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Comment by somat | Hacker News Reader

I think the great failure of the electric car industry is how little effort was put into replaceable batteries.

Imagine if all the cars used a set of standard sized battery packs, engineer an interface where they can be easily replaced, size them so they can be easily manhandled(about 10 kilograms 20 pounds). Then you could stop at the service station, pay the fee, pull your empty packs, and replace them with charged packs. you would be on your way and the service station would charge the packs for a future customer. Something like the batteries for power tools.

The main point is that battery packs would become a commodity, easily acquired interchangeable and everywhere.

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This is the way China is going [0]. Based on success there it seems it will follow in other places.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/inside...

That keeps coming up, but it is a bad idea in general.

Batteries are big and heavy. However they are made up of lots of individual cells. So as a car designer you really want to place individual cells around other parts of the car that cannot go anywhere.

You cannot put the front wheels of a car in the trunk - no matter how much better you think the car would look, there are physical reasons for where they go and how much space they take up... Place the cells around all the big things where they fit, and you can get a lot more in.

There are a lot of other design considerations for a car that are helped by the ability to put cells where you want.

For the average person the engineering advantages of not having a standard pack are better handling, more cargo space/legroom, and longer range: this is more valuable than the ability to swap batteries.

I would make the packs about the size of an ammo can, put nice handles on them, little doors to automatically cover the terminals. integrated charge/status display and make the car fit 10-20 of them, half in the back of hood area, and half in the front of the trunk area.

On the subject of replacing them, while I would not mind shifting a couple of hundred pounds of batteries 20 pounds at a time, I can see how that would be hard for many people, I expect there would be many station attendants who would go home at the end of the day complaining about their minimum wage job shifting batteries.

Agree. We shouldn't be purchasing the infrastructure components but instead using it as a consumable. The same thing bothers me about putting solar panels on my house (they should go in solar farm somewhere else, I still depend on grid but that I'm okay with (could buy batteries if I had reliability concerns)).

Much easier to do with scooters https://www.gogoro.com/ but I don't think it would be too hard to engineer a connector/robot that basically did the heavy lifting/swapping from underneath the vehicle

You should put solar panels on your roof just because the sunlight hitting your roof otherwise goes to waste. If you put solar in a field that competes with any other sunlight uses of the field. (solar over a parking lots makes sense)

I understand that perspective and respectfully disagree.

I don’t want to be personally responsible for the initial capital cost, maintenance/repairs/replacements, and knock on cost associated with their general presence.

Some of which could be leaks due to bracket punctures, reduced access for roofers, gutter cleaning, hanging lights, clearing tree debris, etc., and any reason a contractor needs to do work on the room. Or, something that I could normally diy on the roof becomes something I have to high a pro for.

The field makes sense except in the US at least we have tons of land where this would actually be the highest and best use of the land. If it’s not being farmed/used for some sort of ag purpose right now, there’s probably a reason, it’s not suited for it.

Further, nearly every house has suboptimal positioning to create an optimal layout. Given this is a mutually exclusive decision (I would only want to ever own one set of panels), it makes sense for me to put them in a field that has optimal conditions and transport the electricity over the grid for my consumption. It also means I can change houses and my generated electricity follows me without much effort.

Parking lots I support. I actually tried this once as a quick customer feedback test, they didn’t want covered parking due to “safety” concerns of their guests and employees. Also, I’d be concerned the solar stuff would get stolen in an empty parking lot.

at current energy density 10kg probably only good for 10-15km... and that's without any additional overheads in packaging so one day perhaps with higher energy density batteries?

So your car would have 10 slots for packs, and go ~100 Km.

Like the hot swappable server power supplies?

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