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Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

There are a bunch of markets where the taxis run on CNG, with their own dedicated refill infrastructure. I guess hydrogen could make sense in replacing those? Taxis run long hours and any charging downtime means lost revenue.

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Those taxis usually run CNG because their country/region has access to lots of CNG (eg Phuket Thailand). I wonder if that means they have access to lots of hydrogen as well, if not, they won’t go for it.

BTW I was in a CNG taxi that had to refuel before (transferring between resort areas in Phuket), the wait was long and refueling was slow, probably because they had lots of CNG vehicles and not a lot of fueling infrastructure, and the pressure was slow for some reason. Definitely a supercharger session would have been faster.

Couldn't you just design a car with swappable batteries and achieve the same result?

This exists. I think in China.

See video here:

https://mastodon.green/@FabianLaasch/110083147601165341

Linked as well:

https://www.theautopian.com/china-is-already-doing-ev-batter...

There must be some reason that approximately zero car manufacturers have any appetite in making swappable batteries.

The single biggest reason is that it locks you in, and unless it becomes a standard it's basically useless since people would probably need to go to a dealer to get a battery swap. For the average driver of a BEV, they are rarely going to need a fast charger anyway since just charging at home overnight is good enough for 95% of driving.

That's less of a problem for fleet operators, they could actually have a bunch of batteries at their business sites spread all over a city so a battery swap is never too far away. Fleet vehicles also do more km in a day than the average private vehicle as well, so they WOULD need to use fast chargers a lot more often.

The economics of battery swaps are actually very good. But it’s a situation where a large amount of people would need to agree on a standard. Those sorts of cross industry agreements seem in short supply these days. Reminds me of getting every company to agree for standards in the semi industry.

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