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We're talking about an industry that has failed to standardize on a single, interchangeable charging plug here.

What do you think the chances of a single, interchangeable battery for such a "battery station" to remove, recharge, replace are? Or are you proposing such stations for each individual manufacturer, model, model year, etc?

The industry _has_ standardized, except for one hold-out (Tesla):

https://youtu.be/sZOuz_laH9I?t=990

> CCS is the established industry standard DC fast-charging connector, and every automaker selling cars for the US market is already using it, or, in the case of Nissan, has pledged to use it going forward. Except, oh right, except for... them [Tesla].

The charger situation is quite analogous to Lightning vs. USB-C for smartphones. USB-C is the industry standard, and there's one manufacturer still using a proprietary connector. And in both cases, the hold-out manufacturer provides an adapter cable so you can use the standard connector.

(To your point about standardized batteries having approximately 0% chance of happening any time soon, I 100% agree.)

There is an important point to make here though. I love me some Technology Connections, and am hardly a Tesla fan (in fact just bought a non-Tesla EV). But Tesla's connectors are unquestionably superior to the hideousness that is CCS. Tesla settled early on an elegant connector, and true to form, the rest of the auto industry settled on garbage, literally tacking DC pins onto the outside of a J-1772, much like the monstrosity that is the USB Micro B SS plug design.

They haven’t standardized because they haven’t been given an incentive to standardize. I would argue that perhaps the incentives mentioned in the article could be given to companies instead to encourage them to standardize in plugs and batteries, but many people prefer to see financial incentives given to people instead of corporations

Let's just ignore the total of end-user standardization like a charging plug.

They can't even put the gas filler on the same side universally on all vehicles. They can't even make the way you access it universal. Ever seen a car from the 70s where it was hidden behind the license plate?

> Ever seen a car from the 70s where it was hidden behind the license plate?

Yes, I have. Those are kind of cool, because it is equidistant from both sides.

> They can't even put the gas filler on the same side universally on all vehicles.

The side is a a non-issue. The important part is that the hose connection is standard. Any ICE car I could possibly buy can be fueled at any gas station anywhere, the hose always works.

Governments can mandate this just like electrical outlets and emissions requirements.

Battery swap stations are an old idea, but it's really hard to actually pull it off. It requires that all the cars you service have the same battery pack, or that there are at most only a few kinds of battery pack to deal with. The packs have to be stored and charged, so you have the same electrical service requirements plus you need a place to store the batteries, and employees or robots to move them around. You need car owners to accept an ownership model where batteries are leased rather than owned.

Modern EV batteries are almost always liquid cooled, so your removable battery will need some kind of fluid connection that can be disconnected and reconnected without dripping ethylene glycol or whatever on everything, and without getting air bubbles in the line.

Some cars are moving towards structural batteries, which means the car is less sturdy without the battery installed. That might not be a problem if it's just sitting there.

The alternative is to just do DC fast charging, which seems to be good enough for most uses.

Personally I think the long-term solution here is to electrify sections of the major highways at regular intervals, so that cars can charge without stopping. Sweden has some pilot projects involving rails embedded in slots in the road surface. Overhead lines are another option (and they're cheaper), but if they're high enough for trucks to fit, then cars would have to have very tall pantographs to reach.

As a sibling commenter pointed out, NIO is already doing this with millions of swaps already in China.

Instead of electrifying roads for cars, why not electrify them for rail cars and trains?

Converting trains over to electric is also well worth doing.

> but it's really hard to actually pull it off. It requires that all the cars you service have the same battery pack, or that there are at most only a few kinds of battery pack to deal with.

Precisely the kind of thing government regulation is for. Don't specify what is inside the battery pack, specify the form factor, connection points and attachment mechanisms. Leave the battery companies to figure out the rest.

Way more complex than that. Different packs have very different voltage and current delivery characteristics. A bunch of motor management depends on the battery pack characteristics, including things like regen braking.

Charge times are already under 20 minutes for the best cars and will likely continue to come down. Swappable batteries would be a massively expensive undertaking that would hugely limit innovation in battery and car packaging for a pretty minimal gain.

I’ve taken my model 3 on plenty of road trips and haven’t once thought it would be better with battery swapping.

To some extent, the forced downtime is a benefit. Instantly refeullable vehicles enable fatigued driving. It's not even healthy to be sitting for that long as a passenger.

I believe the EU trucking downtime rules actually line up pretty nicely. Building trucks with enough range to maximize the driver time and then charge during the refresh period works out just about right.

I agree. The newer charging stations are so quick at a rest stop, that I don't even notice them anymore. Once it's down to 10 minutes, it won't even be a discussion topic imo.

I would say 5min. 10min is nothing on a road trip but a lot when you are running late for something. People who make less money tend to care more about this.

fast charging isn't need for day-to-day life. The vast majority of cars spend most of their time stationary and slow AC chargers are going to just become more and more common at all parking spots. Never having to stop during normal driving for gas since you start every day with a full 'tank' is a complete game changer.

It needs to be like 99% of parking lots. It's ok until it isn't. I have had ro refuel my car during a commute many times and barely made it, if electric cars keep contributing to my tardiness I will blame them instead of my lack of adequate planning, even if it worked fine for a whole year before that. It took one experience of being stranded because of bad battery life estimate to get me to dislike them with passion.

What I have learned from thid thread is people who advocate for electric cars are disconnected from the realities of most people. I think it is not possible to change enough people's minds about this, for reducing the impact of climate change, perhaps focusing on cruise ships and electric planes is better while promoting hybrid cars. Full electric cannot happen in the next 20 years at least if I had to guess.

Hardly 99%. With a 260 mile-range car I only need to plug in about once a week. People who drive more obviously need to plug in more often, but it's a pretty rare person who would absolutely need to charge every single day. EVs are not for every single use case yet (like long distance towing) and that's okay. They will handle more use cases with each passing year. We certainly don't have nearly enough slow charging points yet, but it doesn't need to be anywhere near 100% coverage before many people who don't have dedicated parking can use an EV with minimal to no disruption.

Battery swapping isn't more efficient or cheaper. You still have to build out massive charging infrastructure all over the place to charge all the swapped batteries, plus you need staff, locations, and equipment to do the swapping, and storage space for the batteries while they wait to be placed back in a car. Plus every manufacturer has to use the exact same battery physical and electrical specs, eliminating all possible innovation in packaging. No one is saying it isn't possible, it just doesn't actually make sense at scale.

I recognize having a private driveway and garage is a luxury, which is why I'm highly supportive of laws requiring multi-unit dwellings to add charging and offering tax breaks for both landlords and tenants to get them installed. Also highly in favour of tax breaks for employers to offer charging in their lots. I also think municipalities should be upgrading the existing streetlight wiring to offer charging alongside street parking.

To be a bit reductive here, it needs to work for everybody for it to be a viable fossil fuel car alternative. You can't have 1% of people for whom it doesn't work for because for 300M people that is 3M people. Often the people for whom it doesn't work for are the poorest and most vulnerable as well. Imagine taking off the cost of battery ownership and having battery leases subsidized, now you electric cars become even more affordable. Battery swapping from an infrastructure perspective is not mutually exclusive to charging either. You can charge cars with swappable batteries at charging stations. You just need the government to force standardization of both charging and swapping connections. Capitalism will take care of where you have swapping and charging stations. Of course you can force people to buy hybrids as well but they are not well liked due to difficulty of repairing them and that still means fossil fuels.

If fast charging car batteries in less than 5min can be done in 15 years and hybrids are acceptable maybe that is the way to go but even then as a consumer a 20second swap is better than a 5 minute charge. Ignoring what consumers want is always a critical mistake.

I have no doubt fossil fuel cars will go away, the question is do you want them to go away in 10 years, 20 years or 30 years. The sooner they go away the better it is for climate change right? If so, long term "holistic" engineering has no place here. Swappable+chargable battery designs are best imo.

With the current way of owning an EV, you own the battery. And because batteries degrade overtime, the health of the battery is a big component of the value of your car. Using a service like that means you'll get a random battery every time you swap.

I guess that can change if you lease the battery separately.

EVs will switch to LFP batteries that will have a life span of 300k miles with current technology and in 10 years will be at a million miles. Batteries will last longer than the cars.

Like with cooking gas cylinders?

If you don't own it, as long it's certified good and won't blow your car up it doesn't really matter if it's well-worn, etc?

They are already doing this in China.

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

20 seconds battery swap:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q2ew50YVHY

NIO have 1000 stations and 10 million swaps already.

More info:

https://www.arenaev.com/nio_achieves_10_million_battery_swap...

That's what I'm talking about. Biden's 300bn plan will essentially lock the US to charging stations, I wish someone can tell them about this.

I think the problem is that you are thinking of things purely in terms of how gas stations and gas powered cars work. You need to step back and re-think.

For almost all EV owners, a level 2 (240V 20amp) charger at home is all that's needed[0]. It charges slowly, but given the car sits for 12+ hours every night, it's more than enough. You get home, you plug in, you go eat dinner and go to bed. When it's time to go in the morning, you have a full charge. "Refilling" isn't a discrete event that takes place in a given place. You just plug in whenever you aren't driving.

DC fast charging, which charges the car in an hour or less, that's a rare event. It's what you use when you're on a long trip somewhere that takes more than one charge of the battery. But most owners might do that a few times per year.

So the problem you're trying to solve with this "swappable battery" solution is tiny. Imagine how much more the car will cost to support this complexity, and for what benefit? Saving a few hours per year? I won't pay the additional thousands of dollars for the "swappable battery" car, and I won't pay the cost of maintaining the swappable battery stations. It's just not worth it vs spending that time getting lunch.

[0] My wife and I did the math on our own driving patterns and realized we could probably get away with a level ONE charger- literally a standard 120V extension cord - for the EV we're on a waiting list for.

And you are only thinking in terms of rich home owners. I get paid verg well and I still can't afford a house. How am I going to charge at an apartment? Do you think they will spend millions converting every parking lot into a charger and maintaining it? Or would I have to stand in line at a charging station? This is one the main reasons I vehemently oppose any idea that promotes electric cars the way they are. We still don't get public transport and only you folks who are rich or inherited a house can afford basic transportation if fossil fuel cars go away anytime in the next 10-15 years.

I uber just fine to work the few times I go in, when I need a car it is to drive long distances and it sucks waiting every few hundred miles in a queue then an hour to charge. It sucks getting stuck in the middle of nowhere because the mountain road took too much energy than what the battery meter anticipated. It sucks being late to important appointments if I forgot to charge or there is some technical issue with the charging. All of this and more can be avoided by just swapping the batteries and they are already doing this in china.

> Imagine how much more the car will cost to support this complexity, and for what benefit? Saving a few hours per year? I won't pay the additional thousands of dollars for the "swappable battery" ...

Ugh, NIO is already doing this in China and I'm pretty sure it's cheaper. Also, the government is literally spending hundreds of billions to subsidize electric car infrastructure so if it wasn't for the sentiment you and others have that convinced politicians we could be getting swappable batteries.

Until then, as much as I am for climate change prevention I will fight against electric cars the way they are. Maybe when charging a car fully takes less than 5 minutes and charging stations are at least have as abundant as gas stations (regardless of how far a full charge takes you) I can support this. China and all the countries that follow them will beat us again on this as well because while we are busy debating why not they are actually getting things done.

> How am I going to charge at an apartment? Do you think they will spend millions converting every parking lot into a charger and maintaining it?

I live in a condo actually. I'll tell you how: we passed laws in my province that say the condo must assist me when I decide to install a charger. Other jurisdictions are following this pattern. Also: not millions. As I said, it's relatively inexpensive to install a level 2 charger. For a 200 unit parking lot, you'd be wildly overcharged at a million dollars. And providing level 1 charging is as cheap as running extension cords from Walmart.

And hey, don't all your arguments work just a well for when electric lighting and heating first appeared? And yet somehow, all apartments today have it.

> Ugh, NIO is already doing this in China and I'm pretty sure it's cheaper.

They aren't on any real scale, and it's not cheaper overall- just massively subsidized. You know what is cheap? The ubiquitous electrical system that's already everywhere.

> Also, the government is literally spending hundreds of billions to subsidize electric car infrastructure

Source on those numbers? And what is "electric car infrastructure"? You mean the standard electric grid that's already ubiquitous? The EV subsidies are drying up quickly. Adoption of the tech is at the inflection point that the free market is handling the problems just fine.

You've decided how the world "ought to be" and don't care much that the rest of us have solved these problems just fine and have moved on.

> You get home, you plug in

Assuming a common work schedule, that would put you into plugging in at the most expensive peak tier pricing ($0.72c/kW here in PG&E land).

When we had the EV I had a timer on the charger to only turn on at midnight when the off-peak rates kick in. If one had to leave early in the morning, the car was never fully charged.

It worked ok most of the time as my partner could charge it up to 100% for free at work, but without that perk it was iffy.

This is a bit of a nitpick, but L2s don’t charge slowly. Ours gets us about 30 miles per hour, so we get fully charged after a normal day’s worth of driving in about 30 minutes.

It depends on your definition of "slow" and your use case. If you were on a road trip and had to stop for an hour per 30 miles at a charging station, it'd probably seem really slow. If you're plugging in after you get home from a short commute (the most common use case), then it's perfectly fine.

For sure, but we’re talking in the context of a home charger here.

This could work for leased cars or fleet vehicles.

I already don’t want to swap my propane tank for someone else’s rusted piece of crap so I have it filled. No way if want to swap my 20k battery for who knows what.

> I just don't get it. Governments around the world and spending trillions on this stuff so why is there no clear answer on this?

Why would there need to be a "clear answer" on something that quite obviously wouldn't work?

Everyone here has done a great job of explaining to you the complexity of your "simple" solution, but you don't seem to want to accept any of the explanations. You seem to think that your back-of-the-napkin calculation can just be magically turned into a major part of our transportation infrastructure.

Cars aren't television remotes. The batteries in the cars aren't your standard AA battery. The situation is far more complicated than you're making it out to be.

Give me a break, what I have seen is someone showed me this is already being done in China. So anything you say is an excuse that is dangerously preventing climate change prevention efforts. I literally saw a video of NIO doing this and arguments like yours "cars aren't television remotes" "it's too hard" are bullshit. The interstate freeway project was hard yet it was done with trillions of dollars spent because it had to. Since china is doing it the only thing hard is that it costs more but our tax dollars are set aside to subsidize this shit but home owning rich people can make electric cars work for them with chargers so everyone better find extra time and houses fast else you're shit out of luck.

Governments can force car companies to use stanrdized connections, every car has plenty of government regulated things like this.

I said ELI5 so you can explain to me why my back of napkin calculation does not work when seemingly endless subsidies and cost that is passed down to consumers are in the works. NIO is already doing this without a $300B subsidy...oh and get this: selling batteries is more profitable for companies! One car is one battery but when battery stations also buy batteries that is more profit. Tesla literally sells batteries to power grids because of profit.

"Who will spend tens of billions to do this" is the question and we have an answer now, but you don't seem to gey that it will be largely wasted because people will not buy electric cars if they have to wait in line every day to get a charge or filling up the charge can cause them to be late to places. An inconvenient solution is a dead solution, in a free market consumer satisfaction comes first.