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Comment by stetrain | Hacker News Reader

This either requires 1) Different swap stations for every brand of car or 2) a majority of car brands agreeing to use a common size, shape, and spec of battery pack across their vehicles.

Personally I don't see that becoming a reality anytime soon at least in the US.

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I don't know why I feel this will be necessary for EVs to become mainstream. Batteries simply don't last long enough, and even if they do, they degrade over time. Making them easily swappable seems to be a reasonable solution to this.

I have a 5 year old EV with around 95% of its original battery capacity. I think battery degradation of newer EVs will not be the limiting factor in their lifetime or in transitioning from combustion vehicles.

Under 1% of EVs from 2016 or newer have had battery replacements.

https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/how-long-do-ev-batter...

Early EVs skewed that a bit by having poor thermal and charging management of their batteries. Newer chemistries and packs with active thermal management reduce the issues significantly.

Different chemistries also have varying lifetimes. LFP batteries trade a bit of energy density for greater resiliency to charge cycles over their lifetime.

Do you get the 95% number from the dashboard or from actual mileage that you’re able to drive? In my experience those two metrics can be very different, e.g. a vehicle with reported battery health of 80% getting just half of original range.

From the dashboard, and the Tesla BMS is fairly accurate as long as you allow it to calibrate at 100% charge occasionally.

I have also not seen a noticeable change in my range for actual long distance driving over those years, and I do occasionally stretch it to near its full range.

The biggest change was putting wider, higher-performance all season tires on after the factory eco tires were worn out. Still I mostly noticed that efficiency change by tracking my stats on trips. There wasn’t really a noticeable difference from the drivers seat.

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