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Comment by dirck-norman | Hacker News Reader

5 minute swap is not needed for this.

Well, if it degrades to 90% after three years, and let’s extrapolate to 81% after another two to three years, then a battery swap in 5 minutes might be reasonable to do instead of charging once every three to five years or so. I guess it depends on the quality and retained capacity on the batteries being swapped in.

The vast majority of charging is done at home, though. Five-minute-charging/swapping is basically a gimmick to show off to your friends, and only really sees (questionable) use during that once-a-year road trip.

The main value in these technologies is to shut up the "But sometimes I want to drive for 20 hours without being forced to take even a single 30-minute break!" pseudo-argument as to why an EV is "impossible" for their lifestyle. Same with the Lucid Air and its 1000km range: basically zero people truly need it, but it needs to exists in order to drag the last few holdouts into the future.

When my road trip is in negative temperatures, I appreciate not having to be in the cold for too long. I think the bigger adoption issue is thoughts of scaling the charging stations. If there’s a line of cars at a liquid fuel pump, one can still get fuel in twenty or thirty minutes. If there’s a line of four cars at every charger and every car takes 15 minutes to charge on average, that’s an hour before you can start.

> Well, if it degrades to 90% after three years, and let’s extrapolate to 81% after another two to three years, then a battery swap in 5 minutes might be reasonable

eh? are you saying that something that is done once every 5 years has to be done inside 5 minutes? I strongly disagree.

> charging once every three to five years or so

Um, that's not how charging works at all.

That’s not how sentences or quotations work at all.

> Well, if it degrades to 90% after three years, and let’s extrapolate to 81% after another two to three years,

That sounds like a phone battery, not an EV battery. Modern EVs should last 15-20 years before seeing significant degredation.

That was assuming, based on their recharge count, daily 10% to 98% rapid charging. You’d only see that in a vehicle of this range if it’s being used as like a courier vehicle or moving billboard. Pretty much the actual worst cases.

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