My understanding is this still requires a battery breakthrough, or at least significant improvement.
The average person is a tenant without home charging as an option, they require a gas station substitute or better - ideally an obsoleting solution eliminating this waste of time altogether.
Imagine if a battery breakthrough enabled 2000 mile ranges with a 5 minute recharge, and effectively unlimited charge cycles so the battery outlasts the vehicle lifetime with zero degradation of range.
If such a thing were in EVs today, ICEs would all but vanish practically overnight.
I think it's obvious we're still not quite there, but it is getting close.
The problem is these battery packs tens of thousands of dollars (I think, given costs per kWh) and aren’t standardized. Seems like something the auto companies should be open to standardizing. They’ve done the same with oil - because they had to accommodate the fuel literally burning away.
Edit-I get that they’re heavy, but that can be standardized away, too.
Battery packs are massive, complex, sensitive to abuse and expensive to replace. Those are very different qualities from water bottles and propane tanks.
I'm genuinely curious if we have any successful exchange system examples resembling EV batteries to reference as precedence.
https://www.topgear.com/car-news/big-reads/power-shift-batte...
Also in some cars the battery pack is used to add strength and rigidity to the body, thus saving weight and adding efficiency. Harder to pull this off if it’s removable.
I think that's a rational desire when you've bought the battery with your vehicle.
If there were an option to have the vehicle delivered sans battery then enter into a swap program of your choosing which provided the battery that you never actually owned (why would you want to, really, it's _the_ expensive wear component most likely to be meaningfully obsoleted repeatedly), then people would probably feel very differently about it.
Edit-Ok found a slightly convincing argument. The battery pack in a Tesla 3 weighs 1000lbs. It’d require a swap station in order to support removing them. I still say it’s doable. It has to be supported if we want to avert catastrophic climate change.
This is a breakthrough that batteries need to get.
Could maybe pull it off with a different design, like maybe the Tesla Cybertruck exoskeleton could work with this scheme? Would be cool if it could work and if swaps were fast like in that one Tesla demo that never came to market.
https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/videos/battery-swap-event?redire...
If they didn't stick with it, nobody will. Also, standardizing batteries across companies is just silly. Electric cars basically are batteries. If you standardize the most important element of the car, you will kill innovation.
Superchargers on long trips (~1600 km per hour charging with v3) are sufficient. It's 15 min of charing per 400km or 4 hours or driving. Charging at home/work everyday is actually more convenient than tracking discharge and going to some special place every couple of days. Building chargers at parking places is not expensive. From what I gather it should not be more than a few thousands. In bulk it's probably even cheaper.
The issue isn't that it's not an option, it's that people don't want to do it. Most people would much rather drive their own car than a rental. Renting a car is usually something you do as a last resort.
I drive most of my kilometres during certain seasons: Christmas, Easter holiday, school holidays (when visiting parents etc).
These are exactly the times when very many others also want to make similar trips, so the rental companies are out of capacity, or rather, there is surge pricing.
I'm genuinely curious. It was not nasty in any way, it was readable and presented a good argument. That you disagree should not be a reason to downvote.
I don't think 2000 mile range would be that important, but >1000 km would be useful (I have a diesel car that can do this).
Gasoline cars used to offer ranges not so much more than 400 kilometers, only very modern and Diesel cars increased that number significantly. Elektric cars have reached (and in Tesla quite exceeded) that range. More improvements will happen too. But a > 1000 km range isn't what is holding electric cars back. I actually think, few electric cars will ever reach that range, unless there is some crazy breakthrough with batteries, as it makes more sense to have smaller and cheaper batteries than optimizing for an use case which doesn't matter much.
Most people live in buildings, not houses. Same applies for work. You don't get to charge there. A dedicated charging station that replaces gas stations is needed.
> A lot of these places could offer low-power outlets for slow charging.
I have no experience with US, but in many major cities in Europe, it's hard to find any parking space, let alone the one with a charging outlet. It's a problem that would require a lot of infrastructure.
Anyway, those are all valid discussion points. No reason to downvote. People on HN want electric to succeed and that's fine. But downvoting anyone who points at problems... are we on Reddit now?
Like with the majority of parking in Sweden you pay with an app or sms, and the hourly rate is higher if you charge.
The top Model S can charge at 250 kW, or 15.4 miles or range per minute. Theoretically the fastest gas pumps in the US (10 gal/min) do 250 miles per minute (fleet average for new cars), but in practice you really mean a 5 minute fill-up, so ~75 miles per minute. Not that it's any faster to plug in a charger than insert a pump, but <5 minutes is basically irrelevant. So currently the best commercial electric cars are losing by ~5x.
A 5 minute fill up means charging at ~12-13 C. Hybrid cells regularly do 10+ C[1]. The batteries in F1 cars charge or discharge 3 times per minute[2], on average. It will not be long until full size BEVs can do 5 minute charges. The much bigger problem is actually getting the power to charge them; big charger-side batteries are expensive.
[1]: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2014/09/20140915-s500phev.h...
[2]: https://www.mercedes-amg-hpp.com/formula-1-engine-facts/