Wonder if anyone is working on ways for breaks and tires to be less harmful, or polluting?
And/or make them go slower.
Luckily, both reduced noise and increased life are fairly well correlated with reduced particulate emission.
Like the Thinkpads with the "bigger battery" humps: https://sm.pcmag.com/t/pcmag_ap/photo/l/lenovo-thi/lenovo-th...
But it would be cool to just rent the extra 500km when needed :)
Nio has fewer Nio battery swap stations operating in the entire world than just the state of New Jersey has filling stations (not dispensers, entire stations).
Nothing in the video above made me think "oh wow, that looks like that process will be a lot faster than filling up!" and several segments made it seem like there would be more time involved in just getting the car into and out of the battery replacement service bay than filling up takes. (Nio's claim of a 2.5-3 minute battery swap seems to be measuring only the swap time while the car is stopped in the bay.)
That's all before we consider the travel time to one of the stations (which is unlikely to be as close to your trip as a typical filling station because of the rarity of stations), time waiting for the car [or cars] in front of you to complete their swap (which if Nios ever became popular would likely be longer than waiting for one of the typically eight or more dispensers to free up at a filling station), nor to account for the "all long range batteries are out of stock at this location, because it's the Friday before Christmas and everyone is road tripping to visit family" NACKs that are liable to occur in a Nio-only battery swap system.
For me the killer line in the video that will make it hard for Nio to solve all of these is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w&t=270s : "Building these stations is incredibly expensive and it's no secret that Nio is losing a staggering amount of money right now..."
Can I guarantee it will never happen? No. Hence my comment. It was not about stating what will happen or not, I don’t feel this type of prediction has any reliability. Millions of people smarter than me get it wrong every day, especially the very long term ones are almost always wrong.
My experience was that you end up stopping to charge a bit more often than you'd stop to fill up gas, but factoring in stops for bathroom and food, it's really not a significant difference. There just needs to be more chargers (to avoid queuing for an open one), and chargers that are more closely spaced (every 50 miles like gas stations instead of every 100+ miles). Then today's EVs will be just fine for long trips. Not completely perfect, but perfectly adequate, to the point that it won't be worthwhile buying an ICE vehicle just to have it for long trips.
I think the main reason why we don't see anyone seriously pursuing the battery trailer idea is that it would be an expensive niche product. It would have to be mostly a rental-only product, and offer few advantages over simply renting a more suitable vehicle.
I've never had an issue with the connectors for the batteries of the ThinkPad, and being able to swap in a spare fully charged battery has been very helpful many times when out doing field working all day long. What is an issue are the little plastic tabs on the batteries that break off over time. However, usually the batteries have already lost a lot of their lifespan by the time that happens, and since the batteries are removable they can be replaced without opening up the system or melting glue with heat as is the case on most modern cell phones. Seems like a win to me!
Which I think the person you replied was partially attempting to point out.
Making a high voltage connector is well understood problem space. Every electrical engineer knows how to deal with ramping up current when a power supply is plugged in or turned on (inrush current specifications are most definitely a thing), and the entire electric grid is based on sizing, insulating, spacing and switching conductors appropriately for the voltage and current being used. Moreover, high voltage battery packs tend to have switches / contactors on the battery pack that keep the high voltage off until the connection is securely made and enabled, hence why even Telsas require a functioning low voltage battery to start the system.
There are also certain use-cases that are likely best served by putting battery packs in a trailer. Take the trucking industry: going by the charging requirements of a Tesla semi (1MW for 30 minutes), replicating your typical truck stop turns into a huge problem for the grid -- you'd need upwards of 50MW of charging capacity to replicate the flow of diesel coming out of a bank of 10 fuel pumps (sorry, I ran the thought experiment on that one back when specs were first released). Having a battery pack attached to the trailer that gets charged at a more leisurely rate at the warehouse while it is unloaded and re-loaded over a couple of hours is far more scalable than charging the truck in a few minutes at a truck stop. Charging overnight while the driver sleeps is fine, but getting the 8-12 hours of runtime for a workday in a semi is a heck of a lot of battery.
The dangers can be mitigated -- that's the entire raison d'etre of the electrical engineering discipline! Otherwise you wouldn't be able to safely charge an electric car at a 350kW rate these days at charging stations all over the world with a connector that is deemed safe to be handled by random humans. It's not like the software industry where we throw half baked shit at the wall and see what sticks when users encounter it by running an A / B test in production....
These are little bit different than than what a swappable system would entail, aren't they?
> Otherwise you wouldn't be able to safely charge an electric car at a 350kW rate these days at charging stations all over the world with a connector that is deemed safe to be handled by random humans.
Okay maybe I miss read the initial premise but I took it as a home user swapping in-and-out modules themselves.
That would appear to me to be a significantly different engineering challenge and safety issue than what's currently deployed in consumer market EVs...
I'm not even sure the small upside here would justify the added costs and complexity either.
From an electrical point of view, swapping batteries is fundamentally the same general problem regardless of whether they are large or small: you want to avoid arcing when the connector is plugged in, and you need to avoid exposing the user to stray voltage. Sure, there's added complexity to achieve that in a safe and cost effective manner when high voltages are involved, but it's a solved problem as the charge port does exactly this today.
> Okay maybe I miss read the initial premise but I took it as a home user swapping in-and-out modules themselves.
Current EVs on the market suffer from decreased maintainability compared to traditional ICE vehicles. The battery swapping skill set needs to be more widely available so that we don't see EV owners being dinged $40k for a battery swap. There are videos on Youtube showing people doing a battery swap themselves, and while it is challenging, it's not all that hard to do safely when the battery is not damaged given that the battery packs don't expose high voltage on the connectors when not enabled. Of course a damaged battery pack means that all bets are off on the safety front depending on the nature of the damage.
> That would appear to me to be a significantly different engineering challenge and safety issue than what's currently deployed in consumer market EVs...
> I'm not even sure the small upside here would justify the added costs and complexity either.
It a solved problem!!! Just put the charge port at the back of the vehicle and then use it for the add-on battery pack like the existing signal light connectors for trailers. You're done. The only added design constraints on the EV are on the location of the port and verification that it works while the vehicle is being driven. The F150 Lightning fails this today since the charge port is just in front of the driver side door, but relocating the charge port is not exactly rocket science.
Many EVs have already taken the step of making the charge port bidirectional so that the expensive battery in an EV can be used to provide power during an outage or to balance the load on the grid, and that is a far, far more complicated problem than accepting power from an external battery pack through the charge port while the vehicle is operating.
The arcing is the problem AND generally when handling battery packs/modules requires high voltage safety equipment and precautions.
The charge port uses a low-voltage connection to "handshake" as I understand it before the high voltage is being supplied.
You can't, without a good bit more complexity to the battery module itself do that as the batteries terminals will just have the voltage of the battery itself (depends on their state of charge).
Plus the bus bar the module is connecting to also will have a voltage if there's existing modules connected to it.
You're down to having contactors and BDUs at every individual module.
> Current EVs on the market suffer from decreased maintainability compared to traditional ICE vehicles. The battery swapping skill set needs to be more widely available so that we don't see EV owners being dinged $40k for a battery swap. There are videos on Youtube showing people doing a battery swap themselves, and while it is challenging, it's not all that hard to do safely when the battery is not damaged given that the battery packs don't expose high voltage on the connectors when not enabled. Of course a damaged battery pack means that all bets are off on the safety front depending on the nature of the damage.
I'm not saying it can't be done. I am saying it's harder to make it actually safe for the average normal consumer to do as simply as plugging a battery into a power drill for example. In part because of the higher voltages involved.
> It a solved problem!!! Just put the charge port at the back of the vehicle and then use it for the add-on battery pack like the existing signal light connectors for trailers. You're done. The only added design constraints on the EV are on the location of the port and verification that it works while the vehicle is being driven. The F150 Lightning fails this today since the charge port is just in front of the driver side door, but relocating the charge port is not exactly rocket science.
This is a different concept than adding/swapping individual modules in the vehicle itself.
But regarding the concept of a trailer, I suspect that the high cost for the product for the minimum gain it not justifiable for the average consumer. That is you're trying to solve a problem in an inefficient and not profitable manner. (Who wants a trailer of batteries parked in their garage 99% of the time just to have a slightly lighter car?)
> Many EVs have already taken the step of making the charge port bidirectional so that the expensive battery in an EV can be used to provide power during an outage or to balance the load on the grid, and that is a far, far more complicated problem than accepting power from an external battery pack through the charge port while the vehicle is operating.
I understand that, but either you want a trailer or you want internal swappable/addable modules which both economically in my opinion seem of little benefit over engineering better cars with newer/better battery technology and stronger/lighter material.
Additionally, I didn't even mention the annoyance of engineering integrating the heating & cooling system for the modules themselves.
Better energy density batteries & better materials (or smarter manufacturing) make more sense to me than trying to make individual modules for a car swappable or asking people to drive around with a trailer they would use so infrequently that it would not justify the cost to them (not to mention most people don't know how to drive with one properly anyways).
Then again battery charging/weight tech is getting pretty good pretty fast.
If instead people consider EVs that are non-car-shaped then we get things like e-bikes and e-scooters. Both can feature easily swappable batteries as the batteries are so much smaller due to the reduced weight of the vehicle. Also, the problems around congestion can pretty much disappear when you get enough people to use an e-bike/e-scooter instead of a car. The tyre wear/pollution is minimised due to the reduction in weight and similarly the brakes.
Honestly I don't know how she did it, but she did. It helped that we had separated bike lanes pretty much everywhere. It is entirely possible if the infrastructure supports it.
This sort of thing is why I'm personally a big fan of the 15-minute city concept.
Only bulk drinks (crates of beer/soda/...) are challenging. But for those, very often delivery systems are in place that surely are more efficient than individual trips anyways.
Whenever I go grocery shopping I mount a milk crate to my rear rack (this takes about six seconds) and put the cases in vertically. I can also carry a 4L jug of milk in the handlebar-mounted basket.
Usually we’d just stop on the way home from work or whatever to do small, quick shops for whatever we needed.
But on the rare occasion where we did need to do a “big shop”, we just ordered groceries online for delivery the next day. All the major UK supermarkets offer this, with free or very cheap delivery, delivered by environmentally-friendly electric trucks.
There are billions of people that manage their shopping without a car. Millions of them live in North America. Surely, some of them have solved this problem for a family without having to go shopping daily.
So what if I own and use a small family car, to go shopping and take the kids places?
Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
My neighborhood is a real life 15min city, and most people of all ages choose to walk. We don't need to prevent families from owning a car and taking it grocery shopping once a week.
There's also plenty of other, more practical / affordable microcars [1] on the road around where I live, they're considered equivalent to mopeds in terms of legality / requirements but you don't need a helmet, they seat two people and some groceries, etc. They used to be mainly popular for elderly people but they seem to catch on to other people too. Great for local traffic.
Even if there’s 5% of vehicles that couldn’t use them, it would still be a large decrease in local particulates.
(I don’t expect this to happen, of course, absent draconian particulate emissions laws.)
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
What am I missing? Why wouldn’t the tires experience the same forces in both scenarios?
EVs wear tires more quickly, in general, because they are very heavy and produce more torque (and drivers are more likely to request that torque, also).
> because they're transmitting power both when starting and stopping, not just when starting.
bri3d’s adjacent post is what my thoughts would be on why EV’s consume more tires.
It's because it's wrong. If you decelerate the same vehicle at the same rate, the tires can't even tell whether the deceleration is from regenerative braking or friction braking, so the only difference is less brake dust with regenerative braking.
If anything it's the opposite because regenerative braking is more effective when braking is gradual, giving the driver a direct convenience and financial incentive to brake less aggressively (better range, buy less gas or charging), which generates less tire wear.
Because it's completely wrong. The tires indeed experience the same force and don't care where the energy is dumped. As other posters wrote, the increased tire pollution from EVs is because they tend to be heavier, and because their considerable extra torque is likely to be (ab)used by their drivers. Yours truly included, guilty as charged, though I do practice restraint... often.
My EV has three modes - Eco, Normal and Sport. In Sport you get shoved back in your seat from the instant torque, and the fast 0-60 times. In Eco you take off like in a normal car.
You also need to remember that traction control is inherrently easier and faster in an EV as the ECU has fine grained control of how much power to send to the tyres and can effect it near instantly.
You do realize you can drive without just slamming the accelerator pedal straight to the floor every time you start going right?
For the tires it doesn't matter if the energy from stopping is transferred into brakes or back into a motor though?
A model Y would be the comparison to a CRV (model Y is 400 pounds / 10% heavier).