Two-minute battery changes push India’s delivery riders to switch to e-scooters | Hacker News Reader

Two-minute battery changes push India’s delivery riders to switch to e-scooters

theprint.in

489 pointsrustoo360 comments

When I was in Taiwan we saw Gogoro scooters in the wild. The battery is swapped at a kiosk in a couple of minutes. Riders pay a subscription for the scooter and access to the battery kiosk.

Seems like a really great option. I would love to have that in my city. We have dockless bicycles and scooters but a more capable and personal option would be awesome. I'd sign up in a heartbeat.

Sadly my city planners do not seem aware of motorcycles as a transportation option. We have no laws or infrastructure to encourage them or take advantage of the benefits. At a state level we at least get to cut ferry lines, but that seems to be the only perk.

We have subscription escooters which seem tempting to me, but the costs never pencil out. They end up being as much as the scooter within a years time or so, plus you are on the hook if some major damage or theft happens. Whats the point of that then? Might as well look for someone who will let you finance an ebike and put it on your renters or homeowners insurance for protection at that rate.

Access to credit is not as easy in India. This is just a straightforward capex to opex transformation that people can intuitively grasp. Combine that with no minimum commitment and it's transparent to them what expenses are, what income is, and what net income is.

Indian users are very price-sensitive and there are extensive discussion networks running the numbers on these. They won't use these services unless it makes financial sense.

- Quick battery swapping

- No maintenance or upgrade cost

- Low upfront cost

- Low commitment

Still cheaper to own. Maintenance with ebikes is not going to be very much. Throw lube on the chain every once in a while and have the bike shop do tires and brakes once every two years. Honestly you could buy a brand new $1200 ebike a year for the prices the services around me ask for their most basic plans which have mileage limits, and require a deposit anyhow. You can also turn around and sell your new ebike anytime, not much lock in or commitment there whereas I'm putting my blind faith in the fact that this particular subscription service will be easy to cancel (history says otherwise).

Where is "around you"? The economics in India might be a lot different (ie relatively more expensive scooters, cheaper labor)

You can buy an ebike for 1,000 or less. You can pay 99/month for typical ebike monthly rental.

Socal, we have zoomo which is $20/wk.

You're not getting a high quality ebike for $1200. I had a $600 e-scooter (Segway ES4) and by the time I hit 500+ miles on it the screws were falling off, the external battery connection was corroding, and the bottom floorboard light connection had broken.

I just checked and the Ninebot Max is $949 on Segway's website and that's got a smaller battery than most ebikes. And I'd be willing to be that that scooter would also break down just like mine.

>Still cheaper to own.

Bay Wheels is $159/year and about $2.00 a ride, meaning you would need to ride 520 times that year before it became cheaper to own. Also for regular bikes it's free each ride.

That's ignoring that decent e-bikes are more expensive than $1200, the stress of having to lug around and securely park your property, the depreciation of the batteries, as well as any insurance & deductible costs you'll encounter for when (not if) it gets stolen.

It's hands down better to be able to hop-on and -off wherever you want with an ebike than to deal with owning one in SF.

That sounds like a better model than zoomo around me honestly.

I think Bay Wheels is quite a bit more than that if you want e-bikes. [1]

Looks like its $159 per year, so $13.25 per month. Then, your rides are $0.20 per minute for the first 45 minutes, $0.40 per minute thereafter, and an additional $2.00 fee for not parking at a station - stations which aren't always conveniently located.

I own an e-bike now that I ride longer distances - that a Bay Wheels bike won't make anyways but I don't consider that a fair comparison. Based on my old commute from the Mission to downtown 5x weekly:

- 1.5mi/12 minutes each way. $0 base + $2.40 assuming optimality.

- Hub on one side, no hub on the other, average $2.00 extra there, $0 extra back.

- Monthly fee assuming 40 rides per month is $0.33.

So for this commute alone we're talking $7.46 per day, $149 per month or $1788 per year. Add on a few grocery runs, grabbing drinks with friends, lunch runs, not wanting to park at a hub when you're in a rush, and we're probably in the low-to-mid $2000 per year price range if you really buy into it.

A VanMoof X3 is $2448 (or $88 per month) [2] It would pay itself off in like 14 months, or you can save 37% on the monthly payment vs Bay Wheels. Now you have something with almost a 100 mile range, a much better ride, that you can park anywhere. If it gets stolen, they'll also send out a team to pick it up via its onboard GPS, and fix it up for you.

My point isn't that you should or shouldn't get a VanMoof X3, it's just that the pricing isn't exactly a slam dunk in favor of Bay Wheels.

[1] https://www.lyft.com/bikes/bay-wheels/pricing

[2] https://www.vanmoof.com/en-US/x3?color=dark

You're just redoing the same math I did.

>Hub on one side, no hub on the other, average $2.00 extra there, $0 extra back.

This is difficult to believe that it isn't a bad faith argument to pad a comparison, because hubs are littered across downtown and the mission. [1] It's highly improbable that there aren't any hubs near either.

>- Monthly fee assuming 40 rides per month is $0.33.

Which is bad math. Riders use bay wheels more, because you can take a bike to a concert or restaurant or park and not worry about parking it and/or bringing it home later. See the part above about not having to worry about parking an expensive asset. You compare the variable costs of breaking even when determining which of two methods is cheaper, not try to pad it by dividing up fixed costs.

>I own an e-bike now that I ride longer distances - that a Bay Wheels bike won't make anyways but I don't consider that a fair comparison

Then you shouldn't be making declarative statements about a $1200 always being cheaper than something like Bay Wheels, because it is cheaper for the vast majority of people living downtown SF.

[1] https://account.baywheels.com/map

> This is difficult to believe that it isn't a bad faith argument to pad a comparison.

Ok but, I used my actual commute when figuring this in. It was 3 blocks away from my office and a block from my house. I wasn't really looking to walk 4 blocks each way out of a 12 block commute - at that point I could just walk, no?

There's also no hubs in Potrero, Russian Hill, Nob Hill, Telegraph Hill, Chinatown, Japan Town, Polk Gulch (all places I'd call 'downtown') and none west of the mission. Coverage is good, don't get me wrong but it's not perfect for everyone.

> Which is bad math. Riders use bay wheels more, because you can take a bike to a concert or restaurant or park and not worry about parking it and/or bringing it home later.

Ok, but we're talking $0.33 down to what $0.16 per ride? Doesn't really matter because that's covered by the first minute of any additional ride. That'll increase your daily costs a lot - and make it much easier to justify owning your own.

Re: fixed costs, at $2000 per year for Bay Wheels, you can actually afford to get your $1000 e-bike stolen twice per year and still break even - and have your VanMoof with built-in theft protect, GPS and recovery team stolen every year and still break even.

> Then you shouldn't be making declarative statements about a $1200 always being cheaper than something like Bay Wheels, because it is cheaper for the vast majority of people living downtown SF.

Except I didn't say that. It's definitely not always better. I'm a big advocate of bike share services, and I've used them for years. Sometimes it is cheaper, some times it isn't. I'm not the gp.

Wait, you are on the hook for theft?? Just while you are logged in, or for what period of time?

You get billed a fee apparently:

https://old.reddit.com/r/cycling/comments/kon8hr/i_just_had_...

My wife and I just rode Lime scooters in San Francisco and I was shocked by the cost. We rode about 4 miles in 45 minutes. When we got off, we were charged $60 (about $30 each). We could have taken Uber or Lyft for less.

They have 1-hour and 1-day options, but I was told by CS (after) that the 1-hour pass only includes 30-minutes of actual riding. Uhg.

I might buy one, because they are so fun, but I probably won’t rent one again.

I’m talking stand on scooters vs the sit on motorcycle type ones.

I think the point of those things, at least for the ebikes, is to rip off the tourists to compensate for the locals who have a subscription?

Bright side for tourists: No windows to break in the rental.

I think these are intended more for transportation than riding around (unlike the BayWheels type stuff). I used to commute to work on my own scooter and it only takes 15 minutes or less to ride 4 miles on the road. My commute in the morning was just under 3 miles and downhill so I usually managed in 8 minutes.

Lime and other scooters in SF used to have much less expensive subscription options, but they've all recently dropped them for much more expensive ones.

Bay Wheels bike annual subscription is worth it but only if you use them regularly (like commuting/weekends).

Unfortunately, the SF municipal government in all its wisdom has granted monopolies to certain e-scooter companies and capped the allowed number of scooters (the scooters were traumatizing rich aging hippies with their techie-ness). Prices are way higher here than most cities.

If people would stop leaving discharged scooters in the sidewalk, I might care less. As is, they're a nuisance building a business off of overusing a communal resource (sidewalks)

Cities can solve this by enforcing geofencing to only allow locking the scooter in designated areas. Santa Monica for example paints scooter parking spots on a lot of street corners that would otherwise be pretty littered.

Southampton (UK) had a pilot scheme for Voi scooters and had geo-fencing in the app, for parking zones, speed restriction zones and no-go zones.

Theoretically a great thing, but at least one of the parking zones was slightly off, and the scooter would only lock in the middle of the road!

The worst offender for geofencing is honestly the city of beverly hills. Bird scooters don't work in their borders at all, but their borders aren't so clear when you are just riding the bird. Imagine going down a busy 6 lane road full of angry west LA drivers and your scooter just runs out of steam leaving you stranded in 50mph traffic that would rather see you laid out than make way for you. When I told the bird tech support I wanted my money back for them risking my life in this way, they informed me this was expected behavior.

Same issue in some other parts of town to a lesser extent, like on some parts of hollywood blvd. Gee, why is my scooter coming to a stop in the middle of a busy intersection? Oh, some local assholes must have complained to the city councilman and had this virtual bear trap installed in the middle of a busy road, lets hope I don't die trying to wheel this thing off.

Yeah that sounds downright dangerous.

In Southampton it was more like "you can only park here" or "you can't scoot in the public parks" or "this is a hospital zone so you're limited to half speed". That said, it was only a pilot, and I can see the exact same thing happening down the line.

Reserving one parking space per block for scooters, bikes, and other small vehicles would benefit everyone and have little downside.

Other than people with cars complaining that there now isn't room for their one giant single-occupant vehicle compared to parking for 5-10 bikes and scooters.

That's just san fransisco effect. Everything is pricey there because it can be. For point of reference elsewhere in CA, I just rode a bird in LA. 5.2 miles, 23 minutes, it was $14.10 after tax. Rideshare would have been higher in my case and I would have had to wait around for who knows how long for a ride to happen, meanwhile the scooter was there already with a half dozen backups nearby.

But you had almost exactly the same cost as they did? As a quick bit of maths you'd have paid about $28 for 46 minutes (given $14 for 23 minutes) compared to their $30.

The value subscriptions (bikes/ebikes for me in SF) is in not having to worry about it. I can bike to anywhere in the city and generally leave the bike there and walk or bus. Or I can do the reverse. I'm also not on the hook for maintenance.

It's a very different thing than owning.

Edit: I want to be clear that this is about the economics and ease of owning vs renting, not the particular prices. Lyft bikes have memberships+rental fees or just rental fees, and they can be pretty expensive, but so can buying an ebike.

You can take it anywhere and just leave it? Middle of the road? Under a bridge? Random backyard? That sounds useful but how often do you not need transportation back from where you came? If you leave the bike how easy is it to run into another bike someone randonly left?

I can leave an ebike on a random sidewalk, as long as it is not blocking the way, for a $2 fee, or at a dock, of which there are many, for free.

How often do I do this? Probably once a week. Bike out to the beach, walk or bus back. Bike to the grocery store, lyft back. Go on a walk after work, not have to worry about getting home.

How easy is it too find one? Pretty easy. There are docks everywhere, and an app that shows me where bikes are left.

Wouldn't that make it super easy to steal an ebike? No your problem but I wonder if putting these in a truck would be an effective business model

They actually do this to rebalance them, so they probably pick up random bikes too.

It's not really up to discussion, that it works it's proven, it's a system in use in many cities. If you have enough bikes/cars, you will tend to have one available in an acceptable range of time and space. If you go to the outskirts of the city, you don't "release" the bike/car and pay more to have the guarantee to be able to go back.

If people see random bikes wouldn't they do fun kid stuff like throw them off of bridges or knock them over?

For a while the scooter companies removed them from South Bend, Indiana for this exact reason.

Can't find that link, but here's some similar cases: https://www.kcrg.com/2021/06/03/teen-arrested-for-throwing-e... https://slate.com/technology/2018/12/electric-scooter-bird-l...

The biggest benefit of using the Bay Wheels subscription over owning is not having to worry about your e-bike being stolen. It's definitely worth it at the price point it's currently at.

The only downside is that as people return to the bay, the e-bikes (and bikes) are going to become more and more scarce at docks.

You can also insure your ebike

You still have to worry about it, take it with you from A -> B -> A, carry your helmet, ensure it is always charged, reserve space to store it at home, and spend who knows how long dealing with insurance if it is stolen, as well as now being without your bike.

I do a lot of commuting on my ebike, but their are clear situational benefits for the alternative.

The point of that is that renting confers specific benefits that make it worthwhile despite the downsides. First off, no need to charge. Not the worst thing but there's nothing worse than running out of battery because you forgot to charge it. Additionally, no maintenance - the company employs mechanics that are better positioned to fix the scooters. Finally, no need to have the scooter with you - just use it whenever you want, in one direction, and then not have to lug a scooter with you for the rest of the day. Or, if you didn't ride it in, you can't use it for the rest of the day. If it's raining in the morning but clear in the evening, you don't have the scooter to ride home unless you rode it in for your morning commute.

Now, you may not find that list enough to offset the downsides compared to buying your own, but judging from their seeming success, I'm not the only person that's done the math and intentionally chooses renting a scooter as-needed.

Gogoro is a completely different model than Lime/Bird/Spin/etc. With Gogoro you subscribe to the battery swap service and own the scooter. Also, it's a sit-down scooter (more akin to a motorcycle) that can go 90 km/h, not a stand-up kick scooter.

You almost need a scooter in these large third world mega cities. The streets are narrow as hell, they can’t really handle cars. On the flip side. Cars are stuck in traffic all day and rarely get to cruising speeds without making a left turn into another traffic jam. Scooters let you move around in that clusterfuck and no car is moving fast enough to kill you. Good luck staying safe in scooter in America though.

> large third world mega cities.

But enough about Los Angeles

In that case, it would be awesome to have some sort of standard battery for e-bikes, scooters, etc. Then you can just stop by some battery switching place swap one out on demand.

The other amazing benefit for this plan is that batteries are expected to fail and loose capacity after a few years. So being able to easily swap the most vulnerable component is awesome for long-term repairability!

Gogoro has become the standard. Yamaha, Aeon, PGO, and likely others are already using their swap stations.

Kymco has their own design and partnerships, but are way behind now on reach and marketshare.

We have several escooter services in The Netherlands (GO Sharing, Check, felyx, etc.) which are operating in the larger city's. It’s all subscription based and not that expensive comparing to owning a scooter with these current gas prices.

The batteries are swapped at location and transported to and from the nearest chargestation. You have to take a photo when entering and leaving the scooter through the app. An investigation will be started by the issuer when a scooter got damaged. The last driver will not be responsible if it can’t be proved that the driver did the damage.

The engineering company I work briefly passed over few proposals from South Asian companies deploying them. We worked on electric bikes, but decided to pass on a real road going scooter as we have near no vehicle experience besides individual electronic components.

Both leading battery swap standards in India are from Taiwan. One is GoGoRo as you said, and another is Ionex.

Ionex based scooters usually have more in the roadgoing department, and GoGoRo more in internet/app features.

GoGoRo is founded by a Taiwanese guy who worked for a famous company in America, thus he is using his fame to get big money from financial funds. Manufacturing is mostly OEM.

Ionex is made by an established player — Kymco (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDNKQ18-QYY,) and has more firm standing in the industry. They have their own parts, and share service centres with their petrol scooters. The later is a very big thing in India, and South Asia in general.

The biggest impediment for both turned out to be India road. Taiwanese scooters with tiny wheels don't fare well anywhere outside of big cities.

Rural Indians really prefer classic motorcycles — cheap, repairable, no exotic parts. The "app" things doesn't sell at all either. The only useful function for many on smart scooters is a theft alarm + GPS.

In this 2 minute video demonstrating a Gogoro swap the rider goes from opening their seat to having a fresh battery and ready to ride in about 50 seconds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W34k0nrrDQA

I wonder how long before someone comes up with a fake battery pack that looks identical and registers as having a higher battery power then it actually does and has fewer cells internally so they can take the real higher power more cells genuine battery and leave behind a fake on that barely works. Like fake memory cards you can get from wish.com that state they have much higher memory then what they actually have.

You're not going to get much repeat business if you hand out crappy batteries. It seems like incentives are decently well-aligned here.

I guess you might be able to scam the rechargers themselves if you want to "return" a knock off. But if I were them I would put tamper resistant asset tags on my batteries and ensure that whatever battery im taking back is the same as the one I handed out.

It’s the same as any kind of theft really. You probably get away with it to start but eventually the loss becomes great enough that the company pays attention and starts tracking it down. And if you have been doing this on a large scale you could be looking at serious criminal theft.

About as long as it would take for Gogoro to put a camera on their battery kiosks.

This is relatively straight forward to prevent with signed certificates stored on a secure coprocessor.

Each battery can have a serial number and an embedded ARM chip and the charger be connected to the internet.

So the central server will reject the battery if it can't authenticate with the proper RSA private key, or that key is already online somewhere else.

Just like creditcards with chips are validated each time.

You don't even need to go that far with the on-board hardware. Just track battery exchange history with charging pattern data, and identify offenders.

Bad actors can spoof the battery charge reader, but it's much harder to spoof the juice out of the charger.

Battery tracking leads to ads. Ads lead to the dark patterns of the force.

I uh, don't see the point?

You have the charging electronics which will tell you very quickly when a battery is dead, and you know which subscriber gave you the faulty battery. Sure faulty batteries can happen naturally (and accidentally), two faulty batteries though should be statistically enough to trigger an investigation from the company.

I think the idea is that the battery reports voltage like a mostly charged normal battery for just long enough for you to leave the scene with a good battery.

Ideally this would be coupled with lax device receipt keeping so while the company could tell that one of these thousand customers that used the kiosk that day returned the faulty battery it'd be hard to pinpoint a specific wrong doer.

That said, it feels like the margins on this would be low enough to make it not worth the effort.

You could take a legitimate battery and swap good cells for cheaper or old cells. The actual cells usually don't have any smarts to them and would still show as having a full charge but the range would be limited. It could take at least one depletion cycle for the processor inside to realize the cells are of poor health and may just look normal to untrained eyes. Proper security would include soldering batteries in, welding the plastic seams shut, or adding tamper indicators in the battery like a switch on the lid. The system could just refuse to charge any tampered batteries or the attendant could refuse to swap any batteries that have obvious damage.

A lot of battery controllers are intentionally designed to make the batteries unusable if the cells are removed for even a moment. Sometimes the controller uses a volatile ROM that wipes itself when it loses voltage, other times there's software actively looking for it and stopping the controller from working when detected. It's very consumer unfriendly in general for batteries that the consumer supposedly owns, but for batteries that are more loaned property like this it's a reasonable anti-tamper system.

Thankfully someone with such skill will be very unlikely to commit petty theft like this when there are more profitable endeavors to pursue with their skill.

No way! Just because you're skillful doesn't mean you're property utilized, or even (easily) utilizable, due to other issues. I met plenty handy unemployed without steady housing.

And get life ban for the subscription. I think these batteries are properly sealed and their ROI is pretty quick. Much more benefit is from that rapid electricity transfer/exchange.

Do you know what causes the slight wait before getting fresh batteries ? some checks ?

Probably some sort of authentication and status checks of the inserted batteries.

Waiting for the animation to finish.

From the comments it seems like there are no fully charged batteries ready to go, and you will be taking some other mostly-charged ones.

It should be able to correctly time most charges, so that you are always getting the highest battery charge state available at that stop.

Most kiosks have 30+ batteries, so each has a while to recharge before being 'summoned' again.

I can imagine it takes a few hours to fully charge these batteries (and to keep them cool), so if it's frequently used there wouldn't be any full batteries and swapping them would be a waste.

I mean it can be scaled up so that one of these stations has hundreds of batteries, an active cooling system etc etc, so it's a fixable problem.

If swapping the battery takes about as long as sitting at a red light, that doesn't seem like a major problem.

Sure, but making you wait 20 seconds isn't going to make a noticeable difference there.

My guess would be getting the phone out and logging in to some app to order the next two batteries. With a bunch of animations and key presses. And ofcourse some "I agree" buttons.

sleep(randint(30, 100))

The batteries don't look all that big. Do you know what the range is on a fresh pair?

I would typically plan for 60 km between swaps, which includes a healthy error margin (I owned a Gogoro 2+ when I lived in Taiwan a year ago). Gogoro advertises 110 km but that is at 25 kph which is unrealistically slow.

60 km actually goes quite far in Taiwan, which isn’t a very big place compared to eg the United States. Gogoro has an extensive network and you only range limited in rural areas like the east coast or the central mountains.

Can you plug in a gogoro to a regular wall socket? Better a slow charge than to be stuck.

You can always just push it down the road, load the whole thing on a truck, or carry new batteries to where it's parked if it comes to that.

Battery change is great, but wow the ride sounds noisy! I was under the impression that we could expect electric vehicles to be fairly quiet.

Electric motorcycles have this problem, too. Last year a popular German motorcycle magazine ("Motorrad") tested electric motorcycles in their big mountain test where they bring almost all available motorcycle models from that year to the alps.

The loudest motorcycle driven at normal speeds was an electric one.

I really hope they can bring that noise down further.

Was it loud because of EV drive or just the lack of ICE attenuated chain and sprocket noise further?

Looking at the powertrain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD4s92gwlMY

It has to be either the planetary gear set or the chain - none of the gears are helical, so they're bound to be noisy. According to the specs the motor is a permanent magnet synchronous motor, which is normally mostly silent.

The good news is this is India so you won't hear it over the constant honking

Electric cars are whisper quiet at low speeds; at higher speeds tire noise becomes prominent. I wouldn't be surprised if they intentionally add noise for safety reasons.

That looks like such a finished user experience.

Just noticed the Gogoro swap logo in the video. Looks very similar to the Arduino logo. Only difference being the +/- positions are swapped.

Exactly. I expected people fumbling around with smartphone apps, instead the process is extraordinarily easy and simple with no extraneous steps.

I mean it's exactly what I would expect from something with minimal friction. The only improvements I can think of is to make the wait time slower; plugging one battery in should immediately unlock another.

The other improvement depends on battery technology though.

i bet it needs to do some checks to verify someone didn’t plug in a fake battery, the user has a valid subscription etc

The biggest point of friction is finding the swap station. Some swap stations are at ground level and easily visible from the street (e.g. at gas stations or convenience stores). But many are in parking garages and it's never clear what level the swap station is on or where in the facility it's located.

I think the parking garage management gets to choose where to locate these stations, and typically they make it maximally convenient for people who are parking their scooters in the garage, without any consideration for people who are just stopping by.

The app does give you a marker on a map and a photo of the the station, but it's often not enough.

I love the fact there's 2 smaller batteries instead of 1 big one. There's a lot of people with back problems (for example my wife) and this kind of design helps them a lot. Can't wait for this to come to Poland.

Poland has a number of e-scooter companies where you can rent them. They are littered all over Tricity, baby blue ones, but they don't seem to be that popular, especially during the winter months.

Yes I know, we have them in Lublin, but they are priced for occasional short trips not for using them every day. I'd prefer to own the scooter and pay for battery swaps.

Interesting. What about during the winter months?

Have a look at the Silence S01 too, they have a quite different and interesting system that solves for more energy: The battery converts itself into a heavy trolley that you can just pull out, roll to any plug, charge it and put back again.

I seriously ponder getting one as it‘s a nice match for a city apartment with no charging ports.

Motorcycles have about 29 times the deaths per mile compared to cars. If all you're worried about is saving space and gas they're a great option - my Honda cruiser gets about 80mpg. But it's incredibly dangerous. I think it's plausible that safety could improve with infrastructure changes and driver education, but I don't think it could ever compare to being strapped into a metal cage with airbags and crumple zones

Not to mention that in a substantial portion of the world, motorcycles aren't practical for most of the year. Snow, ice and cold aren't great for two-wheeled vehicles.

You should check out the Not Just Bikes Youtube channel.

The channel is mostly on city planning that supports walking and biking (rather than motorcycles) but the Dutch bicycle in the snow because they have an infrastructure that supports it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU&list=RDCMUC0intL...

Of course they don't have mountains which is the issue where I live.

But we ARE talking about motorcycles here. And sliding out on ice on a bicycle is wayyyy different than a motorcycle. Most people can muscle a bicycle into submission but a light motorcycle starts at 300lbs/130kg. Good luck holding that upright if you and the bike disagree on where the tires should be going.

Australia here. When we're not on fire or under water (which is also where scooters perform rather badly), it often seems to be too hot to wear safety gear.

Add the sense of entitlement of large 4WDs to complete non-enforcement of road rules protecting riders of both motor- and acoustic bikes by the Police, and you've got a deadly mix going.

Yeah, I think the Giant Car problem is what will doom this system in the US. True scooters like these can use the bike lanes in most cities (ymmv) so they might have a chance but they'll be stuck behind regular bikes and e-bikes and so limited to those speeds.

> too hot to wear safety gear

There is mesh synthetic safety gear that's quite good these days (I'd imagine it'll eventually disintegrate on a long slide, but will at least help with impact. Also road rash typically isn't what will actually kill you). It also comes in colors that will reflect the sun a little more than black, which is still the most popular motorcycle clothing color by sales.

I used to ride a lot in Ocotillo Wells where it would hit 110F in full safety gear, so it is possible. Helps when you're going fast enough to get wind chill.

I saw many comments above included stories from Taiwan. If you are not aware, Taiwan has an incredible amount of rain, yet there are scooters everywhere. I never understand how scooters remain so popular!

People wear rain clothes on scooters. This is very dangerous. Your vision is very bad in the rain and your control of the scooter is also bad. I did this when I got no other choices.

Yeah and if you need to tow a trailer they don't work either, but those are not very good arguments why we don't try to accommodate them in the situations where they do work very well, i.e. city driving in regions where it doesn't snow very much. The same applies to bicycles and ebikes.

Bikes tow trailers all the time. Just not as big as the ones trucks tow.

Motorcycles can tow trailers. Sidecars are also a thing. In the 1950s there was a motorcycle dealership in Portland that had a motorcycle carrier sidecar. If your bike broke down they would ride out on their bike, roll yours onto the side car and give you both a lift back to the shop. No trucks needed.

There's even 3rd wheel trailers (I personally only discovered this very recently)

https://thirdwheeltrailers.com/

Yes, motocycle is evidently more dangerous than car. But, some people don't have a choice. In some country, car is still a luxury. For example, in my country, a used car can cost at least 3 times a brand new motocycle.

Import duty + Excise + VAT with some ridiculous calculation, 3,000 cc import to Thailand is about 328% (data from 2019, i think the formula is still the same today). It really feels stupid (despite of no choices) to buy 300% price of original price.

they sound like a great option for major cities where there are already tons of speed limiting because of the population density.

I think it's safe to use insurance rates as a proxy for the likelihood you'll get into a crash. Rates are almost invariably higher for every type of coverage if you live in a more densely populated area.

Is that for third party only though? Perhaps also confounded by higher-prices of cars in cities vs rural areas when you do crash into something = higher costs.

From what I've seen, collision coverage tends to be used for cases where you made a mistake and need to get your own vehicle fixed. Generally all the coverage sections will get more expensive when you move to a more densely-populated area but the from the cases I've seen, collision coverage will tend to be significantly more expensive in Chicago than southern Illinois.

You're talking about fatalities though. There are 1000x more rear ends in the city but I have yet to see a car flipped over in the city like on the highway

Motorcycles and bicycles are indeed more dangerous, but exactly because of cars.

If more car owners would at least sometimes switch to the smaller option, it would make life easier and safer for 2 wheel drivers.

This is not likely though, so I hope for ebikes and more cycle lanes and car free zones in cities, to make it more attractive.

I drove for 6 years with 3 different bikes (125cc scooter + 125cc small bike + 600cc bike)... and as much as I love it, I gave it up. I have to fight the urge to buy a new one every few months. I've fallen & had accidents 4 times and I'm lucky to be alive to be honest. It helps to know the stats around the death rates and to watch a few accident aftermath scenes to cure yourself.

I truly do want everyone to drive them for all the benefits they bring but I also truly don't want a single person to die like that, so I no longer recommend that other people buy them (not even a scooter for short distances).

[citation needed]. Not because I doubt the number (it seems plausible), but because I'd like to see the data.

IMO once You factor for speed and environment (how much time will any of those electric city scooters ever ride on highway and/or above maybe 50-60kph?), You'll be left with two causes of accidents - rider who loses control (exponentially less deadly with reduced speed) and scooter vs car crash on intersections / in lanes. In this case, much as those crumple zones work well for whoever is inside the metal box, they also add extra mass / energy to the body that's being deformed on the outside...

Highways are actually some of the safest roadways for motorcycle riders, with the vast majority of motorcycle accidents happening at intersections. Scooters are not immune to this, and would in fact spend more time in these danger zones than motorcycles. I do believe that area also plays a large role in fatality rate as well as culture. Eliminating any alcohol consumption goes a long way in avoiding motorcycle accidents, but there's a huge cruiser culture that involves going to the bar as a ride destination. And localized driving culture also plays a big role. In many developing countries where more people are on bikes, speed limits tend to be lower to match road quality. As such, most motorcycles and scooters will be functionally equivalent, with most bikes being sold being less than 250cc. But also, all the traffic, including car traffic might be slower. Additionally, the increased prevalence of stick shift means less texting and driving. Whereas in the US, especially in big driving cities, you may have very aggressive driving culture. Like Chicago, where I actually felt safer on a full motorcycle than a bicycle and most definitely safer than on a scooter. In those places, being slow puts you at the mercy of the aggressive drivers coming from behind you. Classes I took there actually encouraged you to be a more aggressive rider, to ride slightly faster than traffic to find bubbles in the traffic and be certain that you weren't going to be rear ended by someone doing something stupid. Sorry I don't have any data, just around 100k miles of seat time over the course of about 5 or 6 years, most of it urban riding. Motorcycle's are very dangerous, and there are steps you can take to mitigate the danger, like choosing when and where to ride, but at the end of the day, you are always at the mercy of cars on the road, and drivers seem to be getting progressively worse as more people are on their phones.

A major factor that I see surprisingly few people advocate for even in an educational setting is helmet color and high-visibility clothing. If I remember correctly just wearing a white helmet alone is associated with a 25% lower risk of being in a fatal accident. A white helmet + high vis gets you closer to 40% or 50% reduction.

There were rumblings in Australia about making high-viz clothing a requirement but I'm not sure if that actually got passed or not. From the data I've seen it makes nearly as much of a difference as wearing a helmet vs not.

It's surprising how much motorcycle armor is out there touting their super-advanced kevlar buffer pad race construction yet are colored darker than night.

> super-advanced kevlar buffer pad race construction

Why do you need that on your 25cc scooter? Caus it looks cool. What colour would you like that in? Light absorbing Batsuit black please.

I ride motorcycles. I am never more scared than when I am stopped at a traffic light, especially if there is a car in front of me. I have seen (and in my car been) rear ended. It's not fun. On a bike that is almost certain death. Even at 25-30mph. With the number of drivers on cell phones this is a real risk.

Personally I mitigate this by stopping at the edge of the lane and keeping an eye on my mirrors. If I am going to get hit I can at least escape between the lanes.

In civilized countries filtering between lanes of stopped cars is the norm. This gets the vulnerable two-wheeled vehicles out of the danger zone. In the US that is illegal almost everywhere. Even if it was legal drivers would have to be educated to not use their vehicles as weapons, something that is surprisingly common.

> In the US that is illegal almost everywhere

But, for anyone else reading, one of the few places filtering and lane splitting in general is legal (up to ~10mph speed difference) is in California.

There was extensive discussion on a recent episode of "Highside Lowside" (Revzilla's Podcast) about whether lane splitting at speed increases or decreases safety, complete with stats and personal experiences. (In their opinion it comes down to the skill of the rider.) Filtering when cars are fully stopped is likely safe and less contentious.

I'm mostly basing my comments off of info pulled from this site https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-motorcyc...

You are talking about the stats from an American perspective. Such a car-centric view. Not everyone lives in America.

Hundreds of cities and countries have infrastructure suitable for two wheelers. Especially when you are within the city limits. Cities in India it is extremely common to ride two-wheelers and it is generally safer to ride scooters. Most delivery drivers use motorcycles - millions of them in fact.

I hear a lot of how motorcycles are dangerous and they absolutely are. But 1/2 of wrecks are single vehicle wrecks and most of the other wrecks are cars turning in front of motorcycles or motorcycles getting rear-ended at lights.

American streets are designed poorly, see stroads and all that. If we want motorcycle fatalities to go down, we need to strive for all fatalities to go down.

Yes 5.5k riders died last year, but 42K car drivers died. Yet we're fine with that because "well per mile that isn't that bad" 42K isn't a good number and there needs to be greater discussion surrounding the poor driving conditions created by poor planning.

I rode on Gogoro scooters in Ishigaki, it was one of my most memorable trips! The island is a perfect environment for it: warm, nicely paved roads going through beautiful nature, can't get too far away from anything because it's an island, and battery swap stations placed strategically around so you don't feel uneasy about running out of charge.

Those things have some good acceleration and are a blast to drive.

Motorcycles are extremely dangerous. Research about accidents and (lack of) safety where they're popular: Índia, Brazil, etc. You don't wanna go to funerals after this comes to your city, trust me. One doctor working on organ transplant told me once that almost 90% of donors in one Brazilian big city were riders of urban motorcycles.

It also depends on what area they ride. It's pretty safe in my city, we ride under 50km/h in-city, and I never ride above 70km/h outside city. 20 years, zero crashes. However, some city is crazy, 70km/h is norm around city center. Not including driving fast sounds cool? (I think it's instead, lame, nothing else to show off)

Correlation isn't necessarily causation. The majority of organ donors in the US are probably car drivers, for example. They also breathe oxygen, which can be fatal in the long term.

You'd be surprised. Motorcyclists make up a substantial fraction of all organ donors in the USA. Fatal crashes for motorcyclists are usually the result of traumatic brain injury while leaving the rest of the body intact -- the ideal scenario for organ donation. Fatal crashes for car drivers and passengers usually invokes significant damage to the whole body.

See https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/661256

Sure, but motorcyclist injuries where the rider isn't wearing a helmet are like car injuries where the passengers aren't wearing seatbelts. That being said I was astounded when I was in the Southern US the number of people I saw riding their motorbikes without helmets. Must feel amazing but I would never ever risk that in a million years. You don't even need to fall far or fast for a head blow to scramble you.

It's not just direct impact, rapid deceleration can also be traumatic to the brain and other organs.

Cars have materials designed to deform in predictable ways to absorb shock and smooth the deceleration process in case of an impact.

Motorcycles have absolutely nothing of this sort. Body airbags can help a lot, but are still far from the safety that a car offers.

Personal opinion: motorcycles, as a means of urban transportation not sports or leisure, are for people who don't have an option and don't value their lives highly enough.

Strong "Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge" vibe

> "We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/

The stats can be a bit deceptive when it comes to motorbikes. Focusing on the first world (where I know the situation) the death rate for 16-24 year old males is massive relative to cars while 25+ is much closer to normal vehicle deaths.

In terms of organ donation, that is because an astonishing amount of people don't wear a helmet when on a motorcycle or wear one of those fashionable open-face helmets.

Many people are also unaware you can get airbags for motorcyclists (https://www.revzilla.com/motorcycle/alpinestars-tech-air-5-s...). This is obviously a thing more for first world riders and they are expensive but are very effective at preventing any injury you can't walk away from (assuming you also wear a proper helmet like I mentioned).

I wonder if the electric car market (i.e. Tesla) is ripe for disruption.

I read the article and thought back to the demo [1] Tesla did years ago of automated battery swap. Tesla did it as a stunt; they publicly stated that they didn't plan to market that.

As a Tesla owner, I don't want battery swap as long as I am paying for the battery as part of the price of the car. I'd be worried that my brand new max-range battery would be swapped with old worn-out batteries, and I would feel like I lost value.

However, on road trips, I would much prefer a 5-10 minute battery swap over supercharging (which they no longer give me for free). The electric car experience would essentially be the same as the IC experience.

If Tesla (or someone) sold me a car without a battery, and I had to buy a battery "subscription", I might go for that. I'd get a huge discount off the base price of the car, and now I wouldn't be concerned about swapping since it's not my battery. I'd do my normal day-to-day as usual, and on road trips or unexpected usage, I could swap out in minutes. I could get on board with that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY ed: added video link

The gas grill + propane tank model

This is happening at a pretty large scale in China with NIO brand vehicles.

For it to work, as you said it is a subscription model for the battery.

It requires a very large fleet of vehicles that all use a standardized battery size. That means not offering lower priced vehicles with smaller battery packs, since you're just able to swap it anyway. And it means not having higher-end larger vehicles with larger packs, since now they aren't standardized.

That also means you are using more battery cells than needed for some customers, and you need more total battery packs in circulation as well.

So it can work, but there are definitely tradeoffs to vehicle design, and I doubt the US market could come together to create a standard used by a large enough percentage of the fleet to be worthwhile. We have some brand segmentation in DC fast chargers, but imagine if Chevy and Ford and Honda all had different battery swap stations. And within brands, can an F-150 use the same battery pack as a Ford Escape?

But the market is so efficient, it will find the best way soon enough.

I would think you would only need a standard size battery, and have vehicles capable of holding as many standard-sized batteries as necessary for their weight/performance. So a compact car would have 1 C-sized battery (joke), and a F150 would have 5, for example.

I would be worried that the complexity needed for multiple battery slots would drive up cost and reduce range immensely.

Here is a video on how it works:

https://youtu.be/hTsrDpsYHrw

While currently, thr stations have to be manned, there is potential for this to be completely unmanned drivethrough where you take the car and never have to get out of it, you pay and the battery is changed for you in 3 minutes (which also looks like it could be improved, and that could come down to less than a minute).

I have no doubt that this will absolutely kill the competition.

Also, it doesn't have to be one standard size. A standard interface with a few standard sizes will work just fine.

I think there's no market for this, because charging has been solved to a good-enough with bigger batteries & faster DC charging.

Charging is already at the level it adds only 10% to the road trip time compared to an ICE car (see Bjorn Nyland's 1000km tests).

Recent road trips show that the weakest link are humans which have to take a longer rest period than the car needs to recharge.

I think the logistics for battery swapping in bikes vs cars is completely different.

A battery in a car is a critical piece of mechanical equipment, that lowers CG, forms an important part of the stability calculations etc. As such, the fixtures that hold a car battery in place are much more rugged and designed so.

Making that a swappable design adds more weight to an already overweight car (for example, having a rugged frame casing that has a removable batter inside)

Better Place, the electric car company that was launched in Israel with Renault was doing that. You could charge at home or go to a station and have your battery swapped in minutes. I think they did that mostly to make sure people will always know they can charge quickly and not waste time in a station for that.

My opinion on when Tesla will be ripe for disruption is when more than one car manufacturer agree on a battery swap technology. Once we have that we might see a city offer a fleet of cars for car-share services first (or rental) and then it could take off from there. We aren't there yet and at least a few years out.

IIRC, Ford's EVs use prismatic battery modules. So their F-150 would have 6-8 modules. An obvious next step is to make them user hot-swappable.

(Probably gleaned from Munro Live on youtube. It might have been another mfg, like Rivian or BYD.)

Not just delivery drivers, this is essential for everyone in India that uses a two-wheeler. India has always been known for its notorious costs of Petroleum and its unaffordability to anyone other than the rich.

We need the EV transformation to make sure people are more economically sustainable. A handsome side-effect of it would be the dramatic drop in air pollution given the population density in India

> India has always been known for its notorious costs of Petroleum

Wouldn't the same factors like state tax, central tax, political interference affect battery charges too? Or none of them matter?

India taxes petroleum that much not to generate more revenue -- for they can always raise the sales tax rates -- but to reduce consumption and keep the balance of payments in check.

Another reminder of how much less overhead human-scaled systems require.

In this case, the battery swapping robot is you.

I tried to reply to another comment that was since deleted. It said something along the lines of: >I don't get why Tesla would kill their battery-swapping while they are tackling other Hard Problems.

The practicality of battery swapping decreases exponentially as size and weight scale. The cost of building a battery swapping network for western-car-sized battery systems, even once solving the engineering elements (which are manageable), are likely a non-starter. Especially if the other principle technology rival is fast-charging stations.

How much added convenience is required to justify huge mechanical systems with many wear components and large maintenance costs over replacing a few charging cables every X months? Lots.

The batteri should go in a trailer. Swap the trailer. The car itself could be smaller. Luggage could go on the trailer.

Would make swapping easy but reversing with a trailer is not easy.

Self driving trailer shouldn't be difficult.

Trailers are non-starters for most vehicles.

Better to bring the batteries to charge the cars when they need it: https://www.sparkcharge.io/

I think the trick is not to swap the whole battery

Instead design in a space for a secondary battery, maybe 40% the capacity of the main battery. Make those standard and swap-able.

Now, you can use the car as ordinary in either the one-battery or two-battery mode, with the 1B config being more nimble handling with less range, and the 2B config more range. In any case, you can then enjoy rapid-swap of the standard 2nd battery, or maybe just rent one for a long trip.

This also helps the automakers keep their proprietary designs on the main battery for differentiation. The 2nd battery could go in the extra trunk space or something...

But if you are talking about faster partial-capacity refills during road trip stops, we already have that.

Current batteries charge way faster from 0-50% than 50-100%. The curve really starts to fall off above 80%.

I usually try to plan my stops so that I’m arriving with 5-10% and charging to 60-65%. With 250kW chargers that results in a ~15min charging stop.

I don’t think the costs of development, impact to vehicle design, and infrastructure would make sense for swaps just to replace what is already a 15min charge.

True, the differential will reduce as we get even higher-amperage chargers and batteries w/higher C ratings.

Yet still, being able to get 40% in 3 minutes is still better. I'd also see little reason that a properly configured trunk couldn't hold a pair of 40% battery units. Kind of like carrying jerry-cans on the back of a rover, except you can just plug them in...

Jerry-cans don't weight 400lb

I suspect that battery hot-swapping will be practical for electric trucks. Charging them is really slow unless you use a dozen of cables. Parked time costs real money for them. Normal trucks unload, reload, and go back to the highway pretty soon, often with a different driver at the wheel.

Truck yards usually already have equipment for heavy lifting, and the batteries need not be tailored to the car aesthetics and space constraints. Also, a narrower industry has a better chance to come up with a common standard.

Also it's normal with trucks to have a bunch of stuff kind of bolted on the bottom eg https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/fuel-tanker-truck-pictu...

Tom Scott did a video[1] on this that tackles the problem of electric trucks in a different way. Instead of charging somewhere or swapping out a battery, what if we charged them while they were in a specific lane of a highway.

[1] https://youtu.be/_3P_S7pL7Yg

I'm wondering how well that will scale if all/most of the trucks become electric. I would think the friction would create issues from both heat and mechanical wear.

I suspect that Tesla battery swaps were never a serious endeavor meant to be rolled out, and were instead by design limited to one location merely to be used as a massively profitable tax credit scheme: https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2014/12/30/te...

Doing battery swaps on such vehicles would be incredibly difficult (least of all from an engineering perspective), and my suspicion that it was more subsidy scam than genuine attempt is based on other factors.

Back when electric vehicles were the most popular automobile, battery changes were used to keep electric trucks and taxis on the road longer. Some companies were around 20 years just doing electric vehicle battery changes and service. This was called Power-as-a-Service, or PaaS.

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

I love how this reads like a future history of now and/or alternate timeline parody, and yet it's actually talking about the early 1900s.

Fascinating, and thank you for linking.

Every single person who's ever put batteries in the back of some consumer electronics device immediately thinks, "Why don't they just make it so you can swap batteries in EVs?" I was definitely no different.

I now own a few eBikes including a DIY conversion, a Sur Ron dirt bike and an Onyx emoto. The batteries are just so insanely compact and heavy, it's surreal. The Onyx has a removable 72v/48ah extended range battery which weighs 37lbs (17kg) [1], similar to the weight of the swappable batteries in the article. Let me tell you, that may not seem like a lot of weight, but it really is and it's *just so dense!* It's the equivalent of over 4 gallons of milk contained in two shoe boxes.

Seriously, every time I have to move - or should I say "manhandle" - the batteries in any of the bikes, I audibly groan and make sure to lift with my legs. The batteries are all different shapes, sizes and in various boxes and all shockingly heavy for their size. The sharp edges of the Onyx battery box is a true hazard as its momentum will give your thigh a nice bruise should you swing it, or your car a nice dent.

Anyways, I'm sharing all this to say: Batteries are heavy af. Really. As good as a solution this is for scooters, don't expect it to go much more beyond that. There won't be swappable batteries on your big Zero or Livewire any time soon.

1. https://www.onyxmotorbikes.com/collections/parts/products/rc...

Each scooter has 2 smaller batteries, presumably because of this problem.

I own a Sur Ron too, and I don't find the stock battery weight to be an issue. ~30 lbs isn't unreasonable for the average person to lift. It's amazing they packed a dirt bike into 125 lbs. I'm able to lift it over barriers and load/unload it from my sedan, and it doesn't ride far off from a mountain bike. It's only twice the weight of a top of the line e-mountain bike, but has 7x the power output and goes further. Easy decision. It's the most fun machine I've ever owned.

Zero uses 3.6 kwh modular batteries. I'm guessing they are 40-50 lbs or so which is probably around the upper limit the average person would be comfortable lifting and loading regularly. I'm sure they could be engineered to sell them in smaller sized units, but I don't think they're actually hot swappable.

Keeping my eye on this one: https://starkfuture.com/en-us-US/products/stark-varg

> ~30 lbs isn't unreasonable for the average person to lift.

I agree, but it's definitely at the limit of comfort, especially for smaller people (which I've witnessed personally). That's literally a third of the body weight of some fully grown women!! Much heavier than that and the batteries are just unwieldy, if not outright dangerous.

Stark's bike is cool, but honestly it's just the first of a wave of e-dirtbikes that are coming from literally every motorcycle manufacturer there is. (Stark's founders also seem to be a bit full of themselves, but that may have just been their marketing department getting a little overzealous.)

(I'd love to share your experience with the Sur Ron, but I only "own" mine in the sense that I was the one who purchased it. My son has been doing all the riding on it! Like you, he loves it. I see another one, or a Talaria, in my future soon.)

I remember in 2013 electric skateboards were all of the rage. I felt like a pariah with an electric scooter. I told people they were the future because skateboards are just too dangerous imo.

I’m glad to see this happen.

What I want now is an electric assist scooter, where then battery is smaller and it simply makes your manual pushes far stronger.

I’m no electric engineer, but I think there’s an opportunity here. If you can minimize the resistance added by adding an electric motor you might be able to really decrease the weight of the scooter if it only propels you on push.

Are scooters significantly safer? (I'm assuming you mean the small 2 wheeled scooter that looks a bit like a skateboard with a steering post, not a vespa style "mini motorcycle" scooter which is the scooter referenced in this article).

I don't know how to clearly differentiate between the two types of scooter when talking about them.

I strongly believe the addition of the handlebars makes a scooter much safer to use for an average person compared to an electric skate or longboard. I say this as someone who has owned all three.

Best example of this is braking. Most electric longboards accelerate and decelerate as fast or faster than a scooter. However the laws of motion still apply. Without something to hold onto you have to actually anticipate your deceleration and lean back when decelerating - very unintuitive.

When I had an electric longboard I let several people use it and saw several people fall over (fortunately they fell on their feet)

It just seems that the narrow 3" wheels commonly seen on scooters are way too sensitive to road imperfections. I've seen some with oversized 6" or so wheels that are wider like a mountain bike tire, those seem safer.

I miss eBikes, which seem to have been pretty much replaced by eScooters, at least in my community.

Totally agree. Those wheels are way to small at top speed. You're just asking to get a stone jammed in there.

A 1.5" deep pot hole will stop a 3" wheel as if it hit a solid wall.

That has been basic rule of thumb when it comes to motorcycles for ages - the bigger the wheels the safer it is. The only downside is extra weight and turning radius (smaller wheels can turn more) - which is irrelevant for motorcycles the article argues for.

When it comes to wheels - size matters!

Scooters are dangerous. The upright position with arms low in front close together makes for some really nasty falls.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31130267/

I agree, but skateboards are more dangerous imho

Lotta "imho"s, very little data

yeah, it's as if it's just, you know, my opinion. smh.

there's data out there shows that there's more injury using a skateboard vs manual powered kick scooter:

https://doi.org/10.1177/0363546504269256

https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.109.3.542

proving conclusively that a skateboard is more dangerous than a scooter would be difficult observationally, however. intuitively though all of the danger present in a scooter also applies to a skateboard, with the added addition that a skateboard doesn't have brakes nor does it have a way to steer without leaning, putting yourself at risk of falling off.

Some of that is likely due to the method of use. It's anecdata, but most people I know with skateboards attempt to do tricks. I don't think I know anyone that does scooter tricks, and I only recall seeing one at skate parks when I was younger.

> intuitively though all of the danger present in a scooter also applies to a skateboard, with the added addition that a skateboard doesn't have brakes nor does it have a way to steer without leaning, putting yourself at risk of falling off.

Those may not be entirely bad things. It creates a feeling of danger that scooters tend to hide too well. I tend to feel out of control on a skateboard before I'm actually unable to control it. I tend to feel in control of a scooter until something happens and I realize I've had very little control the whole time.

That's my pet theory for why electronic scooter accidents are so common. The controls make it feel under control even when it isn't, which is how we end up with stupid stories like putting 2 people on a scooter and crashing at 20 mph. I strongly doubt normal people would go 20 mph on a skateboard, much less with a second rider.

Yes they are. For two reasons. The handlebars, and importantly the wheels are much larger than a skateboard [1]

The larger wheels make for a much smoother ride, and they handle bumps far better. You’ll pop over a bump that would send a skateboard into an instant brake.

[1] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/l9n5zWm0N5o/maxresdefault.jpg

I suppose you could get away with a slightly smaller motor if you don't need super torque, but it's the battery that accounts for a huge amount of weight.

I think you are talking about a different kind of scooter than the article.

Haha - I actually read the article but was in reader mode but didn’t see the picture haha.

Strangely the article could apply to a traditional standing scooter as well. What a coincidence.

I did think the 50 mile range was a bit overzealous - shoulda known.

If anyone is curious about how this started, Asianometry (a favorite channel of mine) has a video about how Gogoro built their network in Taiwan

https://youtu.be/xZigLuaijsI

You see this in New York a lot too. The most popular delivery bikes use a swappable battery.

Can you swap them at the store like your empty propane tank though?

Does anyone know who pioneered battery swap scooters? I thought it started with gogoro which is everywhere in Taiwan. But the article just states it was prioneered in China and nothing more.

This is the game changer that could turn cities into EV dominated spaces. Imagine if every convenience store had a rack of these out front. It would be even faster to get a charged EV than even to gas up an ICE car at the pump.

These are the things that start becoming possible if we let our idea of an EV move beyond a 4000lb automobile to move your maybe 200lb self. You would have to use a technician to service a car sized EV and swap out the batteries even if they dropped right out easily, just due to the to weight of them. An entire infrastructure that would have to be built just to move around 3800 unnecessary lbs anytime you wanted to go anywhere at all. Meanwhile, if people were merely happy with something the size of an e scooter, converting the population to EVs starts getting a lot simpler just in terms of the physics of it all, and simple low hanging fruit innovations like this are possible.

this idea raised $850M and failed

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

Those aren't scooters, they're cars -- and they showed up before Panasonic/Tesla attacked the battery-cost problem with roughly 100x as much capital.

Tesla also tried battery swapping several years ago but seems to have given up.

Those are also cars.

That's because Tesla owners have disposable income and tend to charge in suburban or rural homes. Swapping is aimed more at lower-income segments or delivery/maintenance services in urban areas.

Edward Niedermeyer's book _Ludicrous_ spends some time on this subject. According to Musk's own statements, Tesla invited less than 200 customers to a trial, and then declared that there was insufficient demand. Niedermeyer points out that conducting even a single customer battery swap allowed Tesla to book about $100M in extra ZEV credits over the years; according to his own anecdotal observations, there was considerably more demand than Tesla claimed, but Tesla did not seem to be overly motivated to make the program work.

Sometimes yesterday's failed idea can be today's genius idea.

For example, if you tried to launch Squarespace in 1993, most people wouldn't care; they'd wonder who would want it and why. (The World Wide Web was a niche thing at that time.)

Shai Agassi was on the cover of WIRED back in 2008 and college me thought he was going to save the world. Like a proto-Musk if Elon were actually in it to save the planet.

Unfortunately this is not it. The game changer will be when they start closing off large parts of cities to cars and limiting them to small, slow and safe golf cart/scooter/bike type vehicles. Everything else will fall into place very quickly afterwards.

We have the technology, we need the political will. These scooters are nice but few people will brave riding them in a busy American street, not to even mention a highway.

> the political will

Which is another way of saying 'willing voters.' Who all own cars already, for the most part. And rarely vote to reduce their own quality of life even if there is a possibility that in the longer run it will be higher.

and are completely oblivious to the costs of their way of life (and certainly won't listen to a politician who mentions the existence of such cost)

Or they believe the costs are worth it. Trying to convince people to support extraordinary lifestyle changes requires extraordinary evidence that the net result will be positive.

If innovation can't happen until the ignorant are enlightened we're never going to see innovation.

Innovation is all around you. It's just not the type of innovation that requires elected government officials to participate (and in a way that will frustrate some of their supporters).

You're likely reading this on a device that was invented while plenty of ignorant people were still not enlightened.

I completely agree and that's almost my entire point. Innovation that depends on the ignorant being enlightened is almost impossible to accomplish - innovation needs to work around ignorance and accomplish itself through smaller steps that provide benefits to everyone. I really wish this weren't the case as it gives immense momentum to doing things the wrong way - but it's something we need to cope with.

(I admit I may have worded my comment a bit better with a "that" - 'If innovation can't happen until the ignorant are enlightened we're never going to see that innovation.')

Yeah, let’s impose our benevolent superior ideas on the ignorant majority. I’m sure no one has tried that before and it has never lead any country into dictatorship.

Often the majority is very ignorant. You don't need to jump to dictatorships to change their mind, marketing and innovation have proved more than enough

> Or they believe the costs are worth it.

The costs are more than likely paid by others, which is why they're oblivious.

Far easier than convincing them would be to stop subsidizing them, sprawling car dependent suburbs are a giant money sink that the people living in them rarely pay for.

Well how did we convince people to stop throwing human waste out the window, pay for installing sewer pipes and using soap?

How will that ever happen when delivery, moving, construction, etc are essential parts of the economy for "large parts of cities"?

None of which requires unrestricted access for personal cars or motor vehicles.

You can totally ban individual cars while allowing delivery, moving, construction, emergencies, public transport …

A lot of city centers in Europe have been closed to cars during the last decades but special trafic is still allowed.

It just works and it’s better for everybody.

And now I hope this will be extended outside of city centers.

Sure, but how does this system work? Especially with newer services, like ride sharing, where people use personal vehicles to transport people within these areas?

It doesn't work, nobody ever thought of it.

RIP Europe, you will be sorely missed.

On a more serious note, ride sharing services are considered as taxis which are considered public transport and public transport is generally allowed at least on designated roads.

You could require them to register as commercial vehicles. You can enforce using physical barriers or punishing fines/use fees for people that don't enter the area with a fare. Taxis can only go in certain parts of airports, rideshares have designated pickup zones, it seems to work fine. Or you just say that one of the downsides of being a part time driver that isn't part of a regulated fleet is that you don't get to congest downtown areas.

In Granada Spain I noticed that certain parts of the old city had physical barriers that could only be passed by a vehicle with the right NFC pass. Generally taxis, busses, and a few private cars that seemed to belong to people with property in the area. It made it very pleasant to walk around the old streets without having to suck down exhaust fumes of idling cars.

As you noted, Uber is a newer service, plenty of people happily lived their lives before it existed.

As an example, this sign [1] is at the edge of Copenhagen's main pedestrian shopping street.

The international symbols show it's a pedestrian zone, and there's a rule of no stopping from 11-04 (no stopping meaning not even any loading/unloading, a stronger restriction than no parking.)

The text says "Residents excepted" (under the graffiti/sticker) and "Goods vehicles excepted 04-11" (so deliveries and rubbish collection in the morning) on all days including Sundays and public holidays.

50m down the cross-street on which the StreetView car is driving, there's the standard sign for no motor vehicles [2], and the text underneath says "Except for business" -- so this street can be used all day for delivery vehicles etc.

Both signs are enforced similar to parking: get caught, and you'll be fined. I'm sure you're less likely to be challenged if you're driving a van with "Plumber" written on the side, but it shouldn't matter.

No doubt it's more complicated in cities where this is enforced by cameras.

(In addition, the pedestrian streets are mostly conflicting one-way streets [3, and do a 360°]. No problem for a delivery, but useless as a shortcut.)

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6779772,12.5729422,3a,25.5y,...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6772541,12.5737765,3a,23.2y,...

[3] https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6814522,12.5751944,3a,75y,12...

> Sure, but how does this system work?

You walk or take transit within that area? In my experience European cities are super walkable within the core, never bothered with taxis or ride-sharing.

Same way you designate loading/passenger zone parking or bus/taxi only lanes for large parts of cities.

The USA already has a NEV standard (25mph top speed, some look like small cars, others more like golf carts). All it would take to make them viable is more streets with 25mph speed limits.

This makes roads safer for bikes and scooters, but the NEV gives a car-like option for someone who can't (or won't) ride a bike.

Even a NEV-plus standard that allows up to 35mph would be an improvement, that would already cover almost all of my commute.

The NEV standard would be great if people followed speed limits. Unfortunately, the fact that it is 25 mph it does not mean people will drive anywhere close to that. But it is a good start.

There's a pretty easy fix for that... speed cameras.

Even easier fix for that which is much cheaper to enforce... narrower roads, raised crosswalks, separated bike lanes. Cars will naturally drive slower on those roads and they are more friendly to other modalities.

The argument against strict traffic calming is always "How will an emergency vehicle get through?"

There are some solutions that can slow cars but still allow emergency vehicles through, but they aren't perfect, and still need sign off from the fire department. And that signoff can be hard to get, years ago, my neighborhood wanted to install speed humps to slow traffic -- the fire department vetoed it since the road was the main access from the neighhood firestation.

Anyone from NL here? How does that work there?

American fire trucks are absolutely massive compared to their European and Asian peers.

You can actually speed over speed bumps, it's just uncomfortable...

The main thing is: how bad are speed bumps for vehicle maintenance, really? Fire trucks, for example, only need to go full throttle when they leave the fire station.

When they come back they can just go over the speed bump slowly, like everyone else.

Why would going over 1 speed bump every bunch of days be such a major issue? Does that mean that a fire truck going over a pothole will do a barrel roll? :-p

I had a family member with broken ribs make a trip to the hospital in the back of an ambulance, I think it’s the medical vehicles which are most likely to have trouble on speed bumps.

Ambulances are a potential problem, true.

But even for ambulances, if you couple traffic calming measures with bike lanes, better public transport, etc, car traffic goes way down, which means that ambulances aren't stuck in traffic. So even ambulances can slow down a bit before speed bumps and they would still arrive faster than otherwise.

Another is the complexity of city traffic, the more red lights, the more people are frustrated and will try to push faster. When you ensure fluid flow, 25mph is fast enough to go where you want without noticing it, if things are smooth the driver might even enjoy the scene instead of trying to 'get before the green light is over'.

Making streets narrower, raising crosswalks and building separate bike lanes is a much larger up front expense than installing speed cameras.

This is literally the sunk cost fallacy

I don't know where I read this, but narrow streets cause people to slow down too. Nearby my home is a very roomy 30mph 5-lane road where the flow of traffic is usually 45mph. Plenty of room to speed up!

There's a solution for this, that's know to work - one way streets. Set them up in a fashion that you have no reason to enter these slow streets unless you're going to a direct destination there.

That way you can avoid passthrough traffic.

NEVs have governors that electronically limit them 25mph.

I live in a city with a 20mph speed limit in the city and for the most part it's adhered to. This sort of tech would be a game changer here.

Why can't it be both? Easy-access technology can be a first step to changing political mindsets.

Reminds me of cities where there are paths throughout the area for golf carts. Most of them are retirement villages and the like, but there are some notable "normal" cities like Peachtree City, Georgia that do this.

I can't imagine any developed city having the collective willpower to retrofit these sorts of paths into their city, though.

> These are the things that start becoming possible if we let our idea of an EV move beyond a 4000lb automobile to move your maybe 200lb self.

I see you live in an area with significantly more days of good weather than bad!

The Worldwatch Institute regularly put out 80-page studies in the 1980s. Disappointingly, they published one on The Future of the Bicycle which never once mentioned the word 'rain'.

FWIW, the Aptera three-wheel EV design gets IIRC 10X better distance/kWhr than most EVs, and has a US classification as a motorcycle.

Agreed!

It's impossible to use anything but cars in places with bad weather. Science has proved it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

This reminds me of winter biking back in university in Idaho (fairly cold winters)... with a night shift that got off at 23:00.

The path I was on wasn't really maintained with winter bikers in mind, and I never even thought of researching winter tires, and I wasn't a particularly skilled cyclist (I don't think I cleaned the chain once in several years).

So I did what any stubborn-minded fool who had to bike to their job rain or shine would do: I simply fell over repeatedly until I started getting the hang of things (pro-tip: just don't turn at all and you won't fall over)

Nowadays I'm too old to consider regularly crashing during my commute to be a particularly sane idea; though I still don't have a car and wish cycling infrastructure would get even a fraction of the attention that car infrastructure does.

Well, for this missing scenario, public transport in theory would help.

However there is a strong lack of will for it in many places.

In many others the population density doesn't really allow it.

As usual, it's a mix of things, just that the current default of "cars everywhere" should be turned on its head. It should be: "no cars everywhere, and then introduce cars where they are actually needed".

I suggest you try getting outside and traveling the world a bit, to get a better understanding of the large ranges of weather seen in different cities throughout the world. You'll definitely be surprised! There's hot, cold, wet, icy, windy, and everything in between.

For a rare few places in the world, open air transportation could work year round. For the rest, you'll need an equally sized fleet of cars for the bad days, and scooters for the good days, than can be easily swapped.

they would shovel the snow and salt the sidewalks at my uni with enclosed with hvac, basically more durable 'golf carts' with a truck bed with a salt dispenser and a snow plow in front. seems like something like that would make a decent winter grocery getter or commuter.

I imagine that, at some point, safety will become a concern when injuries start piling up [1], leading to bigger, heavier, 'golf carts', with car like safety features. I drive a Fiat 500e [2], which is basically the same size as a golf cart, but won't get me killed. I have no interest in driving anything smaller, and I doubt I'm alone!

1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15389588.2020.17...

> During the observation period, a total of 875 GC-related crashes occurred, representing an average of 136 crashes, 65 hospitalizations, and 9 dead or disabled annually. Of all crashes, 48% resulted in hospitalization, severe trauma, or death. Of these, ejection occurred in 27%, hospitalization in 55%, and death or disability in 15% of crashes.

2. Random YouTube for scale: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xHh1vAGd8Uk/hqdefault.jpg

> I suggest you try getting outside and traveling the world a bit, to get a better understanding of the large ranges of weather seen in different cities throughout the world. You'll definitely be surprised! There's hot, cold, wet, icy, windy, and everything in between.

Nice personal attack.

You have 0 info about me to say anything. You know what they say: "if you have nothing to say, just shut up". Your mom should have taught you that ;-)

> For a rare few places in the world, open air transportation could work year round. For the rest, you'll need an equally sized fleet of cars for the bad days, and scooters for the good days, than can be easily swapped.

A rare few places?

Bikes are common in South East Asia (hot, wet).

Bikes are common in the Netherlands (wet, windy).

Bikes are common in Finland (icy).

Electric bikes are starting to make even hilly terrain bikeable.

Unless population density is low, bikes + scooters + public transport can cover everything.

People just don't want to do that. That's a different story to "it can't be done!!!11!!".

OK. It's a snowstorm. Would you rather spin out in something that weighs 4000lbs or something that is more like an enclosed ATV or a gator with studded tires? The physics is on your side with the smaller and lighter vehicle plus of course the efficiency gains to be had from requiring less energy overall to go the same distance since your total weight is going to be lower.

You're ignoring the vehicle has to be able to carry an HVAC system on it unless you're fine with freezing in sub zero temperatures. Like where do you think all that weight is going? Car manufacturers just arbitrarily making their own costs higher and fuel efficiency worse for nothing?

If your solution to this problem doesn't account for the disabled, elderly, physically unfit, or requires that some or all people be unable to drive in weather that personal vehicles right now handle without issue, like freezing rain, you're not gonna get much buy-in.

'Like where do you think all that weight is going?'

A vehicke that can survive a crash at 60 km/h and reach 200km/h and handle properly at that speed is going to weigh accordingly.

IMO maybe its a little absurd every minivan or whatever can go 120mph and go zero to 60 in 5 seconds. Why do you need that power? Not for legal driving sitations that's for sure since as soon as you use that power you have on tap you are basically driving recklessly by definition. Tool for the job and all. I can manage life going to the grocery store with something with the performance characteristics of a golf cart or a bird scooter. Don't need a 5 second 0-60 for that, personally.

Five seconds to get up to highway speeds isn't outrageous in many parts of the country where there are short on ramps and fast moving traffic.

And that's in ideal conditions - real world could easily have multiple passengers and a full load of luggage/cargo that'll slow things down.

Likewise with going 120mph - highway speeds are anything from 60 to 85mph. Most vehicles aren't at 100% engine load when cruising on the highway.

Even where I live there is the 110 to pasadena, one of the oldest freeways there is (if not THE oldest) and some of the shortest onramps you've ever seen. Even then, you do not need to go from 0-60 in five seconds to safely merge.

And with the 120 on the other end, sure, maybe the engines are good for that, but why even allow the car to go that fast? Why not just put in a speed limiter? Doesn't make much sense why we have all this power imo when the driving rules and laws were written around cars that probably took 20 seconds to reach 60mph and might have needed to go downhill with a tailwind to breach 75mph. And what do you know, the laws always have to account for these anemic vehicles thanks to just old vehicles and stuff like commercial equipment that is going to be heavy and slow no matter what, so you won't find yourself ever needing more performance to keep up with faster interchanges or anything like that since things are always going to built to these meager performance expectations. It's like buying a $4000 gaming PC to run microsoft word 98; wrong tool for the job.

They make enclosed golf carts/gators with hvac too.

Or we could have, you know, buses and trams and metros? Riding a scooter in a car designed city sucks :-/

Nah, you'll just get tunnels were autonomous cars can be stuck in traffic jams, instead.

not if you have a bike lane, then its amazing.

With a car I wonder if you could have 4 or 5 of these batteries as a range extender.

So the main battery is fixed as current standard, but you can throw in a few of these to extend range or if you run out of power for a ~50km type extension.

Not exactly the same, I know, but it's worth keeping in the common memory the fact that battery-swapping EVs have been around for a very long time.

See this[1]. Quote:

" the excessive noise of these vehicles annoyed residents of some of the wealthier areas of the town and so the company ordered 4 battery-powered buses, which entered service in June 1909; ... [buildings] held charging equipment, so that during the day buses could swiftly exchange spent batteries for ones that were fully charged, a change-over which took about ten minutes. "

[1] https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1...

How is this top comment? Is this a joke?

In my city we have electric "GO scooters" [1] and I know other towns have electric "GO Bikes" [2] as well.

It's a wonderful system: If there is a bike available, you can make a 15-minute reservation for it, which givers you the time to walk to it, so it will not be snatched by someone else just before you get there. Then, after your ride you park it and the app will give you an overview of the route you made, and it will tell you the costs €.

During the day, special cargo bikes ride around to swap out empty batteries for full ones.

[1] https://nl.go-sharing.com/en/how-it-works/

[2] https://nl.go-sharing.com/en/bikesharing/

Shameless plug - here is something we did about 10 years ago with custom drones we built at the time (when drones were not commercially available as much as they are today)

We basically implemented a battery swapping station and kept a lab-scale surveillance mission running for 3+ hours for UAVs. Ground vehicles were too small to be battery swapped (and we didn't care about them enough as they wre doing more or less random moves).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0tCZKAh4H5cdm9nRkJfTFFsTG8...

I've thought for a long time that battery swapping is the only way to go for all electric vehicles. A subscription or pay-as-you-go service for battery changing is practical and would make battery replacements costing tens of thousands of dollars a non-thing. I know some batteries are heavy, but if stations can provide petroleum pumps, then they can provide mechanized battery exchange infrastructure, right? Bring on the ISO standards for vehicle batteries!

Does anyone have any reason why this wouldn't work? Perhaps parts being stolen from the rental batteries before they're returned or some such?

You add more weight by making the pack easily removable, and you need battery standardization.

If every brand or every model has a different pack size, then swap stations aren’t very scalable.

If you standardize pack sizes, then some cars will have less range than they could, given that they could fit a larger pack.

It makes a lot of sense for the relatively small, light, and inexpensive scooters. The packs can be hand carried, and different vehicles can just have slots one, two, or three packs as needed.

You aren’t trying to squeeze 300-400 miles out of a scooter by packing every inch of the frame with batteries. “Good enough” is perfectly fine for urban scooters.

And I think the reality is that it just won’t be economically viable for large cars. We are quickly reaching the point where the battery packs will last the lifetime of the car, and roadtrip charging stops are falling under 20 minutes.

> We are quickly reaching the point where the battery packs will last the lifetime of the car,

Are we helping that along by lowering the lifespan of cars?

Having worked around propane cylinders a standardized battery pack sure seems like a no-brainer to me. It adds value to the EV because the useful lifetime is no coupled less closely to the lifetime of the battery pack.

Advances in battery chemistry and charging could be rolled-out across "legacy" fleets of EVs by upgrading the charging stations and batteries in circulation. The EVs themselves remain unchanged.

I feel like planned obsolescence is a "feature" of current EV's, in part by integrating the battery pack so deeply into the design. There would weight/efficiency trade-offs in standardizing on a battery pack but it's not like there isn't value returned by way of faster "recharges", increased service lifetime of the EV, and the potential to take advantage of new battery/charging technology.

It also seems like rapid battery change stations would be a great "pivot" for existing gas stations and truck stops, and something they could move into slowly (convert a portion of their dispensers over to battery change rigs as the Customer base shifts from ICE to EV).

I think a lot of people underestimate the speed at which DC fast chargers are already being deployed. They are a simple known quantity with few moving parts that are fairly easy to install with existing power infrastructure as long as you can find a few extra parking spaces in a lot somewhere.

Tesla alone is opening stations with 8-20 charging stalls on a daily basis, and other companies are doing similar work:

Tesla: https://supercharge.info/changes

Others: https://fastcharger.info/

We are already at the point where most new EV car batteries are going to last the life of the vehicle, and can get a useful charge on a road trip in under 20 minutes. Battery swaps are an interesting idea but would add extra space and weight and require a level of standardization that just isn't going to happen across manufacturers unless forced by regulation.

What should the expectation of useful life of an EV be? My family's daily drivers are 2007 Honda models, both w/ >200K miles and can still achieve 100% of their factory-new range, don't burn oil, and pass emissions and safety checks. I don't think a 15 year operational lifetime for a modern vehicle is at all unreasonable.

Most EVs have battery warranties for 100,000 miles +, and that's to a certain degradation mark, not that the battery is expected to be non-functional past that point.

Even if an EV needs one battery replacement in its lifetime, that's an entirely different impact to vehicle design and infrastructure than having battery swap stations (brand/model specific???) on every street corner.

Newer chemistries are aiming for longer lifespan, with Tesla's stated goal being a million miles.

Basically most of the problems preventing EV adoption 10-20 years ago have been solved by scale and technology improvements, so I wouldn't expect those to stop today. I think if we put an interstate-highway-system level investment into battery swap stations and standardization we might see it all be obsoleted in a decade as cars can fit 500+ miles of range, recharge to 80% in 15 minutes, and have batteries that last 500,000 - 1,000,000 miles.

Also as the EV industry matures, I'm sure we will see a market for recycled and refurbished batteries outside of the OEMs. This is already happening at a raw material level, and OEMs are doing this at a battery pack level.

If your 2007 Honda has an engine or transmission failure at 200,000 miles, you probably are going to pay someone to rebuild it or buy an already rebuilt component, rather than paying Honda the value of your entire vehicle for a brand new factory engine.

Edit: And have you actually measured that your 2007 Hondas still get 100% of the rated EPA range? I would find that pretty surprising.

That all sounds good. It just feels like it's never actually coming.

Tesla is probably coloring my perception, what with reading horror stories about parts being unavailable after minor accidents. It seems like Tesla, especially, is doing everything they can to avoid a used market. Just their "DRM" alone makes the car feel like a long-term rental versus an ownership model.

I feel good about my ICE cars' lifetime because I can get rebuilt parts and have a "good as new" vehicle (if the cost makes sense). The EV industry doesn't feel like it's going that way any time soon. Maybe some regulation would help.

re: Range/mileage of my Honda cars - I track fuel fills and mileage religiously (being a child of parents burned by the 70's gas crunch and who are borderline "hyper-milers" with their own vehicles). Both my vehicles still operate at or above their EPA rated mileages (17-20 on the Pilot and 27-31 on the 2007 Civic Si, mixed city/highway driving but heavily dependent on the type of driving). I've had excellent luck with Honda vehicles and I also try to take excellent care of them. (I'd still be driving my wife's 1995 Civic, at 350K miles on the original engine and transmission, if not for the body rusting away from 20+ years of Ohio winters. It wasn't washed regularly during / after winter in its early life and never had anti-rust treatments. Poor thing.)

The market will come. The first non-Tesla dedicated EV factories are only coming online in the US this year. There are 13+ new battery factories under construction in the US for non-Tesla suppliers targeting operation by 2025.

It's not tomorrow, but the car market and chargers are going to look a lot different in 10 years. And I don't think installing a bunch of mechanically complex battery swap stations is going to work for American car preferences unless we get some really onerous regulation to standardize across brands and car models.

JC Decaux in Dublin has user-swappable batteries for its city bike scheme. You rent the battery, charge it at home, and use it in one of their electric-capable bikes. The battery weighs 500g and has a range of about 8km, which is more than the distance between the two furthest stations. Users who don't pay for the battery can use the electric bikes too, interchangeably with their non-electric push bikes.

I thought this was a brilliant idea and implementation, but it hasn't been all that popular and there was a safety recall of the batteries at one point.

With nearly limitless solar potential, and widespread use of 2 wheelers (75% and steady), switching to electric could dramatically reduce air pollution in Indian cities, which is caused in no small part by ICE 2 wheelers.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/664691/share-of-two-whee...

Why hasn't Tesla gotten into this sort of battery swap tech for their own cars yet?

Because they would need to announce it first, spend 10 years talking about how it's right around the corner but never delivering, and then maybe they could deliver it.

We'll see these battery swaps right after FSD actually becomes L3.

They did try it in 2013, but abandoned the idea: https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event

According to "Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors", it may not have been abandoned. Instead, the feature may have never been planned:

"In 2013, California revised its Zero Emissions Vehicle credit system so that long-range ZEVs that were able to charge 80% in under 15 minutes earned almost twice as many credits as those that didn’t. Overnight, Tesla’s 85 kWh Model S went from earning four credits per vehicle to seven. Moreover, to earn this dramatic increase in credits, Tesla needed to prove to CARB that such rapid refueling events were possible. By demonstrating battery swap on just one vehicle, Tesla nearly doubled the ZEV credits earned by its entire fleet even if none of them actually used the swap capability."

The scale. Tesla batteries are like 900 pounds. You now have to make a machine that can move 900 pounds of electronic hardware at mass scale. Meanwhile, if your machine only needs maybe 20lbs of batteries, suddenly that machine can be your user, and the infrastructure problem got a lot simpler and cheaper to solve. I have no clue why tesla isn't considering a low cost, <$500 EV, be it scooter or bike. I think their brand name and a price point that makes it easy for people currently on the sidelines to buy in would easily be enough to dominate this market overnight. At this point is just these companies from china you get from sketchy amazon sellers. I don't see schwinn ebikes when I drive around, they are too costly, I just see these cheapo foldable amazon ones that go by 50 different names, which I think is telling where the latent demand really lies (not in the saturated luxury ebike/escooter market which doesn't seem to move much product).

One of Elon's friends was killed in a motorbike accident, I think as a result of this Tesla isn't ever going to approach the 2-wheel-transport problem.

Kinda ironic, considering odds are Elon probably knows a few people who were killed in car accidents too.

I've spent my time on 2 wheels with way too much power between my legs, and I'm happy to report that I made it out alive.

It's a ton of fun for track, adventure trails etc, but for commuting, not having your body be the crumple zone is tough to compete with.

They tried and failed already. Lots of reasons why this wouldn't work with cars:

- The battery is expensive and makes up a large chunk of value of the car itself. Being able to swap out a dying years-old battery for a fresh new one doesn't make sense.

- Swapping an electric car's battery is time consuming and requires specialized equipment and labor.

- The real utility for battery swaps for cars isn't in the middle of the city but in remote highway stops, where setting up such stations isn't feasible.

It does work: NIO does it (they have 700 battery swap stations already). CATL also announced that they will produce swappable car batteries.

I, myself, don't see how this can be more competitive than superchargers. But I do see that some customers would like to have this option.

Because Tesla knows that the vast majority of people will never need it.

Most people use their cars for well under 100 miles per day. With a battery-electric car, you can charge it at home. You never go to a station for anything -- not fuel, not fast-charging, not battery swapping. You come home, plug in, and get on with your life.

People will make a few long trips per year, and those cases are well handled by the supercharger network. It doesn't take long, and corresponds to down-time that most drivers should be taking anyway.

There is nothing for them to gain by a massive redesign that would gain most users little to nothing. Instead, they take the stable battery pack and design around it, even making it a structural part of the vehicle to save weight.

Replaceable battery packs for cars solve a non-problem. People who would want them would do better purchasing a gasoline car, which are readily available and will remain so for quite some time.

> you can charge it at home

Most people in most big cities don't have private parking they can equip with a charger, and they struggle to even find parking at all. You'd have to make every single parking space in a big city a charger to make this approach scale.

> Most people in most big cities

... should use fast chargers, if they have no 'at home' option.

Most people in the US live in single family detached homes and can get enough juice from a 120V outlet to meet their daily driving needs.

Most of the world is not the US. And fast charging of ~1 hour or even 25 minutes is an inconvenience that would make people choose a non EV.

We're not far from 15 minute charge times (and in some regards already there). That's fast enough.

Most people in big cities don't have cars. Most of the cars in a city are commuters, who go home every night to the burbs. It's the same reason cities have relatively few gas stations.

People who insist on having cars in cities will either find places to charge, continue to own gas cars, or switch to ride sharing plus public transport. It is not a case for Tesla to change their entire design.

> Because Tesla knows that the vast majority of people will never need it.

I don't know what portion of US drivers park either on the street or in a parking garage, but I'm pretty sure it''s tens of millions of people. Driveways pretty much don't exist in my neighborhood. It's all parking garages and street parking.

Lining every parking garage and neighborhood street with dozens of chargers may be the optimal solution, but I'm skeptical.

I think people overthink how complicated EV chargers are (specifically slow chargers). At they’re core, they’re just a normal 3-pin plug with a fancy computer controlled switch. All of the heavy lifting is done by the car, it has the inverter, the battery controller, and all the monitoring equipment.

All the charger does is tell the car how much power it’s allowed to use, authenticates the car, and flicks the switch on at the command of the car. The charger also has a cheap-as-chips current transformer so it can make sure the car doesn’t consumer more power than it allowed, and will flick the switch off if the car misbehaves. The car is responsible for everything else.

So at the end of the day, and on street slower charger is a metal post with a plug on the outside, and a Raspberry Pi and relay inside. They can, and will eventually be, dirt cheap to manufacture. As for power cables, well, and can just slice into the cable already powering houses and lampposts.

AC slow chargers (for overnight or at work) are cheap and simple. Basically the same as installing an outlet for a clothes dryer or oven with a circuitry box to act as a relay and monitor.

DC fast chargers are more complex and expensive but still way cheaper than a robotic mechanical battery swap system that works across multiple makes and models of car. And more of these are being installed literally every day:

Tesla: https://supercharge.info Others (US): https://fastcharger.info

We're getting to the point where many newer EVs are coming with 300+ miles of range that can do an 80% charge in 20 minutes.

The swappable batteries seems like a great solution for mopeds etc. but for giant car batteries I think better and cheaper batteries will outpace any advantages that battery swapping has within a few years.

> It doesn't take long

Is there public data about how big the network would need to be if 90-100% of long distance travel is switched from 5 min gas station stops to super charging; both in terms of throughput and latency? And/or studies of (probably rare) mass transit events that may or may not be expected; thinking natural disasters and large events away from population centers like burning man or Coachella.

I am actually more wondering why we do not see battery trailers. Imagine a two wheel, 500 lbs trailer that you pull for the next 30 miles between two 1 minute stops on the highway that recharges your cars battery within those 30 miles. I know there are prototypes, but something seems to stop it from becoming large scale. Inefficient? To much overhead? Can normal drivers not be trusted with a 500 lbs trailer? I would like to know...

Too much overhead and DC fast charger networks are already approaching parity with the speed you could make that work. Trailers add another set of wheels to the ground, too, which is a failure point. Might as well just put it on the roof or something instead.

I don't think there'd be much actual time savings. Every time I get off the highway to get gas (which means slowing down to exit, stopping at the bottom on the exit ramp, driving to the gas station, pumping gas, getting back on the highway, etc), it ends up being close to a 15 minute stop. I'd be surprised if you can pull off, hook up a battery trailer (and pay for it), then get back on the highway in a few minutes.

Might as well just stop in for a 20 minute charge at a DC fast charger, many cars can do an 80% charge in 20 minutes.

This actually sounds doable if the battery charging trailer is self driving (and self docking). You would lose only minimal time slowing down for the docking/undocking. Easier to test on select pieces of highway with predictable self driving conditions. And the highway gives you space and time for charging, when you need it most for long trips.

We're still far from having self-driving cars, I don't think we'll have self-driving battery trailers running around the highways anytime soon. And you've just more than doubled the cost of these battery trailers by putting motors and control systems in them.

My gas powered car gets around 300 miles of range before the fuel light comes on and I need to make a 10 or 15 minute stop to refuel. I think I could survive with an EV that gets 250 miles of range between charges (300 mile rated range, assuming 80% charge) before needing a 20 minute charge stop, I need to stop and stretch my legs, eat, or use the restroom more often than that.

I recall, oh maybe 15 or so years ago, there was an, I believe, Israeli inventor who proposed doing this for cars. Not sure what happened to it, but I think that's something that should be looked into more. I know, most auto OEMs like to build the car around the battery (for structural soundness), but if I could just pull in and have my battery swapped while on a road trip, that would be amazing.

I believe you are remembering the same thing I'm remembering, it was called BetterPlace

Here's a TED Talk about it from 2009 https://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_a_new_ecosystem_for_el...

They went bankrupt in 2013

What would be really amazing is if we all leased the batteries but owned our vehicles (whether its scooters, cars, etc) AND there were super fast quickswap stations built into the road itself. Imagine if pulled up to a red stop light and the light knew it was going to be red for the next 30 seconds at least - your vehicle could communicate with some type of in-road underground battery swap station and then at the press of a button it could quickly reach up, remove your existing battery, and replace it with a fully charged one.

Larger vehicles could even have multiple batteries - one quick swap one on the bottom and then another one elsewhere in the vehicle that was a bit more work to swap - this way you could mainly use and stress the swap battery and ideally keep swapping it out as needed on a road trip but worst case you still have a large energy reserve to fall back to.

Battery wear is a complex thing and it's not trivial to control or test. You could easily trade in an excellent battery and receive one that had 50% rated capacity. If you plan to wear them out very quickly, not to need the full capacity, and pay well above actual cost for the convenience of swapping, then it could work.

Otherwise, you will be ripped off by the better informed charging station that hands out only their worst batteries, and sells the best trade-ins as new.

Yeah, I think it’s clear that you would have to buy the cars off the lot with no battery included.

What if we took batteries out of commission after X cycles?

There would need to be regulation on it. I wouldn't trust my manufacturer or charging network not to rip me off if they had the chance.

That sounds like a huge amount of infrastructure work on something that even in the best case will be relatively prone to failure. Meanwhile, we already have grid connections all over the place and DC fast charging is quickly approaching fast enough. For those who even have to use it, the rest just charge at home and none of these contraptions would improve their experience.

Have you lived in a multifamily building in a city? Or even in a single-family home with only street parking? It’s not like we all have a garage at home to park and charge a vehicle. Some do, but I would estimate the vast majority in my city do not.

I’m not saying we need in-street contraptions like GP described, but “just charge at home” doesn’t cut it for a lot of people.

I like the kiosks mentioned in the article, those seem pretty convenient for city-dwellers.

In the US, more than half of everyone lives in a single family detached house. So perhaps half the population doesn't have a major hurdle to at-home charging currently.

For the rest, a 300 mile EV with once-a-week fast charging while they grocery shop is entirely viable. Yes we need to continue building out the infrastructure, but since your comparison is with a battery swap solution that doesn't currently exist in any form, we're already way ahead on that.

> For the rest, a 300 mile EV with once-a-week fast charging while they grocery shop is entirely viable.

Assuming you’re driving to get your groceries. That’s also not necessarily a good assumption here.

The flip side of that is that the group you described is the one most likely to not need to charge every day. My experience was that 200 miles was a pretty reasonable amount for a full week. If I'm honest, most weeks I'm well under 100 miles.

With fast chargers a weekly grocery trip or a charger near the office would probably satisfy most needs. Tesla claims that 15 mins. yields a 200 mile range. My gas hog Pathfinder gets about 250 miles between fillups that last about 10 minutes (bathroom and snack breaks when I'm on a road trip). It seems that range anxiety is kind of overkill. To be honest I'm surprised that coffee shops, and fast service restaurants haven't been installing chargers.

Do you visit a grocery store or similar establishment for at least 30 minutes per week?

If so then there is potential for charging infrastructure to solve your use case without requiring every person to have home charging.

DC fast charge infrastructure is growing at a huge rate. We have tested designs that are being mass manufactured and are installable in basically any parking lot with enough nearby grid capacity.

New charger locations are being added literally daily across the US and the world.

Tesla: https://supercharge.info

Others (US): https://fastcharger.info

It's definitely going to be a different model than gas stations, but I think we can continue to install huge amounts of DC charging capacity at stores and along highways, combined with slower AC charging capacity at apartments, office buildings, etc, easier than we could install enough battery-swap capacity to handle the EV transition.

> Do you visit a grocery store or similar establishment for at least 30 minutes per week?

Not by car I don’t; there’s no need to.

Likewise my company’s office basically doesn’t have parking, so charging there isn’t an option even if I did drive there regularly (but I don’t).

Best option for me would be if my apartment building had EV chargers in the garage, but it doesn’t. (And my last place was more central and didn’t have a garage at all.)

When do you use the car then, just personal travel? Without a commute your weekly charging needs should be pretty low.

Charging definitely doesn't cover everyone yet but I think a lot can change in a decade, and running AC circuits off of the existing grid seems more feasible to me than mechanical battery swap stations that work across different brands and models of car.

Basically, yeah. I generally don’t need it when I’m in the city. It’s only when I visit friends and family outside the city that I use it; most of them live in the suburbs since that’s where I moved from, and you mostly need a car to get there.

Anyway, not suggesting that battery swap stations are particularly practical for electric cars? Those have huge batteries. But if stations for electric scooters as mentioned in the article get any traction, that’d be a win I think.

you live in a country without snow, right ?

>Imagine if pulled up to a red stop light and the light knew it was going to be red for the next 30 seconds at least - your vehicle could communicate with some type of in-road underground battery swap station and then at the press of a button it could quickly reach up, remove your existing battery, and replace it with a fully charged one.

If we had the technology and logistics to build an entire underground battery swapping facility at every major intersection, I'm sure we'd have moved past cars completely!

I remember watching a TED Talk in 2009 that had a pretty similar idea https://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_a_new_ecosystem_for_el...

Seems like they went bankrupt though in 2013

This is the way, but I have serious concerns when it comes to abuse as surveillance tools. I'd want such vehicles to incorporate something of a Faraday cage around the battery module. The thing is inherently always powered and could easily become a mechanism for tracking locations and travel speeds real-time.

This isn't going to happen because almost no one would be worried about it and there would be a cost that only benefitted a microscopic fraction of concerned people. It also feels completely arbitrary; for all you know, there are tracking devices in everything you own. It's not like you can really tell. There could be passive tracking devices in every consumer device.

Except consumer devices you own you're free to open and scrutinize if you're concerned there's such fuckery going on, nor do all consumer devices inherently accompany your travels.

When it's a battery swap situation, you don't own the thing, and you bet your ass they're going to have anti-tampering measures for obvious good reasons.

It's especially problematic for vehicle batteries since they're so large in terms of both physical volume and power capacity. There's plenty of margin to slide in a smartphone equivalent payload.

If it's not something we can defend against it's a significant downside to the battery swapping arrangement IMNSHO.

I think you have to accept that privacy is dead. Period. There is absolutely no tinkering, no open source software, nothing that will prevent you from being tracked. Realize you cannot change this, and accept what you cannot change.

Never.

I would love to see a unified model for batteries for e-scooters. It will save so much battery waste for everyone.

There are standard battery sizes/specs for small devices, it makes sense here too.

"Battery swapping, a relatively new technology pioneered in China"

I assume they mean for EVs, since I have been swapping them in my portable devices for decades.

Also, I bemoan the use of the word "technology" just to make something sound more impressive. What technology is involved in swapping batteries?

We have a similar thing in Vietnam with Vinfast scooters. However, in practice, it doesn't work very well.

You rent batteries from Vinfast for your scooter and then, supposedly, can swap them out at a variety of Vinmart convenience stores or Vinfast dealers. The problem is that very few Vinmarts participate and the number of them seems to be shrinking. I've also been in a situation where they are simply out of batteries to swap.

And then on top of all of that, the types/shapes of batteries differ between scooter models.

That said, I love my scooter but I definitely don't bank on the battery swap stuff.

> A lot of drivers in China, the world’s biggest EV market, live in apartment blocks and so don’t necessarily have personal charging outlets.

As an apartment dweller this makes so much sense.

For reference India's petrol prices are at around $6/ga. The taxation on Petrol is quite high, and this is not a new phenomenon. Ergo, the switch to electric makes a lot of sense, but I'm not sure how India's grid will handle this.

The grid-losses were reported to be ~30%, and India provides electricity (albeit bad quality, intermittent) for free to all Indian farmers. Unclear how this can be scaled TBH (ignoring issues with battery sourcing etc.).

> Some battery developers are also opposed to standardizing power packs anytime soon because the technology is evolving rapidly and India could switch to the more efficient and environmentally friendly sodium-ion batteries from the lithium-ion ones favored by e-rickshaw makers.

I do not think that is true. This is what all of them say whenever standardisation comes into the argument. However obviously they use that to lock the customers in.

That makes no sense. With new battery tech, it's typically the chargers that absorb the complexity, the load is just a load.

So the scooters should be able to handle the new batteries just fine, and it would be on the network operator to upgrade the charging kiosks accordingly. It'd be much easier to rolling-upgrade batteries in a swappable fleet than to call fixed-battery scooters into the shop and swap each one out, as well.

As the parent says, arguments like these are always a scheme to lock customers into proprietary standards. It's frustrating that companies still think they can get away with this.

Standardization is not in chemistry or the tech itself. It is in voltage/amps and the physical dimensions we already do this with AA and AAA batteries.

> the load is just a load

You will need a standard communication protocol for storing charge/discharge history with the battery and reporting temperature. Nobody wants to swap in a battery that is exhausted and won't maintain a charge. Vendors maintaining swap pools need to know when to cull old packs.

That is where the government/standards bodies are important. It is in everyone's collective benefit to standardize as the whole market will expand.

As quoted in the article this piece is what the finance minister highlighted in her budget speech last month as being important to get in place.

More practical zero-emission scooters in India could be, as I understand it, quite something. I complain enough about exhaust fumes in Western cities.

A very ignorant question: in order to charge faster, why can’t we just charge 200 little batteries in parallel and then operate them in series?

AFAIK, that is basically how batteries work. A battery is comprised of "cells".

Some batteries like deWalts's flexvolt system do allow rearranging the cells. They go full series so you can run efficient 60V tools off them, but swith to partly parallel to charge on a standard 20V charger.

From my limited understanding, the rate you can get charge into a battery is proportional to its capacity. You see this in the size normalised charge rating that batteries have, like 1C means it takes 1 hour to charge and 4C means it takes 15 minutes. Adding more batteries in parallel is much the same.

Batteries have "C" rating which is how many times you can charge or discharge them in an hour. This magic number is closely linked to battery chemistry. A "6C" battery can be charged in 10 minutes as long as you have the power, while a 10C battery can charge in 6 minutes. You're right that sometimes charging speed is limited by the available power. Don't expect to fast charge a 130kWh Tesla at a 45kW charger or charge a 100Wh laptop on a 18W cellphone charger. In the case of these scooter batteries, you are mostly limited by the batteries C rating. Even if you watercooled them to stay at a happy temperature, you can only push the chemistry so much.

Maybe if they switched to a different chemistry like Lithium Titanate they could chaemrge quicker. For now it is easier to use LiFePo batteries and just swap them out.

You can! Two limitations.

(1) Heat dissipation. You're charging the battery with a much higher current than the discharge current. Even if you can push a coolant through the battery at the charging time, it adds serious thermal loads, and associated mechanical loads, to it.

(2) Power at the charging point. You're pushing dozens or even hundreds of kilowatts, this takes both high voltage and high currents. Cables and connectors aside, the particular charging place just needs a pretty beefy cable from the electric mains. A typical cable going to a single-family house has a 20-30 kW limit. Now imagine a station with 10 charging points.

Because the time taken to charge 200 little batteries in parallel is the same as it is to charge them in series.

Smaller batteries are capable of delivering less current, but also only capable at charging at lower currents. So you can’t charge the individual cells in a battery any faster than the battery as a whole.

If you tried to take a single little cell, and charge it at power level of an entire EV battery, all you’ll get is a small explosion and a fire. If you take one of the individual cells out of a Tesla, it’s not much bigger than a AA battery. The charging cable of a super charger is much thicker than a AA battery, and made out of a substantial better conductor than a battery. Just imagine what would happen if you took a battery the size of a AA cell, and plugged it straight into that cable, running at 480V and pushing almost a thousand amps. They peak at 250kW, about 50 households of power usage. Your little battery won’t stand a chance.

" She has to recharge three lithium-ion batteries — which give a combined range of 80 kilometers (50 miles) — in her auto rickshaw twice every five-hour shift."

So you have to use three sets of batteries for 80kms. Sorry, but I would still use gas.

> Sorry, but I would still use gas.

Of course, but this is very privileged stance, and you're not the target customer base either. The overall cost of those three batteries is significantly lesser than gas so as to merit their choice for batteries.

- The batteries discussed here are small and comparatively light weight (a person can remove). So consider it more as "Cells". If you want more range, replace more cells or have heavier pack. If you need the range of Tesla, then you need more battery packs in the vehicle (And increases the weight of the vehicle and its cost).

- Also the vehicles mentioned here (Auto rickshaw) generally carry max 3 customers for shorter distances. Majority of the travel will be in the range of less than 10 Kms.

So for less cost, she is able to serve the same customers, increasing her earning.

This would actually solve huge pollution problem in south east asian countries such as Indonesia. I think the ratio between motorcycles and cars are 20:1 which is insane.

Hopefully this can be adopted soon

> Battery swapping, a relatively new technology

XBox players remember...

It's laughable to call it 'new' technology but it's nice that an infrastructure to make it happen for e-scooters is a thing.

Cool! My dad who knows nothing about tech had the same idea for cars decades ago. Nice to see someone finally do it.

That's a genius idea, and could probably work for any mode of transportation. Scooters, bicycles, cars, trucks.

Bureaucrats of countries that basically depend only in selling gas, are watching in panic or?

Given that it will still take 30-40 years for the bulk of gasoline consuming fleets to expire/turnover, this is ironically a problem that I bet such oil plutocrats are thinking they'll shift the burden to their children to deal with.

Also I doubt they’re actually worried. They have enormous cash reserves.

Nearly half the initial money in the Softbank Vision Fund was Saudi Arabian and that gave us Uber and many other new unicorns. If anything we should be worried about the effects of all those cash reserves starting to throw around their weight.

In any case, there are two million applications for petroleum other than gas for gas based internal combustion engines.

Now for cars/trucks and we’re in good shape

Kerning. Changes != Charges

Do you like how that little thing in the bottom corner flips constantly? You don’t find it distracting at all do you? The person who did that should be shot.

This is why hydrogen, while being less efficient that battery-electric, stands a chance. Convenience of 'filling up' in a minute is the killer feature of hydrogen, regardless if it's 50% as efficient as battery-electric. When said power is coming from a nuclear reactor, who cares?

I remember hydrogen fuel cells getting major hype over 20 years ago, quite specifically in the year 2001. It probably started earlier than that.

Since then, there's been approximately zilch in terms of commercial applications, despite numerous drawbacks inherent to lithium ion batteries. I'd bet on some novel alternative battery technology over hydrogen.

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