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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

My opinion is that the industry has gone in the wrong direction with batteries. Cars should use swappable rechargeable batteries swapped by robots at the charging station. Faster pit stops and simpler batteries (no need for water-cooled, etc) and cheaper cars. And elimination of concern of battery warranty.

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Guessing you're a non-EV owner.

I've owned a Tesla for the last 6 months. Here's my experience:

* It charges at home, begining the charge at 12:30AM just after the rates drop. It charges to ~240 miles of range.

* For the 4 days I've wanted to go futher, charged upto 100% and that solved my problem 2 of the 4.

* Other 2 days, I stopped at a charger along my way on a road trip. there was a place to grab food and take a walk. 25 minutes later on was back on the road. No biggie. -- I don't need or want a swapable battery. Rather have a better engineered car that doesn't have this engineering requirement.

I'd assume 99% of Tesla owners would agree.

Tesla Model 3 LR owner. Completely agree. There's no need for all the extra baggage for rapid battery swap. Road trips are easy already without swapping the battery. And the battery is swappable... just not rapidly. I've done many long distance road trips, and some regular road trips where I actually choose a slower (V1) supercharger because it's close to a friend's house and we can meet up for lunch or dinner while I'm passing through their city. The notification on my phone that the charge session has ended always interrupts our meal a bit earlier than we would naturally end it, but that just means no awkward goodbye. It's great.

Also, I couldn't imagine driving an EV now without liquid cooled batteries. How would you preheat the battery when you want it to be nice and warm in preparation for a rapid charge, or to gain performance on cold mornings?

And the new Teslas have a heat pump to recycle battery heat into the cabin. There have been some notable failure reports with this, but so far so good on our Model Y.

Model Y here. Completely agree.

Guessing your not an owner of a vehicle that has a swappable battery ;) And I'm assuming that 100% of non-Tesla owners would agree.

The problem is Gresham's Law as applied to battery packs.

A new EV owner decides to go on a trip and make use of the new swap stations. Their battery pack is brand new and charges to 100%. When they swap it, they're likely to get a 2 or 3 year old pack that only charges to 70%. It was intentionally exchanged at the swap station by an owner who was willing to roll the dice to try and get a newer pack from someone like our new EV owner.

They don't degrade that fast.

Your missing the point and proposal. I'm personally not purchasing a car whose batter costs more than any card I've ever purchased. And I am not alone. If I don't own the battery, I didn't pay fore it either. I've just shaved $16K off the car cost. At that lower price, myself and many other would consider it.

Many companies have tried this; all have failed. The latest to try is Ample [0], and we'll see how far they get. As a peer poster here observed, this idea seems correlated with people who don't have actual experience with EV ownership. It's a solution to a non-problem for the average driver [1].

Besides, Tesla now spends about $250K to build a supercharger. A robotically-operated battery-swapping station would probably cost 10x as much both in initial capital and in maintenance costs.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/ample-ev-startup-swappabl...

[1] Although it might be the perfect solution for some drivers. Uber drivers maybe, who Tesla doesn't allow to use superchargers and who need to recharge as quickly as possible.

Most EV initiaties have failed, so those failures don't say a whole lot.

> this idea seems correlated with people who don't have actual experience with EV ownership. It's a solution to a non-problem for the average driver

Or there are lots of people it would be a problem for, and so they don't buy EVs. Unless you start handing out EVs at random it's hard to see how much the causality flows in each direction.

NIO succeeded: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2021/03/20210327-nio.html

I am aware that some companies have tried (I wouldn't say "many"). And I know that Apple tried with the Newton and failed - and didn't give up.

I don't think that a battery swapper would be any more complicated than an automatic car wash.

Tesla attempted it and gave up. Given how much Musk loves ambition, there's probably a decent reason for it.

Part of the problem is accounting. Since the value of a battery pack is highly variable depending on its remaining life, the only way it would work is if you subscribed/leased the battery so it didn't matter what the delta in value of the packs are.

Without that, you have to return to the exact same swapping station and pickup your original battery.

You missed the key point of swapping batteries. You don't own the battery nor did you pay ($16K) for the battery. So there is no "original battery". I assume that in ten years we will have "standard units of power" - the equivalent of a large "D" cell battery.

That is an option I kind of outlined as leasing/subscribing to the battery back are the easiest mechanisms to do this.

If the car owner only charged via swapping you could do a system where the cost of the pack was part of the electricity cost (eg: like a propane/co2 tank swap). The downside to this specific one is that you would have to either prevent charging or charge a fee if they did not swap in a specific time period as the battery is a significant capital expense.

Swapping is getting more unlikely as car makers are switching over to structural battery packs which makes swapping the pack non-trivial.

The car equivalent of unrepairable smartphones, and unservicable tractors. That would be terrible.

That would massively increase the complexity and cost of batteries because suddenly they need to withstand being installed and removed thousands of times.

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