chemistries choosing their customers?

If you have the best product, you can pretty much choose your customers. But I suspect the choice is done simply with pricing to reflect better performance qnd or branding associated with it. Hence, counterfit cells are more common than real ones by top manufacturers. Even the pros are giving up trying to ID fakes and just focusing on testing whatever shows up in the box.

Lets put it this way: how many battery packs actually reach 300-miles in practice?

Spoiler alert: Chevy Bolt is over 230 miles. Nissan Leaf is 150 miles. If you want 300 mile electric range, your only option is Panasonic (and by transitivity, Tesla, who is their only customer at the moment).

That feat alone means that Panasonic cells give you a real technological advantage. A Panasonic Li-Ion cell is worth far more than a typical Li-Ion cell. It is NOT a commodity, but a fundamental business advantage these days. If the other LiIon cell manufacturers manage to get real improvements to Power Density / weight, then maybe we can talk about Commodifying LiIon cells.

But for now, its Panasonic only.

My understanding is that there's very little demand for Tesla's chemistry (low cobalt NCA). All other automakers prefer NCM, primary because:

* better sustained performance compared to NCA

* better peak/burst performance compared to NCA

* easy to adjust formula to show preference for capacity, performance, or longevity (most automakers skip on the 3rd)

Tesla prefers NCA battery because:

* it has more capacity / weight

* it's much cheaper due to lower cobalt requirements (main reason)

The main reason traditional automakers tend to shy away from NCA because:

* it is far less stable than NCM, which puts it a much higher risk for fire or explosions

* it costs more than NCM to make stable (I suspect Tesla chem is cutting corners in this area)

You can decide whether the trade off of safety for range is worthwhile for you; traditional automakers err on the side of safety.

I've encountered many reports of issues with safety regarding autopilot or breakdown/less repairability of the vehicles due to lack of experience in design, but what evidence is there for Tesla cutting corners regarding battery safety specifically?

Just the choice of using NCA batteries over NCM could be viewed as a safety cost cutting measure.

Here's a scientific paper about the safety of various battery chemistries (warning, PDF): https://res.mdpi.com/wevj/wevj-06-00572/article_deploy/wevj-...

Summery is that, compared to NCM, NCA inhibits thermal runaway at much lower temperatures, offers significantly less short circuit resistance, slightly less overcharge buffer before thermal runaway, significantly faster thermal runaway after overcharge buffer is exhausted.

The result of thermal runaway is fire or explosion.

Ok, I guess I'm thinking of the "thin" family of laptops with molded flat packs. Or maybe those have standard flat cells, just not the 18650.

But in any case, technically even the Tesla just uses hordes of 18650. But that doesn't make it any easier to remove the pack itself.

I do wonder if cars based on sodium-sulfur fuel cells would behave well.

In principle they should be good (you just need some small battery to start them), but the problems of making them safe may overwhelm any gain you get from using fuel cells.

Renault already offer battery leasing - you buy the car, but lease the battery based on your annual mileage. It has been reasonably popular, but it's far from a game changer.

https://www.renault.co.uk/renault-finance/battery-hire.html

From what I remember, early Tesla models offered something similar as well. It was mostly just to reassure early buyers, though, from what I remember.

From what I've heard (in Fully Charged videos), Renault did it for similar reasons and similarly expects the number of owners using battery leases instead of ownership to drop off soon as most buyers are now comfortable with the ownership model and prefer it.

They had a pilot running at Harris Ranch and shut it down eventually https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/harris-ranch-battery...

For a quick recharge the current-generation 120 kW SuperChargers were deemed good enough. Now that they're growing their fleet of mobile service trucks, battery replacement might get re-introduced as an at-home service.

This was in reference to a program that sold an insurance program to effectively allow you to swap out a worn battery for no (or low) cost. It also was shut down as it was found not to really be necessary, though.

So does Nio. Battery leasing and swap programs too..

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2017/12/20171218-nio.html

«Why does the battery needs to be part of the car at all? It clearly depreciates and is technologically disrupted on a different time frame than the car itself. A Tesla Roadster is a fine car and will continue to be for decades, if you can only refresh it's battery pack every 10 years or so.»

Cars overall depreciate on the scale of 10/15 years or so. Right now the depreciation rates are the same. It's an interesting artifact of ICE vehicles that people don't expect any car's drive train to last more than ~15 years. It shouldn't be a surprise that car manufacturers were skeptical of battery tech right up until they hit about that same magic lifetime number. It also shouldn't be a surprise that car manufacturers won't have a lot of incentive to push it past that magic lifetime number, because that would affect car replacement rates and that would affect the bottom line.

Mostly battery replacements look to keep the used car / secondary markets busy, and if we expect to see interesting innovations in battery replacements that's probably where we'll see them as more electric cars get resold to secondary and tertiary owners. (Just as we see the used car markets pushing innovations in after-market parts in general.)

You are right in that maybe leaves room for a disruption that someone might be interested in a "car for life" model where electric cars might be built far more sustainably with an ideal towards larger reuse of the vehicle over the owner's lifetime and a larger depreciation scale on the order of multiple decades.

That would be a huge game changer, and would potentially be great for the planet (less steel production alone, conceivably). It would also take a lot of work to make it happen, given the existing industry reliance on the current business model for most of a century now. It would also be one extremely huge disruption in so many downstream industries, secondary markets, etc, to the point where it may be more of a revolution (in the industrial sense, but also perhaps the war sense) than a "simple" disruption.

I see lots of 15+ year old cars around, my car is over 20 years old and still works fine. About 25% of vehicles used in the US today are at least 15 years old. The drivetrains already very often outlast the body/frame falling apart from rust, at least in places that salt the roads during winter.

https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicles

Isn’t it before electronics heavily started to get into the cars ?

Of course, we can view the car as a single purpose ‘move from A to B’ device, but there’s other viewpoints where the car has a performance (speed, efficiency, handling assist, smoother engine management) profile, quality of life and security features (auto cruising, speed limit detection, tire pressure detection, auto braking etc)

All of these should have evolved enough in 10 years that you get significant benefits from an upgrade.

Cars have made pretty heavy use of electronics for around 30 years at this point. My mid-90s car has electronic fuel injection, computer controlled transmission, a dozen sensors in the engine bay, anti-lock brakes, keyless entry, power windows, motorized seats, heated seats, digital cabin thermostat, cruise control, etc. There's even a stereo.

Obviously new cars are in general an upgrade. Most people driving old cars do not do so because they want to, they do it because new cars are too expensive.

As someone experinced here, most pre OBD2 electronics are very often much easier to hack for performance applications. Obd2 started in 1996 in the usa. The extra sensors and data are not the issue, quite welcome actually. The issue is the opaqueness of the newer hardware.

Not to mention that they're easier to diagnose and fix. Having diagnostic data available to you was fantastic for me as a young car nerd with no experience.

I think we might already be in that future with electrics. Just look at most tram and subway systems in major cities, you will usually find a mix of rolling stock with some produced as far back as 60s or 70s and still in daily service. The equivalent ICE bus has long since been scrapped.

Not necessarily by design, it's simply inherent to electric drive, you have much less "metal grinding against lubricated metal with a controlled wear rate" situations that seems to doom ICEs and the associated transmissions on the long run.

I drive a 30 year old vehicle at times, replaced the engine with a japanese engine at around 60k on it, at a cost of around $2,000 with new timing belt and associated accessories/pumps/etc. The engine is rock solid still pushing out about 450 HP but the suspension, frame, and body are pretty beat at ~200k miles on the car. I would say you really aren't going to have an enjoyable car at much more than 130-150k miles, whether or not the drivetrain is replaced. I did a good amount of work in college on fatigue cycles in metals, and with our roads and infrastructure deteriorating this is only going to decrease the usable life of an average frame/suspension.

Yeah, that's a fascinating technical question if someone were to try for a "car for life" model. My college car was still driving fine when I sold it (at about 13 years in its life and something less that 70k miles), but the interior plastics were deteriorating faster than I would have expected to the point where pliers were needed to be used to adjust the a/c as the knobs broke off and probably the window cranks were about to follow.

The other side of it too is accidents are likely to always be an issue with cars (even in a world of self-driving cars, I suspect), and there are plenty of other safety reasons cars shouldn't be expected to be driven for too many years without replacement.

I'd dispute the idea that a car with 130k-150k miles can't be enjoyable. I've had multiple BMWs with more than that many miles that were plenty enjoyable. None of them had any drivetrain replacements though all of them had suspension replacements as should be expected as those are all wear components. I've even had other BMW owners remark that my 200k+-mile car drives better than their own with ~60k miles due to the recency of the suspension component replacements on mine.

There's certainly degradation that occurs to a car with lots of mileage, but it's generally with the interior and the electrical systems. There may be some exterior corrosion, too, if you live in the appropriate climate though corrosion resistance has improved a lot on cars lately. And, of course, all bets are off if you don't properly maintain the car.

I drive a toyota at 180k and it's fine. It's not pretty or perfect, but it gets me to and from work with no issue.

I should get around to replacing some suspension components to make it more comfortable to drive, probably will later this year when I get some time. They're not terribly expensive.

Yup. I've got a 20 year old BMW with 150k miles on it, and it's a fantastic car. But things wear out.

Electric or ICE, as you hit 150-200k, you'll have long since worn through all kinds of rubber bushings on virtually every part, you'll be approaching the point where you've had to replace starter or alternator, you'll have (hopefully) replaced your suspension a couple of times, and so on. As the value continues to decline, the 'value' of spending parts+labor money on any of these replacements starts to decline.

Can I ask what parts you're referring to specifically when you say "replace the suspension"? My car is past 100k at this point and I'm looking forward to what might need to be done to keep it reasonably nice.

Usually, you'd be talking dampers (often called shock absorbers in the UK), and often the springs will have broken.

Having said that, I remember that 20 years ago, those kinds of parts would need to be replaced after maybe 60-80k miles. However, everything seems to be better built now - my van has 214k on it, and no sign of needing replacements - same goes for all the cars I've bought and sold (20 or so) in the last 3 years.

Primarily the shocks / dampeners and their rubber bushings.

You at least need to do struts and shocks, probably springs if they're separate. You'll want to check the strut towers are still decent, or if they need reinforcement.

Going a little deeper, probably your tie rods and sway bar links are shot, as are the control arm bushings (which may or may not be integral with the entire control arm).

It's pretty commonly for shocks/struts/dampers to be worn out by 50-80k miles. As early as 30k. Sure, the car will still seem to generally drive fine, but the point is that all of these things get worse over time.

Further on down the mileage line, virtually everything is wearing out. Rubber bushings in control arms. Rubber bushings in all your rear suspension points. There's rubber EVERYWHERE on cars, and it all wears out. Motor mounts, transmission mounts, shock mounts. Again, it'll still go down the road, but it won't drive like new. You might have a lot of slop in steering, slop in cornering. The car might pull one way or another under acceleration. It'll be louder, harsher, clunkier.

The transmission, especially on an automatic, is the thing that often does them in. I just recently had one go on a 18 year old Chevy Imapla and decided to sell it rather than fixing it. The body and interior are in very good condition. The problem is that other stuff is starting to go. For example the AC has never been serviced and will be an issue in the near future, I live in Atlanta where that is needed. I've gone through two EGR valves, throttle position sensor etc.. The car, working perfectly can sell for up to $4500 with new tires, but it has old tires (-$400), plus the transmission rebuild/replace is going to be between $2100-$2500. The engine itself is in great shape with no problems and if I wanted to dump more money into it I could drive the car to 300 plus thousand miles, but it is starting to need to have things fixed more and more....

It helped that I was able to get a brand new loaded Volt for $9,000 off plus an additional $7500 tax rebate. which in the end means that I have the best of both worlds for $25,000 with a full warranty etc..

In Belarus there are quite a few of BMW and Audi approaching 30 years or more. According to a person that works in a shop specializing in their repair the biggest issue is rust. The engine and other parts are mostly original with minimal repairs. In Belarus a good mechanic earns 700-1000 usd/month and his time is cheaper then getting replacement parts.

Most of the parts that degrade in a suspension are replacable. Bushings, stabilizer links, steering links, shocks, etc. are all easily replaced in most cars (n.b. EVs such as Tesla are the same as any other car in regards to these parts -- they will wear over time). The core frame structure is not going to suffer any significant fatigue from normal driving. Rust is another matter of course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company)

There was an Israeli battery/car tech startup that was built on that model, but it sadly went kaput. I still firmly believe that the hot-swap model is the winner long term.

Yea, worth noting that the small-tank propane market also works like this. When you go to a supermakert or gas station, you just swap an empty tank for a full one. Refill is done after hours at scale.

It works almost the same for bottled oxy/fuel/shielding gas used for cutting and welding operations across the country.

Notably, 10 years ago I could swap a butane or propane tank from one vendor with one of another vendor at any place that sold butane/propane.

The last time I tried to do that (6 months ago) they rejected it. I had to go to the original supplier, as they were no longer refilling each others branded containers. In spite of standard fittings/sizes/etc. They've become significantly less fungible, and I can no longer just go to the nearest or cheapest supplier based on my needs.

Even worse, I've just realised that I now effectively have two un-refillable tanks, as Homebase just shut down all my local branches. Which I paid deposits on when I bought them, obviously. Nice ...

uhaul will generally fill propane tanks. When you swap tanks you get substantially less than what uhaul will fill to.

Yep. They also over-charge for propane, sell the tanks not fully-filled, and don't compensate you for propane left in the tanks when you return them. All to increase convenience slightly (I can get the swap tanks at the supermarket or Home Depot, but I have to go to a specific gas station to fill the tanks I own). I strongly prefer the non-swap solution.

I used to think the same, but I'm starting to disagree.

Batteries aren't as "fungible" as something like gas or electricity is. (is that the right word to use for this?)

You can be reasonably sure that gas is gas, and electricity is electricity, but not all batteries are going to be the same. Some will be higher capacity, some will have greater life, some will be heavier or lighter, some cars or trucks will need bigger or smaller batteries, etc... Some could even be damaged and unsafe, which is something you don't really get with gas (sure bad gas could ruin your car, but gas from a pump isn't going to catch fire randomly and hurt you because it's bad)

At the end of the day, it's just too much variation for me to trust a random battery pulled from a depot of them.

The thought experiment that put me over the edge was imagine instead of batteries, we were talking about tires. What if it was deemed better to swap out your tire when you had to put air in it. So you brought it to your shop and they pulled the wheel and tire off, then put one that they had in-store on full of air, and they refilled the one you gave them and handed it to someone else.

Would you trust that? How would it change how we handle tires on cars? Would the public go for it? I really don't think they would, I know I wouldn't, and it's the same kind of feeling with car batteries.

You assume gasoline is fungible, right?

to an extent that it matters, yeah.

Sure, I put 87 octane in our SUV and 89 in the audi, but yeah for the most part gas is gas, unless something is wrong.

Getting 2 random batteries to have less than 10% variance among them is going to be a lot harder (especially when battery health changes a lot depending on how they are treated. Users running them to near empty in cold weather is going to shorten the life a lot faster than the guy who only runs it to 50% before swapping out every time), and I have a feeling that the amount of "problem" batteries will be much higher than the amount of times i've ever had "problem gas" (which is basically 0 times so far).

I am assuming in a hypothetical battery swap world batteries would be rigorously tested before replacement. How hard do you think it would be (sincerely)? For the gasoline analogy, there are lots of ways to achieve an octane rating but I suspect most people only use the "do I hear engine knock" test. Similarly, I would be fine of a guarantee of if I have 300 mi of electric range (whether it's 300, 310, or 320) under normal driving conditions for a battery swap, as a trade off for convenience.

I really think it would be a lot harder than testing gasoline.

For starters, with gas and other things like it, there is a supply chain which is pretty tight. If one supplier starts giving bad gas, you can blacklist them and move on. With batteries you'd have to test them after every single use, because you don't know what the last user has done to them.

Then they need to be physically inspected, because a puncture or deep gouge or crack or something could cause big issues.

Then their actual capacity needs to be tested some how. I'll admit that I've been outside of the battery ecosystem for a while, but years ago it wasn't all that easy to "spot check" a random battery to find it's health and capacity. Most devices would gain that knowledge about a battery over a few charge cycles. You need to make sure you know it off the bat, and you can't be wrong or I'll lose faith in the company and the tech.

Then throw in the complication of different sizes, different shapes, different technologies, different requirements (this isn't just the "gas" part of fuel, it's also the "gas tank", so one size will never fit all), and now you are maintaining huge banks of different kinds of batteries all while charging them to the right amount without degrading them, and checking that users didn't run them in below freezing to almost 0 percent which would reduce the lifetime and aren't damaging them in any way which would be very unsafe.

In an ideal world, it sounds like a great idea, but I just don't trust that it can be pulled off without making the user's life worse than if they didn't do it.

A couple of things: when I think about it, I implicitly think about it as a vendor specific thing. Like Tesla supercharger stations. Agree that battery standards across makers likely impossible. Second, I think the major upside is removing a large potential liability from each vehicle - as hybrid vehicles are entering "old used car" ages/mileages, all your points about assessing the health of the battery apply to 2ary buyers and ability for people to monetize their old vehicles.

Bringing it back around to the topic, I don't know that we can wait on solid state and this represents a work around while smarter people that I can figure that out.

Side note: is that a typo or do you really have 87 octane gasoline in the USA? Because it's 95 and 98 in the EU.

They're possibly different measures, RON vs MON. The wiki article has more including a photo of an offending US gasoline pump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating

yes, but we use a different method of measuring than you do.

IIRC ours is the average of 2 different methods (it normally shows as R+M/2 on our pumps), whereas I believe the EU uses only the one that tends to be a lot higher (RON I think)

Most gas stations around me have 87, 89, and 91, and sometimes 93. I believe your octane numbers will be on average like 6 higher than ours for the same gas.

If you investigate the way gasoline is distributed in the US you will see that it is extremely fungible.

Sure, but my point is that you have gasoline being produced by many companies and production facilities, from many different/blended inputs (heavy oil with low gravity, NGLs, ethanol mixture, et al), and with proprietary additions.

There's no reason that batteries can't be checked that the meet spec before they are replaced in your car in the same way.

I'd be surprised if each battery couldn't come with a little computer that tracks charge times, cycles and power output over time. It would make it trivial to monitor whether or not a battery is currently serviceable (or whether it will expire prematurely).

For EV fleets we used to only be able to do this per vehicle (not by battery) while the vehicle was home and charging, by shipping the fleet battery metrics to a central aggregator. But that is overkill for consumer vehicles.

With Tesla, every single cell has a computer chip monitoring its performance on a variety of issues. And the aggregate data for that is all called back to HQ on a regular basis. Tesla knows better than you ever possibly could as to how well each and every cell in your battery packs is doing.

Gasoline is largely fungible because it's required by law to be. What can be called gasoline, what additives can (and are required to be) put into it, how much energy it has per liter, etc., are all regulated.

There was a time where gasoline brands mattered, and the gas you got from Esso might have been slightly different than the gas from Sinclair or Hess or whatever, but that was intentionally regulated into irrelevance because the benefit to consumers of a consistent product was more valuable than allowing brands to differentiate themselves.

It took several decades after the widespread adoption of the car (and gasoline as the dominant fuel) for this to happen, and during this time users had to struggle with varying fuels produced from different feedstocks, gumming of engines, dilution of crankcase oil, etc. (This is referred to in period motoring publications as "the Fuel Problem".) The automobile industries and the oil industries basically pointed fingers at each other until the US Bureau of Standards had to step in and mediate on a consistent set of standards that the refiners would produce fuel to, and the engine manufacturers would design their engines against. If this hadn't happened, and the market had been left to sort it out, I suspect you would have ended up having to fill your Ford car only at Sinclair stations, based on some Ford/Sinclair arrangement or whatever.

Unfortunately the 'solution' to the Fuel Problem in the 30s involved the introduction of tetraethyl lead, which mars what would have been a good example of mutually beneficial public-private cooperation and useful regulation.

I like your tire analogy. While it is probably true that the risks would be lower with battery swaps, it is also true that the marginal benefit isn't so great as people tend to perceive.

Would you take the marginal risk of a battery swap (plus the costs of all those batteries in inventory throughout the country) in order to save 60 minutes on a 600 mile trip?

And is the infrastructure to do all of that really less expensive than putting a charger at enough restaurants for you to just stop and eat while the car charges?

>Would you take the marginal risk of a battery swap (plus the costs of all those batteries in inventory throughout the country) in order to save 60 minutes on a 600 mile trip?

I honestly think I would for a trip like that. But at the same time I wouldn't want to be stuck with a potentially "sub-par" battery after that trip either. And those 2 things seem pretty at odds with one another.

Like in a perfect world I'd love to be able to have it as an option, but I'm not willing to give up "my" battery in my current (hypothetical!) car for one of unknown quality.

Perhaps a "booster" system would work then in this case? You don't swap out the actual battery in the car, but instead swap out batteries that go in your trunk or something and charge your actual battery while driving! Then you don't care about how shitty that pack is, you are only using it to "recharge" on the go!

600 miles is equal to about 10 hours of driving (very roughly). There are very few people who would do that trip without stopping at least a few times (bathroom, food, stretch, etc...) and if charging infrastructure is common enough (which it will be) than a good chunk of those 60 minutes can be done in concert with those stops. And compared to ICE vehicles, most would need about 2 re-fueling stops to make that trip[1]. So an aggressive ICE trip would still result in about 10-20 minutes of re-fueling time.

Another thing to consider, it is much more likely that we will see 400mi range electrics sooner and/or easier than we could roll out a large network of battery swap stations. I think the concept of battery swap is solid. Most batteries have BMS systems that prevent over/under charging and any physical damage can be detected. Plus the battery would likely be owned by a third party, so it would not be a big deal if you got stuck with a bad battery, you would just swap it out for another one. The main issue is logistics. Much harder to build a network of battery swap stations then it is to put some fast chargers in parking lots. And if we can get the range up to 400 miles, then a 600 mile trip could be done with 20-30 minutes of super charging.

[1] Assuming a ~300 mile ICE range, you need to fill up at the start, at the middle, and at the end (although one could wait till the next morning, but I think it should still count). Whereas electric, you start full (because you plugged in overnight prior to departure), and you end full (assuming you can plug in overnight at your destination). These are rough assumptions, but I think 2 fuel stops is a good approximation, but many would need 3 (including my own ICE car, which gets ~250 miles per tank).

If you or someone else can do it, I genuinely encourage you to! I do think that ideally battery swap tech could be a big benefit, but I just don't see it taking off for so many reasons.

The major one being your first paragraph. Charging tech is getting better every day, and we are already at the point where 15 minutes can get you a good chunk of charge with current batteries in some cars. I think things will change (no more "gas stations" (or places solely devoted to providing fuel), and a lot more charging spots at destinations that are worth spending 30 minutes at), the bit of charging time every few hours will begin to become a non-issue, and the whole complicated logistics nightmare of managing a fleet of physical battery packs at various depots across the country will go the way of the flying car. That thing that everyone thinks they wanted but it was just never practical to have.

> if charging infrastructure is common enough (which it will be) than a good chunk of those 60 minutes can be done in concert with those stops.

This was really the point that I was getting at. It is ultimately cheaper to put good chargers at every restaurant and bathroom stop than it is to put battery swap stations (with inventory) at enough locations.

Oh, that guy. I met the Better Place CEO once. Good looking, great talker, knew many national leaders, totally unworkable business plan. Along the lines of "take over the world, with 10x growth per year." In a business where you actually have to build stations and cars, not just distribute software, and the margins are low. I wouldn't go all the way to "con man", but it was close. More like someone who bought into their own hype.

Automated battery swapping takes tight standardization. It's in use for some industrial robotic AGVs.[1][2][3] Mechanically, it works, but all the vehicles have to be very similar. A taxi fleet, maybe.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvqbw0UT5pM [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKg8Zxmmpv4 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJwtwdeAXhM

> If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics.

I wouldn't. Not to be a naysayer, just giving some context. The cars I buy are already in that price range, and I already pay "comparable gasoline prices" (via gas, hah), so in my area all I'd gain is a different type of gasoline when in city, and when I go camping/etc I'd be at risk due to being in slow adoption areas.

Don't get me wrong, I want electric, but due to the areas I drive I've already settled to likely being stuck with Hybrids for the next X years.

With that said, if the model you laid out still ended up cheaper than gasoline it would at least tip the balance towards its favor. I just can't handle a zero sum trade - and I imagine the same would be true for many around this large, slow to adapt land masses.

Cities will become much, much nicer though. Air quality alone. I look forward to it

Business practice seems to be shifting, at least that's what I see where I sit. DHL has started delivering parcels using electric vans and from what I've read today's batteries aren't a problem for that.

Today's batteries aren't really good enough for driving on vacation, but private practice is moving too. The number of 25-year-olds with driving licenses is dropping, I've seen surveys that list the iphone above a BMW as a status symbol, and then there are phenomena like this: https://www.citymetric.com/transport/driving-london-has-been...

I see plenty of people driving battery-electric cars on vacation; try hanging out at a Tesla supercharger and talk to the people there.

This summer will be my 3rd year driving our Tesla Model X from Boston to Hilton Head, SC. Superchargers are everywhere, it's an easy drive. We also drive from Boston 2+ hours into NH to go skiing all winter, also a breeze...

> Today's batteries aren't really good enough for driving on vacation

Picked up our Model 3 in September. We've already driven it to West Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, as well as multiple trips inside of Florida. Hit 10,000 miles yesterday.

I would never argue that road tripping in a Tesla is as worry-free as it is in a ICE-powered vehicle, but with a modicum of forethought I'd say the Model 3 is plenty good enough for driving on vacation today. The hardest part is limiting yourself to hotels that offer Level 2 chargers, but pretty much all new construction hotels have EV charging of some sort.

Buying the car and hot swapping the batteries (with an automated machine similar to going through a car wash, no less) was the vision of A Better Place, a short lived Israeli startup. That company failed, but I wouldn't say it's impossible by a long shot.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-pl...

And here, for comparison, is the original Wired hype article I remember first reading which led me to wondering "hey what ever happened…" a few years ago.

https://www.wired.com/2008/08/ff-agassi/

While your suggestion is good for the vast majority of driving situations, there is one kind of driving where it won't work:

Off road driving

Unless we get a battery that has - at a minimum - the same capabilities as a tank of gas, off roading is going to be relegated to strictly internal combustion, or maybe hybrid powered only.

Right now, even the tech in a Tesla would not get a decent off road rig (up-armored, lifted, accessories, large MT tires, etc) out to the trail, over/thru it, and back to civilization. What we have right now will generally get you over a decent trail - but you'll probably have to trailer the rig in and out of the area.

Even if solid-state batteries prove to be practical, it still might not be enough for any kind of serious off roading capability; that is, anything more than a "day trip", or where unplanned excursions off the route are involved.

Because you won't have any easy ways to recharge the battery while on the trail.

Right now, you can carry your own fuel with you, and refuel as needed or if there's an emergency or whatever. Other people when out with a group may also have fuel others can use - so the concept of universality comes into play.

It's not possible to bring a generator (and fuel) or a solar panel with you to charge the battery of a hypothetical off road vehicle, unless this new battery tech allows for short charge times at lower voltages/currents as well (which probably isn't on the table). And you likely can't bring along spare battery packs - the size and weight would be prohibitive (then again, some people bring along replacement axles); unless the weight and size of such solid-state batteries are less.

Yes, off roading is a small segment of the population, and so maybe it would be ok if that portion remained to use IC engines; presumably a battery swap system, or a solid-state battery pack might be the solution for the majority.

Battery technology, the management of charge/discharge/heat etc is the "secret sauce" that differentiates EVs. Anybody can stick an electric motor in a chassis. No carmaker is going to want to give that up for an industry standard one-size-fits-all generic battery.

This is an obvious idea hampered by the business model impossibilities of owning $20,000 battery packs which you can only improve in value by a few dollars every time you exchange them. The inventory / infrastructure / damage costs are too high to justify it.

A battery pack has between 500 and 1000 charge cycles, so each swap on the $20K pack will recover you $20-40 in depreciation. It's the main cost of using an electric car.

So then, the business challenge becomes to extract more value from a pack than a car owner can. There are many opportunities to do that:

- much improved inventory management, buy in bulk, monitor and adjust charging parameters etc. to prolong battery life based on observed performance of the specific battery type.

- this allows you to optimize battery purchase and chemistry to minimize overall cost even at the risk of a reduced lifetime

- centralized recharge gives you economies of scale to purchase cheap electricity during the night and enter all sorts of contracts where you can earn money by acting as a last-resort supplier at peak times, without actually using significant charge cycles on your inventory.

- the same economy of scale is passed down to customers who won't be bothered to install high power fast charge circuits, or are simply unable to.

- differential pricing based on customer needs, for example, new, top performance packs for home users and degraded packs with lower peak current for less sensitive customers, taxis and commercial fleets etc.

- batteries depreciate even when they sit charged; a modular system will allow customers to keep (and pay rent for) a single or low capacity unit on a regular basis for city use and opt for full capacity when they really need the extra range.

> each swap on the $20K pack will recover you $20-40 in depreciation

Just the labor cost for the procedure is likely to greatly exceed the $20-40 estimate.

What labor? https://youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY

https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event

They replaced the battery in 90 seconds and it was completely automated.

I really like the idea of having gas stations replaced with battery stations. Drive in to the "pump", put in your credit card, and let the automated system replace your battery.

The space that was used for tanks could be devoted to charging infrastructure.

I don't think that the data for Tesla batteries supports your 500-1000 cycles number.

> A battery pack has between 500 and 1000 charge cycles,

I am very skeptical of that claim. This seems to hold true for laptop batteries. Not cars.

Tesla batteries are already highly modular and easily swappable. Having them be swapped every reload just doesn't make any sense.

I bet in ten years having your battery swapped is about the same as having your belt and pump swapped. A couple hours mechanic fees plus the cost of a new battery minus the resale value of the old one. Done within a day, simple once every 250k kilometers to keep your car run as new.

A model 3 without a battery would still be 30k, and that's with Tesla on razor margins and with the much cheaper supercharger infrastructure.

What about the opposite ie the car structure should be the battery! Carbon Fibre can be a very effective Anode at double the strength of steel - not v effective at it’s max strength of 10x Steel. Not as energy dense as curent Tesla batteries, but at the system level, should in theory save 50% of weight for same capacity, which is huge! Also lower energy density is naturaly safer, ie less likely to go up in flames. Just guessing, but this might partly explain how the Tesla Semi Truck is getting the claimed 500 mile range, that most commentators say is impossible?

They could double or triple that range by going to a diesel electric drive-train. Trains (in the USA, at least) use a diesel-electric drive-train to great effect.

There is a pretty significant systems engineeing effort to integrate the battery performance with the motor and power electronics. Tesla does a fantastic job in this regard and that is likely responsible for their high efficiency. You lose a lot of ability to do the integration in an optimized way if you have to design around different batteries.

All that to say there is a lot to be gained by not doing a battery swap system.

What I would like to see is an ev with enough range to do the commute, with rentable batteries to increase the range as and when.

Won't be surprised that Tesla jumping on the chance to cancel the battery swap program when the reported popularity was low was due to something else.

It could be that a quick hot swap is technologically complicated, especially given Tesla manufacturing tolerances. Also if the hot swap fails, you're stranded without a car.

Tesla’s hot swap demo was a compliance hack to garner as many ZEV credits as possible in California. There was no way it was going to be rolled out if you observed how rapidly they rolled out Supercharger stations instead.

I have a Tesla and don't think that kind of hot swap is necessary with the supercharger network and ease of charging in my garage, what I would like to see is public pricing on them swapping my battery with a new one after 10 years.

And how about a road that powers the car?

This is already common practice in some other areas, e.g., renting gas cylinders and paying for refills.

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