Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The gas grill + propane tank model

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)

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.)

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