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Comment by mulperi | Hacker News Reader

We would need a standardized, replaceable battery pack that takes us 300-500 km. That would eliminate the risk of expensive battery service and make recharging instant at service station.

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Battery swapping stations looks a lot more expensive and failure prone compared to fast chargers.

I think 250kW flat charging curves are almost as convenient. Go to pee and scroll HN for one minute and voilà.

"fast chargers."

Or contact less, constant charging at traffic lights, during parking, on the highway.

I'm sure there are people in 1900 who said, "Cars will never work, because I need to by petroleum in a pharmacy!" ignoring how technology will progress. If you had told them, there will be a "gas station" everywhere, those people would have called you crazy.

As cool as an inductive charging strip would be, offhand, the inherent losses as well as practically microwaving the underside of the car, would probably both be too much.

Now, parking lots where a robot lifts an underside contact up if there's a match, that might just work.

Wirless charging my phone is idiotic from an energy point of view, but convenient.

I do thing the last 20.000 years of human progress has been driven by convenience (and security).

I'd bet for the more convenient solution every day.

That's not a very fair comparison.

I'm not worried at all about the power efficiency of my phone's charging process.

Some napkin math suggests that my pocket supercomputer costs me at most about $1 per year to keep charged and running, or perhaps $5 over the life of the phone, when plugged in every night. I wouldn't notice or care if it were an order of magnitude worse than that at $10 per year or $50 over the life of the phone.

So wireless charging of my phone doesn't bother me a bit, and it is something that I use that when it is convenient.

An EV doesn't operate at that scale, though. I would care a lot about losing even 10 or 20% of charging efficiency with an EV.

How does this relate at all to what you're responding to?

I believe GP might be taking about an add-on, not a substitute for the existing battery. Perhaps a tiny trailer hooked up to a standardized coupling that you rent when you are venturing out on something that's more than an hour of driving.

It would mostly be a challenge for mechanical engineers, to come up with some solution that does not ruin driving characteristics too. Perhaps even involving some heavily computerized active suspension, just not a dangling ticket trivial mini trailer that swings into dangerous resonance...

Swapping the floorboard batteries, yeah, won't happen. You'd rather see the battery car self-driving in close slipstream formation connected with a transmission wire that's never mechanically loaded.

You say won’t happen, but there are Chinese companies that offer you different size batteries based on need.

Going cross country? Swap out for a massive battery. Just doing city runs? Get the smaller lighter cheaper battery

Are they profitable though? Sounds like a painful investment trap, where the company can always declare projections of a happy future once a certain threshold would be reached in terms of installed base of compatible cars with interchangeable batteries, and every time growth in installed base starts to visibly miss the optimistic prognosis they can say "uncle" and force a reset by introducing some new incompatible format "this time it will be better, need more money, now!"

(I know nothing about how intra China VC works or does not work, but battery swap schemes sound like an effective capital trap - note that those traps tend to work best when even the ones setting them up don't recognize their nature, I'm not accusing anyone on doing it on purpose!)

That may be, but BYD has made it work reliably and enables you to do battery-as-a-service which actually makes a lot of sense for EVs, since that's usually the lifetime limitation. Second hand EVs become actually viable that way.

Plus, fast charging wears out the battery sooner, reducing car lifetime even further. Not very cashmoney from an ecological nor an actual cash money perspective. If you're gonna spend 2x the ICE car cost on an EV it should at least last you longer.

Renault also did battery as a service a decade ago, with some battery swaps. The maths didn't work at the time but maybe BYD and NIO will this time.

Agree that fast charging wears the battery more, but it's mostly fine. Cars are built to be used and it's better to fast charge current gen batteries when you need it than waiting for better technology while driving an ICE car.

> Renault

> a decade ago

Well there was also that GM EV1 that didn't work out in 1996, I guess that's it for EV, wrap it up folks.

I don't think that whole battery pack will be standardized, more like it will have slots for smaller standardized packs (i.e. 10kg ones). Similar to standardization in PC.

That would be solving so many problems.

1. Repairability - You can replace all packs, or just some. Depends on your financial situation.

2. Independence - You are not dependent when your company will stop manufacturing your special battery pack.

3. Longevity - You can buy 10 year old car with dead battery and buy latest set of standard packs with latest battery technology, suddenly your car is having twice the range than it was a new. Like HDD -> SSD

4. Less dependency on street infrastructure - You can charge the car on a charger or if you can't charge at your place, you can just pull one or two packs out of your car and charge them on 230V in your apartment or hotel room.

5. No wall box needed - You can have two sets of these standardized packs. You can put one into garage where it will be charged during the day (i.e. Solar array) and you can use the other one in your car. Swap them when needed.

It’s a solution for a problem that won’t exist.

Charing for 30 minutes isn’t a real issue after a long drive.

Replacing individual battery modules will become cheap enough it will extend the life of battery packs enough.

And once the whole battery needs replacing it will be ok financially.

In the not too distant future there will be contact less charging everywhere, at Walmart, at work, at home.

In the near future, electric vehicles will be obsolete and we'll be running off rainwater and people will be parking their cars outside to harvest it. California will be mostly unlivable.

Luckily not living in California but at the baltic sea, 50m above sea level, 2km from the coast.

Just use salt water from the ocean instead. It's got electrolytes, it's what the cars crave.

The only people who say "I don't mind stopping for 30 minutes to charge!" are people who dont drive much. For people who travel by car a lot, that's insane.

I can't imagine being forced to hang out at a truck stop for 30 minutes rather than getting back on the road.

Can you imagine riding a horse or walking to your destination? Because that's the alternative if cheap oil isn't readily available anymore.

Or maybe you'd rather imagine having to migrate because your city is under water and there is no more food, due to changing climate?

Your convenience is beside the point, society will adapt.

Do you stop for food? Buccee's is already half restaurant and targets long distance drivers. Charge yourself while charging your vehicle. Many suburban gas stations have some form of food service attached as well.

This would make the cars significantly more expensive and heavier, negating any advantage.

Hmm what should we call it? Not AAA- maybe DDD?

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