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Comment by arduinomancer | Hacker News Reader

I'm really curious what the future will look like for charging infrastructure if majority of people switch to electric.

Is the ideal long term goal to have a charger in basically every parking spot?

For example an apartment building where every single spot in the parkade has a charger.

I think the ideal end-game is that we have chargers in most residential parking spaces and plenty at workplaces and commercial property, plus we've either electrified sections of the interstate highway system (or the equivalent in non-US countries) so that cars can recharge without stopping or batteries are big enough and can charge fast enough that charge times on long trips don't matter.

The electrification of highways is something I'd love to see happen, but so far I don't think there's much interest or even consideration of that as a possibility. (There are a couple pilot projects in Sweden, one using overhead lines and another that uses slots cut into the road surface with high voltage rails underneath.) The payoff would be huge though in terms of reducing the cost and carbon emissions from long-haul trucking.

Chargers in parking spaces makes sense for urban areas. Dedicated charging locations make sense for highway driving.

A couple of examples of dedicated charging locations:

- Circle K in Norway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TVohXHjLro

- Gridserve in the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoN4WCpuxHY

With a battery swap out model, you could have spots where you pull in and swap a drained / semi-drained battery (or batteries) for a fully charged one. Maybe like the way it's done with propane tanks in some places, but more complicated.

Quality control, general standardization and ease of access would need to be solved, but if done right this could be automated by pulling up to a vending machine and maybe eventually (super futuristic) on the fly like the way they can do in-flight fueling for aircraft.

The initial overhead could be worth it to not sit around charging, but I could also see other interests winning out here (bored people spend money, standardization isn't necessarily win-win, enabling third party service is less profitable for the car makers, &c).

> With a battery swap out model

No consumer is ever going to agree to this psychologically, so I wish people would stop pushing it.

No one is going to agree to swap the pristine battery in their new car with a reconditioned battery (at best) at a charging stop.

Eh, I think it depends on how the technology advances and if the battery remains a primary feature going forwards. We already have lots of battery powered devices and device consumption of battery energy could just as easily become the place to optimize. It's the primary hurdle now for EVs, but when people swap the AAs in their devices, I hardly can imagine anyone feeling as if they're degrading the product. I imagine in this scenario, quality control and branding would still play a pretty big part of the process as well.

> No consumer is ever going to agree to this psychologically

Nio has done over two million battery swaps:

https://www.nio.com/blog/nio-completes-2000000-battery-swaps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTsrDpsYHrw

Ample wants to do the same but with fleet cars at first:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl5UJQzP7NE

I was just going to say this. It’s a model that’s already working and expanding. It makes so much sense esp. for smaller commuter cars.

> No one is going to agree to swap the pristine battery in their new car with a reconditioned battery (at best) at a charging stop.

They might if they never owned a battery in the first place.

I certainly am not particularly interested in owning a massive expensive wear item of almost certainly soon to be obsolete technology.

In a world with standardized batteries that are easily swappable at a dedicated facility like an EV jiffy lube, it doesn't take much imagination to see your EV delivered with one of EV jiffy lube's swaps preinstalled and all priced accordingly.

I could see both swap/charge existing at the same time.

As in ideally you use swap but you can also charge if you're in a pinch.

But not for a long time, the swapping infrastructure would likely be really expensive to build, so you'd need a lot of users to make it worth it.

The power requirements to run, say, 100 chargers, potentially all at once, are potentially bananas. If there's going to be large-scale charging, there's also going to have to be some kind of load-orchestration system involved, too.

There already is, companies like EverCharge (https://evercharge.net/) deal with load orchestration. However even if every parking spot has a car that’s plugged in, most of them probably won’t be charging at any given time.

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