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Comment by speedgoose | Hacker News Reader

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.

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 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!)

"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?

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