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Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

I reject the premise of the question, because you don't need lithium for electric vehicles. We could get by with shitty low-range batteries the way other EVs have. We would just need to standardize battery-swapping at the equivalent of gas stations. Drive 100 miles, drive into a battery-swapping station, service technician swaps the battery, you're back on the road in less than 5 minutes. We did it 100 years ago, we can do it again. So lithium isn't a blocker.

I also think we shouldn't own as many personal vehicles as we do, and should start to move legislation toward more funding of better (and faster, and more efficient) public transit, and more taxing of private vehicles. We don't need to have so many private vehicles, we are just addicted to them.

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This will never work. Components in cars are engineered to be organized as efficiently as possible. The overhead from having replaceable batteries will kill the amount of storage you can have. There is no way you can have generic attendants swap out batteries in 5 minutes. Working with EVs is a dangerous job that you can't just pay an uneducated minimum wage worker to change. The batteries are extremely heavy and are placed in locations that you need a car lift to get to. Plus theres all sort of liability and safety issues from potentially messing up a battery swap or getting a bad battery and blowing up your car.

I dont know how scalable this is, but Nio (electric car maker from China) are building automatic battery swap stations. See e.g. here (video is in German): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv7OQofChbg

edit: I think it takes more than five minutes though, especially when you have to wait in line.

> Components in cars are engineered to be organized as efficiently as possible

Ever heard of an SUV? Cars are not designed to be efficient, they are designed to meet product goals. Sometimes those goals are efficiency, such as meeting an emissions or efficiency regulation. But most of the goals are "what do we think some schmuck will pay $30K for?"

If 100 years ago, replaceable batteries were not a barrier to storage space, they certainly shouldn't be now, unless we're just admitting that we suck so much at building cars now that we can't even make them like we did 100 years ago. Battery swapping services existed for 20 years. It only stopped because the market decided gas would rule instead.

SUVs have no relevance to the question. In every EV, and modern cars, the location and layout of every component, especially the battery is a highly engineered process. The battery specifically is not only the most valuable component they need to store as much of as possible, it is the most heavy and most dangerous. Teslas blew up because the battery wasn't stored safely. Store it too high and you risk rollovers. This doesn't even take into account the danger of high amp battery packs being moved around and shared between vehicles. You're oversimplifying a very difficult problem

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