Maybe the solution is to have better business practices around the technology that we do have. Why does the battery needs to be part of the car at all? It clearly depreciates and is technologically disrupted on a different time frame than the car itself. A Tesla Roadster is a fine car and will continue to be for decades, if you can only refresh it's battery pack every 10 years or so.
I'm thinking of a modular battery that is hot swapable at the charge stations and where you only pay it's depreciation based on what you actually use. This would significantly lower ownership costs for light users and drastically increase efficiency and flexibility for heavy users who are no longer dependent on charge times. Since it's modular, you load the number of units you need, say one battery unit for a Leaf, two for a Model S or 10 units for a light truck, all in standardized format and with their own computing that tracks things like life span, charge cycles performed by the user himself for proper billing etc.
I know Tesla experimented with and later abandoned battery swap, but that's predictable without the proper business structure in place, no one is going to leave the most expensive part of their car back at the charge station. If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics.
Actually, Tesla's batteries don't degrade that much (10% average after 160,000 miles [0]). Turns out, with proper thermals and not charging/discharging fully vastly decreases their degradation according to other hacker news people on the topic [1].
Same reason batteries in your phone or laptop are each a different shape and non-removable. They are an integral part of the design, a significant part of the weight & volume, with significant thermal concerns, etc... many electric cars today even use the battery as a "stressed member", aka the battery provides rigidity to the frame. How exactly will that be hotswappable in two minutes by John Doe?
Basically, the point is a standardized, easily removable, hotswappable widget makes a lot of sense when it's a minor item. But when it's half the weight, value, volume, and engineering challenge, you have to sacrifice all of those attributes to use the hotswap widget.
This originally made me think, if only we could pump fluid electrolyte in & out of the car, and let the battery take whatever form it likes. Then I realized that's called a flow battery, and then I realized that a hydrogen fuel cell is a type of flow battery.
While the 18650 Lithium Ion cell is a standardized shape, the chemistry between Lithium Ion implementations is different from company to company.
A big reason for Tesla's design was that Panasonic's Cells (a partner of Tesla) was superior on power-density / weight.
I expect that power-density / weight will continue to be an important factor in electric cars, especially when you need thousands of these cells to power an electric vehicle. As such, I don't expect lithium ion cells (even "standard" 18650 ones) to become a commodity.
Lets put it this way: how many battery packs actually reach 300-miles in practice?
Spoiler alert: Chevy Bolt is over 230 miles. Nissan Leaf is 150 miles. If you want 300 mile electric range, your only option is Panasonic (and by transitivity, Tesla, who is their only customer at the moment).
That feat alone means that Panasonic cells give you a real technological advantage. A Panasonic Li-Ion cell is worth far more than a typical Li-Ion cell. It is NOT a commodity, but a fundamental business advantage these days. If the other LiIon cell manufacturers manage to get real improvements to Power Density / weight, then maybe we can talk about Commodifying LiIon cells.
I've encountered many reports of issues with safety regarding autopilot or breakdown/less repairability of the vehicles due to lack of experience in design, but what evidence is there for Tesla cutting corners regarding battery safety specifically?
Summery is that, compared to NCM, NCA inhibits thermal runaway at much lower temperatures, offers significantly less short circuit resistance, slightly less overcharge buffer before thermal runaway, significantly faster thermal runaway after overcharge buffer is exhausted.
The result of thermal runaway is fire or explosion.
If you have the best product, you can pretty much choose your customers. But I suspect the choice is done simply with pricing to reflect better performance qnd or branding associated with it. Hence, counterfit cells are more common than real ones by top manufacturers. Even the pros are giving up trying to ID fakes and just focusing on testing whatever shows up in the box.
I do wonder if cars based on sodium-sulfur fuel cells would behave well.
In principle they should be good (you just need some small battery to start them), but the problems of making them safe may overwhelm any gain you get from using fuel cells.
>>Same reason batteries in your phone or laptop are each a different shape and non-removable.
What? Most laptops on the market today have removable batteries, to the point where you can buy spare battery packs for them for long trips. Same with a lot of smartphones.
There are few consumer laptops with removable (pops right out) batteries these days. I haven't seen one since the early 00s.
At best there are still those which are user-serviceable (requires a screwdriver and some finesse at the least). And Apple products where you cannot do even that.
Some business models still have the external removable battery, but have lower specs and higher price than consumer counterparts.
Almost no modern smartphones have removable batteries. It's rare enough that the LG G5 tried to make it a selling point a few years ago.
A lot of smart phones? Maybe I'm not a discerning enough Android fanboy, but none of my phones have had removable batteries:
* Nexus 4
* Nexus 5
* Nexus 6P
* Samsung Galaxy S7
* Samsung Galaxy S9
The only recent phones I was aware of with removable batteries were the LG G*, but I don't think the latest model of those has a removable battery anymore either.
Up until last year at least swappable batteries were still common in lower-end smartphones. Generally none of those OEMs sold spare batteries though; even when many high-end models had swappable batteries, up until 2015/2016-ish, almost no OEMs sold spare batteries. I think it was the beginning of 2016 that LG actually started selling spare batteries, the same year they produced their last two high-end smartphones with swappable batteries.
Even though swappable batteries do continue on the low-end, I think maybe [in the US] only Motorola actually makes spare batteries available for consumers to purchase, even for devices that don't have readily swappable batteries. I think this year Motorola will ditch swappable batteries, pretty sure, but will supposedly continue to make spares available for select models via Ifixit.
Renault already offer battery leasing - you buy the car, but lease the battery based on your annual mileage. It has been reasonably popular, but it's far from a game changer.
For a quick recharge the current-generation 120 kW SuperChargers were deemed good enough. Now that they're growing their fleet of mobile service trucks, battery replacement might get re-introduced as an at-home service.
This was in reference to a program that sold an insurance program to effectively allow you to swap out a worn battery for no (or low) cost. It also was shut down as it was found not to really be necessary, though.
From what I've heard (in Fully Charged videos), Renault did it for similar reasons and similarly expects the number of owners using battery leases instead of ownership to drop off soon as most buyers are now comfortable with the ownership model and prefer it.
«Why does the battery needs to be part of the car at all? It clearly depreciates and is technologically disrupted on a different time frame than the car itself. A Tesla Roadster is a fine car and will continue to be for decades, if you can only refresh it's battery pack every 10 years or so.»
Cars overall depreciate on the scale of 10/15 years or so. Right now the depreciation rates are the same. It's an interesting artifact of ICE vehicles that people don't expect any car's drive train to last more than ~15 years. It shouldn't be a surprise that car manufacturers were skeptical of battery tech right up until they hit about that same magic lifetime number. It also shouldn't be a surprise that car manufacturers won't have a lot of incentive to push it past that magic lifetime number, because that would affect car replacement rates and that would affect the bottom line.
Mostly battery replacements look to keep the used car / secondary markets busy, and if we expect to see interesting innovations in battery replacements that's probably where we'll see them as more electric cars get resold to secondary and tertiary owners. (Just as we see the used car markets pushing innovations in after-market parts in general.)
You are right in that maybe leaves room for a disruption that someone might be interested in a "car for life" model where electric cars might be built far more sustainably with an ideal towards larger reuse of the vehicle over the owner's lifetime and a larger depreciation scale on the order of multiple decades.
That would be a huge game changer, and would potentially be great for the planet (less steel production alone, conceivably). It would also take a lot of work to make it happen, given the existing industry reliance on the current business model for most of a century now. It would also be one extremely huge disruption in so many downstream industries, secondary markets, etc, to the point where it may be more of a revolution (in the industrial sense, but also perhaps the war sense) than a "simple" disruption.
I see lots of 15+ year old cars around, my car is over 20 years old and still works fine. About 25% of vehicles used in the US today are at least 15 years old. The drivetrains already very often outlast the body/frame falling apart from rust, at least in places that salt the roads during winter.
Isn’t it before electronics heavily started to get into the cars ?
Of course, we can view the car as a single purpose ‘move from A to B’ device, but there’s other viewpoints where the car has a performance (speed, efficiency, handling assist, smoother engine management) profile, quality of life and security features (auto cruising, speed limit detection, tire pressure detection, auto braking etc)
All of these should have evolved enough in 10 years that you get significant benefits from an upgrade.
Cars have made pretty heavy use of electronics for around 30 years at this point. My mid-90s car has electronic fuel injection, computer controlled transmission, a dozen sensors in the engine bay, anti-lock brakes, keyless entry, power windows, motorized seats, heated seats, digital cabin thermostat, cruise control, etc. There's even a stereo.
Obviously new cars are in general an upgrade. Most people driving old cars do not do so because they want to, they do it because new cars are too expensive.
As someone experinced here, most pre OBD2 electronics are very often much easier to hack for performance applications. Obd2 started in 1996 in the usa. The extra sensors and data are not the issue, quite welcome actually. The issue is the opaqueness of the newer hardware.
Not to mention that they're easier to diagnose and fix. Having diagnostic data available to you was fantastic for me as a young car nerd with no experience.
I drive a 30 year old vehicle at times, replaced the engine with a japanese engine at around 60k on it, at a cost of around $2,000 with new timing belt and associated accessories/pumps/etc. The engine is rock solid still pushing out about 450 HP but the suspension, frame, and body are pretty beat at ~200k miles on the car. I would say you really aren't going to have an enjoyable car at much more than 130-150k miles, whether or not the drivetrain is replaced. I did a good amount of work in college on fatigue cycles in metals, and with our roads and infrastructure deteriorating this is only going to decrease the usable life of an average frame/suspension.
I'd dispute the idea that a car with 130k-150k miles can't be enjoyable. I've had multiple BMWs with more than that many miles that were plenty enjoyable. None of them had any drivetrain replacements though all of them had suspension replacements as should be expected as those are all wear components. I've even had other BMW owners remark that my 200k+-mile car drives better than their own with ~60k miles due to the recency of the suspension component replacements on mine.
There's certainly degradation that occurs to a car with lots of mileage, but it's generally with the interior and the electrical systems. There may be some exterior corrosion, too, if you live in the appropriate climate though corrosion resistance has improved a lot on cars lately. And, of course, all bets are off if you don't properly maintain the car.
I drive a toyota at 180k and it's fine. It's not pretty or perfect, but it gets me to and from work with no issue.
I should get around to replacing some suspension components to make it more comfortable to drive, probably will later this year when I get some time. They're not terribly expensive.
In Belarus there are quite a few of BMW and Audi approaching 30 years or more. According to a person that works in a shop specializing in their repair the biggest issue is rust. The engine and other parts are mostly original with minimal repairs. In Belarus a good mechanic earns 700-1000 usd/month and his time is cheaper then getting replacement parts.
Yeah, that's a fascinating technical question if someone were to try for a "car for life" model. My college car was still driving fine when I sold it (at about 13 years in its life and something less that 70k miles), but the interior plastics were deteriorating faster than I would have expected to the point where pliers were needed to be used to adjust the a/c as the knobs broke off and probably the window cranks were about to follow.
The other side of it too is accidents are likely to always be an issue with cars (even in a world of self-driving cars, I suspect), and there are plenty of other safety reasons cars shouldn't be expected to be driven for too many years without replacement.
Yup. I've got a 20 year old BMW with 150k miles on it, and it's a fantastic car. But things wear out.
Electric or ICE, as you hit 150-200k, you'll have long since worn through all kinds of rubber bushings on virtually every part, you'll be approaching the point where you've had to replace starter or alternator, you'll have (hopefully) replaced your suspension a couple of times, and so on. As the value continues to decline, the 'value' of spending parts+labor money on any of these replacements starts to decline.
The transmission, especially on an automatic, is the thing that often does them in. I just recently had one go on a 18 year old Chevy Imapla and decided to sell it rather than fixing it. The body and interior are in very good condition. The problem is that other stuff is starting to go. For example the AC has never been serviced and will be an issue in the near future, I live in Atlanta where that is needed. I've gone through two EGR valves, throttle position sensor etc.. The car, working perfectly can sell for up to $4500 with new tires, but it has old tires (-$400), plus the transmission rebuild/replace is going to be between $2100-$2500. The engine itself is in great shape with no problems and if I wanted to dump more money into it I could drive the car to 300 plus thousand miles, but it is starting to need to have things fixed more and more....
It helped that I was able to get a brand new loaded Volt for $9,000 off plus an additional $7500 tax rebate. which in the end means that I have the best of both worlds for $25,000 with a full warranty etc..
Can I ask what parts you're referring to specifically when you say "replace the suspension"? My car is past 100k at this point and I'm looking forward to what might need to be done to keep it reasonably nice.
Usually, you'd be talking dampers (often called shock absorbers in the UK), and often the springs will have broken.
Having said that, I remember that 20 years ago, those kinds of parts would need to be replaced after maybe 60-80k miles. However, everything seems to be better built now - my van has 214k on it, and no sign of needing replacements - same goes for all the cars I've bought and sold (20 or so) in the last 3 years.
It's pretty commonly for shocks/struts/dampers to be worn out by 50-80k miles. As early as 30k. Sure, the car will still seem to generally drive fine, but the point is that all of these things get worse over time.
Further on down the mileage line, virtually everything is wearing out. Rubber bushings in control arms. Rubber bushings in all your rear suspension points. There's rubber EVERYWHERE on cars, and it all wears out. Motor mounts, transmission mounts, shock mounts. Again, it'll still go down the road, but it won't drive like new. You might have a lot of slop in steering, slop in cornering. The car might pull one way or another under acceleration. It'll be louder, harsher, clunkier.
You at least need to do struts and shocks, probably springs if they're separate. You'll want to check the strut towers are still decent, or if they need reinforcement.
Going a little deeper, probably your tie rods and sway bar links are shot, as are the control arm bushings (which may or may not be integral with the entire control arm).
Most of the parts that degrade in a suspension are replacable. Bushings, stabilizer links, steering links, shocks, etc. are all easily replaced in most cars (n.b. EVs such as Tesla are the same as any other car in regards to these parts -- they will wear over time). The core frame structure is not going to suffer any significant fatigue from normal driving. Rust is another matter of course.
I think we might already be in that future with electrics. Just look at most tram and subway systems in major cities, you will usually find a mix of rolling stock with some produced as far back as 60s or 70s and still in daily service. The equivalent ICE bus has long since been scrapped.
Not necessarily by design, it's simply inherent to electric drive, you have much less "metal grinding against lubricated metal with a controlled wear rate" situations that seems to doom ICEs and the associated transmissions on the long run.
There was an Israeli battery/car tech startup that was built on that model, but it sadly went kaput. I still firmly believe that the hot-swap model is the winner long term.
I used to think the same, but I'm starting to disagree.
Batteries aren't as "fungible" as something like gas or electricity is. (is that the right word to use for this?)
You can be reasonably sure that gas is gas, and electricity is electricity, but not all batteries are going to be the same. Some will be higher capacity, some will have greater life, some will be heavier or lighter, some cars or trucks will need bigger or smaller batteries, etc... Some could even be damaged and unsafe, which is something you don't really get with gas (sure bad gas could ruin your car, but gas from a pump isn't going to catch fire randomly and hurt you because it's bad)
At the end of the day, it's just too much variation for me to trust a random battery pulled from a depot of them.
The thought experiment that put me over the edge was imagine instead of batteries, we were talking about tires. What if it was deemed better to swap out your tire when you had to put air in it. So you brought it to your shop and they pulled the wheel and tire off, then put one that they had in-store on full of air, and they refilled the one you gave them and handed it to someone else.
Would you trust that? How would it change how we handle tires on cars? Would the public go for it? I really don't think they would, I know I wouldn't, and it's the same kind of feeling with car batteries.
I like your tire analogy. While it is probably true that the risks would be lower with battery swaps, it is also true that the marginal benefit isn't so great as people tend to perceive.
Would you take the marginal risk of a battery swap (plus the costs of all those batteries in inventory throughout the country) in order to save 60 minutes on a 600 mile trip?
And is the infrastructure to do all of that really less expensive than putting a charger at enough restaurants for you to just stop and eat while the car charges?
>Would you take the marginal risk of a battery swap (plus the costs of all those batteries in inventory throughout the country) in order to save 60 minutes on a 600 mile trip?
I honestly think I would for a trip like that. But at the same time I wouldn't want to be stuck with a potentially "sub-par" battery after that trip either. And those 2 things seem pretty at odds with one another.
Like in a perfect world I'd love to be able to have it as an option, but I'm not willing to give up "my" battery in my current (hypothetical!) car for one of unknown quality.
Perhaps a "booster" system would work then in this case? You don't swap out the actual battery in the car, but instead swap out batteries that go in your trunk or something and charge your actual battery while driving! Then you don't care about how shitty that pack is, you are only using it to "recharge" on the go!
600 miles is equal to about 10 hours of driving (very roughly). There are very few people who would do that trip without stopping at least a few times (bathroom, food, stretch, etc...) and if charging infrastructure is common enough (which it will be) than a good chunk of those 60 minutes can be done in concert with those stops. And compared to ICE vehicles, most would need about 2 re-fueling stops to make that trip[1]. So an aggressive ICE trip would still result in about 10-20 minutes of re-fueling time.
Another thing to consider, it is much more likely that we will see 400mi range electrics sooner and/or easier than we could roll out a large network of battery swap stations. I think the concept of battery swap is solid. Most batteries have BMS systems that prevent over/under charging and any physical damage can be detected. Plus the battery would likely be owned by a third party, so it would not be a big deal if you got stuck with a bad battery, you would just swap it out for another one. The main issue is logistics. Much harder to build a network of battery swap stations then it is to put some fast chargers in parking lots. And if we can get the range up to 400 miles, then a 600 mile trip could be done with 20-30 minutes of super charging.
[1] Assuming a ~300 mile ICE range, you need to fill up at the start, at the middle, and at the end (although one could wait till the next morning, but I think it should still count). Whereas electric, you start full (because you plugged in overnight prior to departure), and you end full (assuming you can plug in overnight at your destination). These are rough assumptions, but I think 2 fuel stops is a good approximation, but many would need 3 (including my own ICE car, which gets ~250 miles per tank).
> if charging infrastructure is common enough (which it will be) than a good chunk of those 60 minutes can be done in concert with those stops.
This was really the point that I was getting at. It is ultimately cheaper to put good chargers at every restaurant and bathroom stop than it is to put battery swap stations (with inventory) at enough locations.
If you or someone else can do it, I genuinely encourage you to! I do think that ideally battery swap tech could be a big benefit, but I just don't see it taking off for so many reasons.
The major one being your first paragraph. Charging tech is getting better every day, and we are already at the point where 15 minutes can get you a good chunk of charge with current batteries in some cars. I think things will change (no more "gas stations" (or places solely devoted to providing fuel), and a lot more charging spots at destinations that are worth spending 30 minutes at), the bit of charging time every few hours will begin to become a non-issue, and the whole complicated logistics nightmare of managing a fleet of physical battery packs at various depots across the country will go the way of the flying car. That thing that everyone thinks they wanted but it was just never practical to have.
Gasoline is largely fungible because it's required by law to be. What can be called gasoline, what additives can (and are required to be) put into it, how much energy it has per liter, etc., are all regulated.
There was a time where gasoline brands mattered, and the gas you got from Esso might have been slightly different than the gas from Sinclair or Hess or whatever, but that was intentionally regulated into irrelevance because the benefit to consumers of a consistent product was more valuable than allowing brands to differentiate themselves.
It took several decades after the widespread adoption of the car (and gasoline as the dominant fuel) for this to happen, and during this time users had to struggle with varying fuels produced from different feedstocks, gumming of engines, dilution of crankcase oil, etc. (This is referred to in period motoring publications as "the Fuel Problem".) The automobile industries and the oil industries basically pointed fingers at each other until the US Bureau of Standards had to step in and mediate on a consistent set of standards that the refiners would produce fuel to, and the engine manufacturers would design their engines against. If this hadn't happened, and the market had been left to sort it out, I suspect you would have ended up having to fill your Ford car only at Sinclair stations, based on some Ford/Sinclair arrangement or whatever.
Unfortunately the 'solution' to the Fuel Problem in the 30s involved the introduction of tetraethyl lead, which mars what would have been a good example of mutually beneficial public-private cooperation and useful regulation.
Sure, I put 87 octane in our SUV and 89 in the audi, but yeah for the most part gas is gas, unless something is wrong.
Getting 2 random batteries to have less than 10% variance among them is going to be a lot harder (especially when battery health changes a lot depending on how they are treated. Users running them to near empty in cold weather is going to shorten the life a lot faster than the guy who only runs it to 50% before swapping out every time), and I have a feeling that the amount of "problem" batteries will be much higher than the amount of times i've ever had "problem gas" (which is basically 0 times so far).
yes, but we use a different method of measuring than you do.
IIRC ours is the average of 2 different methods (it normally shows as R+M/2 on our pumps), whereas I believe the EU uses only the one that tends to be a lot higher (RON I think)
Most gas stations around me have 87, 89, and 91, and sometimes 93. I believe your octane numbers will be on average like 6 higher than ours for the same gas.
I am assuming in a hypothetical battery swap world batteries would be rigorously tested before replacement. How hard do you think it would be (sincerely)? For the gasoline analogy, there are lots of ways to achieve an octane rating but I suspect most people only use the "do I hear engine knock" test. Similarly, I would be fine of a guarantee of if I have 300 mi of electric range (whether it's 300, 310, or 320) under normal driving conditions for a battery swap, as a trade off for convenience.
I really think it would be a lot harder than testing gasoline.
For starters, with gas and other things like it, there is a supply chain which is pretty tight. If one supplier starts giving bad gas, you can blacklist them and move on. With batteries you'd have to test them after every single use, because you don't know what the last user has done to them.
Then they need to be physically inspected, because a puncture or deep gouge or crack or something could cause big issues.
Then their actual capacity needs to be tested some how. I'll admit that I've been outside of the battery ecosystem for a while, but years ago it wasn't all that easy to "spot check" a random battery to find it's health and capacity. Most devices would gain that knowledge about a battery over a few charge cycles. You need to make sure you know it off the bat, and you can't be wrong or I'll lose faith in the company and the tech.
Then throw in the complication of different sizes, different shapes, different technologies, different requirements (this isn't just the "gas" part of fuel, it's also the "gas tank", so one size will never fit all), and now you are maintaining huge banks of different kinds of batteries all while charging them to the right amount without degrading them, and checking that users didn't run them in below freezing to almost 0 percent which would reduce the lifetime and aren't damaging them in any way which would be very unsafe.
In an ideal world, it sounds like a great idea, but I just don't trust that it can be pulled off without making the user's life worse than if they didn't do it.
A couple of things: when I think about it, I implicitly think about it as a vendor specific thing. Like Tesla supercharger stations. Agree that battery standards across makers likely impossible. Second, I think the major upside is removing a large potential liability from each vehicle - as hybrid vehicles are entering "old used car" ages/mileages, all your points about assessing the health of the battery apply to 2ary buyers and ability for people to monetize their old vehicles.
Bringing it back around to the topic, I don't know that we can wait on solid state and this represents a work around while smarter people that I can figure that out.
Sure, but my point is that you have gasoline being produced by many companies and production facilities, from many different/blended inputs (heavy oil with low gravity, NGLs, ethanol mixture, et al), and with proprietary additions.
There's no reason that batteries can't be checked that the meet spec before they are replaced in your car in the same way.
I'd be surprised if each battery couldn't come with a little computer that tracks charge times, cycles and power output over time. It would make it trivial to monitor whether or not a battery is currently serviceable (or whether it will expire prematurely).
For EV fleets we used to only be able to do this per vehicle (not by battery) while the vehicle was home and charging, by shipping the fleet battery metrics to a central aggregator. But that is overkill for consumer vehicles.
With Tesla, every single cell has a computer chip monitoring its performance on a variety of issues. And the aggregate data for that is all called back to HQ on a regular basis. Tesla knows better than you ever possibly could as to how well each and every cell in your battery packs is doing.
Yea, worth noting that the small-tank propane market also works like this. When you go to a supermakert or gas station, you just swap an empty tank for a full one. Refill is done after hours at scale.
Notably, 10 years ago I could swap a butane or propane tank from one vendor with one of another vendor at any place that sold butane/propane.
The last time I tried to do that (6 months ago) they rejected it. I had to go to the original supplier, as they were no longer refilling each others branded containers. In spite of standard fittings/sizes/etc. They've become significantly less fungible, and I can no longer just go to the nearest or cheapest supplier based on my needs.
Even worse, I've just realised that I now effectively have two un-refillable tanks, as Homebase just shut down all my local branches. Which I paid deposits on when I bought them, obviously. Nice ...
Yep. They also over-charge for propane, sell the tanks not fully-filled, and don't compensate you for propane left in the tanks when you return them. All to increase convenience slightly (I can get the swap tanks at the supermarket or Home Depot, but I have to go to a specific gas station to fill the tanks I own). I strongly prefer the non-swap solution.
Oh, that guy. I met the Better Place CEO once. Good looking, great talker, knew many national leaders, totally unworkable business plan. Along the lines of "take over the world, with 10x growth per year." In a business where you actually have to build stations and cars, not just distribute software, and the margins are low. I wouldn't go all the way to "con man", but it was close. More like someone who bought into their own hype.
Automated battery swapping takes tight standardization. It's in use for some industrial robotic AGVs.[1][2][3] Mechanically, it works, but all the vehicles have to be very similar. A taxi fleet, maybe.
> If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics.
I wouldn't. Not to be a naysayer, just giving some context. The cars I buy are already in that price range, and I already pay "comparable gasoline prices" (via gas, hah), so in my area all I'd gain is a different type of gasoline when in city, and when I go camping/etc I'd be at risk due to being in slow adoption areas.
Don't get me wrong, I want electric, but due to the areas I drive I've already settled to likely being stuck with Hybrids for the next X years.
With that said, if the model you laid out still ended up cheaper than gasoline it would at least tip the balance towards its favor. I just can't handle a zero sum trade - and I imagine the same would be true for many around this large, slow to adapt land masses.
Cities will become much, much nicer though. Air quality alone. I look forward to it
Business practice seems to be shifting, at least that's what I see where I sit. DHL has started delivering parcels using electric vans and from what I've read today's batteries aren't a problem for that.
Today's batteries aren't really good enough for driving on vacation, but private practice is moving too. The number of 25-year-olds with driving licenses is dropping, I've seen surveys that list the iphone above a BMW as a status symbol, and then there are phenomena like this: https://www.citymetric.com/transport/driving-london-has-been...
This summer will be my 3rd year driving our Tesla Model X from Boston to Hilton Head, SC. Superchargers are everywhere, it's an easy drive. We also drive from Boston 2+ hours into NH to go skiing all winter, also a breeze...
> Today's batteries aren't really good enough for driving on vacation
Picked up our Model 3 in September. We've already driven it to West Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, as well as multiple trips inside of Florida. Hit 10,000 miles yesterday.
I would never argue that road tripping in a Tesla is as worry-free as it is in a ICE-powered vehicle, but with a modicum of forethought I'd say the Model 3 is plenty good enough for driving on vacation today. The hardest part is limiting yourself to hotels that offer Level 2 chargers, but pretty much all new construction hotels have EV charging of some sort.
Buying the car and hot swapping the batteries (with an automated machine similar to going through a car wash, no less) was the vision of A Better Place, a short lived Israeli startup. That company failed, but I wouldn't say it's impossible by a long shot.
And here, for comparison, is the original Wired hype article I remember first reading which led me to wondering "hey what ever happened…" a few years ago.
While your suggestion is good for the vast majority of driving situations, there is one kind of driving where it won't work:
Off road driving
Unless we get a battery that has - at a minimum - the same capabilities as a tank of gas, off roading is going to be relegated to strictly internal combustion, or maybe hybrid powered only.
Right now, even the tech in a Tesla would not get a decent off road rig (up-armored, lifted, accessories, large MT tires, etc) out to the trail, over/thru it, and back to civilization. What we have right now will generally get you over a decent trail - but you'll probably have to trailer the rig in and out of the area.
Even if solid-state batteries prove to be practical, it still might not be enough for any kind of serious off roading capability; that is, anything more than a "day trip", or where unplanned excursions off the route are involved.
Because you won't have any easy ways to recharge the battery while on the trail.
Right now, you can carry your own fuel with you, and refuel as needed or if there's an emergency or whatever. Other people when out with a group may also have fuel others can use - so the concept of universality comes into play.
It's not possible to bring a generator (and fuel) or a solar panel with you to charge the battery of a hypothetical off road vehicle, unless this new battery tech allows for short charge times at lower voltages/currents as well (which probably isn't on the table). And you likely can't bring along spare battery packs - the size and weight would be prohibitive (then again, some people bring along replacement axles); unless the weight and size of such solid-state batteries are less.
Yes, off roading is a small segment of the population, and so maybe it would be ok if that portion remained to use IC engines; presumably a battery swap system, or a solid-state battery pack might be the solution for the majority.
Battery technology, the management of charge/discharge/heat etc is the "secret sauce" that differentiates EVs. Anybody can stick an electric motor in a chassis. No carmaker is going to want to give that up for an industry standard one-size-fits-all generic battery.
This is an obvious idea hampered by the business model impossibilities of owning $20,000 battery packs which you can only improve in value by a few dollars every time you exchange them. The inventory / infrastructure / damage costs are too high to justify it.
A battery pack has between 500 and 1000 charge cycles, so each swap on the $20K pack will recover you $20-40 in depreciation. It's the main cost of using an electric car.
So then, the business challenge becomes to extract more value from a pack than a car owner can. There are many opportunities to do that:
- much improved inventory management, buy in bulk, monitor and adjust charging parameters etc. to prolong battery life based on observed performance of the specific battery type.
- this allows you to optimize battery purchase and chemistry to minimize overall cost even at the risk of a reduced lifetime
- centralized recharge gives you economies of scale to purchase cheap electricity during the night and enter all sorts of contracts where you can earn money by acting as a last-resort supplier at peak times, without actually using significant charge cycles on your inventory.
- the same economy of scale is passed down to customers who won't be bothered to install high power fast charge circuits, or are simply unable to.
- differential pricing based on customer needs, for example, new, top performance packs for home users and degraded packs with lower peak current for less sensitive customers, taxis and commercial fleets etc.
- batteries depreciate even when they sit charged; a modular system will allow customers to keep (and pay rent for) a single or low capacity unit on a regular basis for city use and opt for full capacity when they really need the extra range.
They replaced the battery in 90 seconds and it was completely automated.
I really like the idea of having gas stations replaced with battery stations. Drive in to the "pump", put in your credit card, and let the automated system replace your battery.
The space that was used for tanks could be devoted to charging infrastructure.
Tesla batteries are already highly modular and easily swappable. Having them be swapped every reload just doesn't make any sense.
I bet in ten years having your battery swapped is about the same as having your belt and pump swapped. A couple hours mechanic fees plus the cost of a new battery minus the resale value of the old one. Done within a day, simple once every 250k kilometers to keep your car run as new.
A model 3 without a battery would still be 30k, and that's with Tesla on razor margins and with the much cheaper supercharger infrastructure.
What about the opposite ie the car structure should be the battery!
Carbon Fibre can be a very effective Anode at double the strength of steel - not v effective at it’s max strength of 10x Steel.
Not as energy dense as curent Tesla batteries, but at the system level, should in theory save 50% of weight for same capacity, which is huge!
Also lower energy density is naturaly safer, ie less likely to go up in flames.
Just guessing, but this might partly explain how the Tesla Semi Truck is getting the claimed 500 mile range, that most commentators say is impossible?
They could double or triple that range by going to a diesel electric drive-train. Trains (in the USA, at least) use a diesel-electric drive-train to great effect.
There is a pretty significant systems engineeing effort to integrate the battery performance with the motor and power electronics. Tesla does a fantastic job in this regard and that is likely responsible for their high efficiency. You lose a lot of ability to do the integration in an optimized way if you have to design around different batteries.
All that to say there is a lot to be gained by not doing a battery swap system.
Won't be surprised that Tesla jumping on the chance to cancel the battery swap program when the reported popularity was low was due to something else.
It could be that a quick hot swap is technologically complicated, especially given Tesla manufacturing tolerances. Also if the hot swap fails, you're stranded without a car.
I have a Tesla and don't think that kind of hot swap is necessary with the supercharger network and ease of charging in my garage, what I would like to see is public pricing on them swapping my battery with a new one after 10 years.
Tesla’s hot swap demo was a compliance hack to garner as many ZEV credits as possible in California. There was no way it was going to be rolled out if you observed how rapidly they rolled out Supercharger stations instead.
No they don't, everything is already in place. In a few years the industry will catch up to Tesla and we'll see further price decreases across the board and mass EV adoption using current tech.
The battery will have to be reinvented for large planes to become electric, but that's a different discussion. Small planes will be able to ride off the EV battery tech to start the electrification of that whole industry.
Last time I checked, the extraction process for lithium, which is needed for the batteries, still has a heavy impact on the environment. This article mentions a cost of 500,000 gallons (almost 2 million litres) of water for a tonne of lithium. [1] Considering that as of now the most lithium is produced in desert regions of Bolivia and Chile, using what little water exists there in the first place may be detrimental to the population of these regions.
Are there any news regarding new, more environment friendly mining processes?
I was just in the desert in Chile rock climbing (Valle de Los Condores), and there were tons of mines nearby. There were rivers and waterfalls everywhere, and a hydroelectric plant. It’s a weird climate, but water is definitely not lacking, even in the desert.
On the other hand, that valley is amazing and should be protected land
Tesla batteries are only ~2% lithium. The vast majority of the battery is nickel, followed by cobalt and aluminum.
Better mining practices are obviously still a good thing, but the environmental impact of lithium mining is pretty small when it comes to Tesla batteries.
You can still recycle frack water for use over and over again, which is increasingly common. By necessity water recycling has become a big business in the fracking industry.
"Sensing a chance for a big return, private-equity firms have invested more than $500 million into wastewater-disposal companies such as Solaris Water Midstream LLC, WaterBridge Resources LLC, Goodnight Midstream LLC and Oilfield Water Logistics LLC. There are roughly a dozen of these water-focused companies that analysts said could each be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. ... Some companies have a longer-term plan: recycling the wastewater to sell it back to drillers to reuse."
"The oil and gas industry is finding that less is more in the push to recycle water used in hydraulic fracturing. Slightly dirty water, it seems, does just as good a job as crystal clear when it comes to making an oil or gas well work. ... Until recently, many companies considered recycling too expensive or worried that using anything other than freshwater would reduce well output. But oil and gas companies are increasingly treating and reusing flowback water from wells, which unlike freshwater is very high in salt, with good results."
The fact that this is true, and that simultaneously there isn't a lithium battery recycling industry of any significant size indicates that lithium energy storage is still at an early stage. The prediction that costs will come down and that the economy around lithium batteries will grow to include recycling and other ancillary aspects of the value chain seem likely to be true.
> The fact that this is true, and that simultaneously there isn't a lithium battery recycling industry of any significant size indicates that lithium energy storage is still at an early stage
Where are all these lithium batteries ending up at? Landfills? Many other devices use lithium batteries, namely cellphones.
Small batteries are uneconomical to recycle, and most don't contain dangerous metals or other chemicals. Lead-acid batteries used for starter motors in cars are big, heavy, and contain lead, which you would pay to divert from landfills, even if recycling them isn't profitable on its own.
Lithium batteries from cars and large storage systems will be worth recycling when they are numerous enough. It's
unclear if a phone battery will ever be worth recycling.
First announced in 2016, supposedly finally arriving in 2020. Lets see. They all keep announcing stuff like this but there's still very few decent [non-Tesla] models on the road today.
What's the range though? Considering the battery pack is the main cost contributor, it's always possible to introduce a lower sticker price by further compromising on range.
No, it isn't. Prototypes have been shown already. It is roughly the outer size of the VW Golf, but offers larger interior space due to being designed to be electrical only, that means, the space of the engine can be saved:
https://www.t-online.de/auto/elektromobilitaet/id_83655386/e...
In a few years the industry will catch up to Tesla and we'll see further price decreases across the board and mass EV adoption using current tech.
Can this catch up be quantified? There must have been a study of how entire industries ramp up infrastructure and develop economies of scale. This has happened in wartime many, many times, and well resourced countries had an interest in how fast these things could happen. (And how they could be prevented.)
I think batteries with high investment but low operations cost, as well as self driving tech (comprehensive all solid state radars and lidars and cameras with sensor fusion can get quite expensive) fit the "mobility as service" or taxi / uber business model much better.
I stand corrected - last I checked, a production all-electric aircraft could do 15 minutes of flight time. It's nice to see a 4x improvement in the Pipistrel case. However, a 60 minute flight time is still 3 times smaller than the petrol counterpart.
Yeah but you can use the potential energy of the plane to produce power, just like car going down hill. Probably not gone work for small planes but it does have interesting advantages and new ways of thinking about planes.
For an airplane, there's no particular reason to turn potential energy into chemical energy for storage. Use the potential energy more directly to glide down to your approach point.
Airplanes are typically "driven" (using positive power) all throughout the flight regime, including descent and approach.
> Airplanes are typically "driven" (using positive power) all throughout the flight regime, including descent and approach.
No, not really. Descent in most aircraft is typically done at idle. In jet powered aircraft, final approach will be done with the engines at some speed above idle, but that is to minimize spool-up time during a go-around, rather than because the aircraft needs the thrust.
The airplanes where electrics could possibly compete are piston powered and flown with power in the descent. Electrics don’t even compete well there yet (and may never as they are just as heavy on landing as takeoff). For airplanes with higher fuel burn (long haul jets), they benefit significantly from being lighter at the end of the flight. Even my piston airplane picks up about 5 knots in cruise at 1/4 tanks vs full.
In jet descents, we rarely get what we prefer which is a slam dunk approach (much more fuel efficient to stay up high). Many times we’re down at 10K feet for 20+ miles because of sequencing. It’s only in the less busy airports where jets can regularly get slam dunk flight idle approaches.
Even there, you probably want to use potential->kinetic rather than potential->chemical->(later) kinetic transfers because of unavoidable losses at each conversion. On the runway, using regen instead of thrust reversers or beta/reverse would be helpful, but that's a vanishingly small part of the overall flight regime.
Even so, the aircraft still needs to make a comfortable gradual descent. It must maintain lift as it descends, otherwise it will stall (aerodynamically) and fall out of the sky. The controlled descent takes most of the energy that you might think could be recovered by e.g. windmilling the electric fan motors as generators.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with "must maintain lift as descends otherwise it will stall and fall out of the sky"...
Wings stall when they exceed their critical angle of attack. A descent is inherently a low AoA maneuver. Heck, in pretty much all aircraft of decent performance, they have devices on the wings to help "spoil" the lift of the wings to help the plane descend more quickly. They're sometimes called speed brakes, sometimes called spoilers.
Right, but you need a certain amount of forward speed relative to descent to maintain that AoA (assuming you want to maintain a fairly gradual, level descent; most passengers would find a steep nose-down descent alarming).
If you scrub off all your forward speed by turning your propeller/fan into a generator to charge the batteries, you have to push the nose down to maintain AoA.
> Descent in most aircraft is typically done at idle.
Went on my first flight in decades last year. The moment we started out descent really stands out to me, I remember the eerie-ness of hearing the engines slow down a ton all of a sudden and no one looking disturbed by it at all.
Alpha Electro, the new 2-seat electric trainer: the greenest way of learning to fly!
Performance of the Alpha Electro 2-seat electric trainer is tailored to the needs of flight schools. Short take-off distance, powerful 1000+ fpm climb, and endurance of one hour plus reserve. The Alpha Electro is optimized for traffic-pattern operations, where 13% of energy is recuperated on every approach, increasing endurance and at the same time enabling short-field landings.
Using propeller in the "beta" range for improved short-field operations and power recovery is a definite benefit to the Pipistrel. It's also an airplane that can't legally fly 95 miles/150 km and achieves those power recovery numbers only in pattern operations. I don't see that as representative or substitutive for even piston airplanes use cases.
The article begins by contradicting itself: "To deliver an electric vehicle that’s cheaper, safer and capable of traveling 500 miles on a single charge ..."
That's not a "car". A "car", as driven by a billion people every day, takes trips whose distances have a power-law distribution falling off from ~2 miles down to 150 miles, by which point you are looking at < 0.1% of trips. A large fraction of cars have never been driven on a 500 mile trip.
They'll probably never sell a 500mi EV just like they don't sell cars that go 500mi on a tank. EPA range on most cars will touch 400mi but that's about it. If anything, gas tanks are getting smaller as fuel efficiency goes up. Gas tanks take space, carry a heavy fuel that, in turn, reduces fuel economy, and so on. Batteries cost money. The only reason to make an EV with a greater range than most gas cars is if recharging is slow. The range then offsets charge time on the rare roadtrip. If you can charge your car quickly, suddenly there's not even a reason to have more than 200mi range. Already the 310mi range on our Tesla 3 seems a bit excessive when I've only had to supercharge it twice, and mostly I just get home and don't bother plugging it in because it doesn't NEED a charge every day.
They do sell cars that to over 500 miles on a tank. A Prius should do it. There was also an episode of top gear where one of them went 1000 miles in a jaguar without refueling.
I thought the same. I mean, you don't need vast technical advancements to build that anyway, though the battery would likely cost approximately $20,000 USD with current technology. It isn't necessarily obvious that really unconventional things would need to happen to get that down to ~$10k, and most uses would work with a much smaller battery than that.
> A large fraction of cars have never been driven on a 500 mile trip.
Consumers base buying decisions on the longest trip they expect to take.
Even if 360 days a year they commute for 10 miles, and then for 4th of July / Thanksgiving / winter holidays they take an extended 300+ mile road trip, they will consider a car capable of traveling 300+ miles.
Maybe the business model is the problem. If instead of owning a car, you use a car sharing model, you could use an EV car most days, swap for a pickup truck for a yard project, and swap for a gas car for your road trip (until EVs get that much range).
That makes it sound like a marketing / consumer optics problem then, not an engineering one.
When I was a kid my dad drove and older classic car daily, and for any trip longer than ~300 miles he would just get a rental and put the miles on that.
If people could get accustomed to that workflow, I think the need for 500 miles+ electric range is almost non-existent.
Daily drive the electric car, and spend ~$150 for a gas rental car once or twice a year for the big trip to visit the in-laws.
Yeah but rentals are extremely inconvenient. You need to arrange a ride to the rental place. Most of them close at 5:00pm unless you're close to an airport. So now you're also taking time off work. The paperwork takes at least 20-30 minutes for some ridiculous reason. They will try to upsell you on a larger vehicle, extra insurance, etc. It's a pain.
Once or twice a year it's tolerable. If you get to doing it monthly or more, it's becomes a major detractor.
> The paperwork takes at least 20-30 minutes for some ridiculous reason.
I am guessing you are not in the US. Over there, most big rental companies will let you join their program, club, or whatever they want to call it, for free(online, even). Which means you are pre-screened. You can pre-decline all this stuff you are talking about.
Then, you just make a reservation online, walk to the parking lot, pick your car, and just hand your id for them to check when leaving the parking lot. The whole process takes a couple of minutes really. When you are back, you just park at the dropoff location and walk away. At no point you have to bother with going to the counter.
> Consumers base buying decisions on the longest trip they expect to take.
Which makes little sense. I am frequently asked about this. Look, I'm optimizing for 99% of the trips I take, which are inside cities. The odd roadtrip? I'll take the savings from not having to pay for gas (workplace charges nothing) and just rent a car for that odd trip. Most rentals have unlimited miles anyway.
And that's because I have an earlier generation Leaf. A Tesla would be no issue.
It doesn't really matter what people actually need. What matters is what they think they need. Few people are coldly logical about big purchases like cars.
If you can charge your car both at work and at home that advantage is reduced drastically.
On the other hand you still think about those 0.1% of trips when you buy your car, which is why people have big cars for their family to handle holiday trips even if they are half empty 99% of the time. And you don't want to have to stop every 400km to charge your car when you go in holidays, especially if it means staying in a saturated station for 30 minutes.
I know you have to get some rest but many people just switch driver and only have a real break every 5 -6 hours, which means around 700km, and current EV don't have that range. In addition, you can take some rest wherever you want, for instance by a lake or in the forest, whereas if you need to charge your car you will be forced to be in an ugly fast charging station :(.
I still believe in EV though and I am convinced it will take over the market progressively, those are just temporary problem that explain why their market share is still so low, but it's improving.
How often are these long road trips though? Would you really not get an EV because very rare road trips take slightly longer, but meanwhile you're saving lots of money the whole year long on gas costs and not destroying the environment?
I can't imagine letting a few longer stops during infrequent long distance road trips being the deciding factor in what kind of car I'd buy.
Like many a middle aged dad, I have become afflicted with boating disease. One of the many problems that comes with owning a boat is that you need some way to tow it. Another problem is that you want your boat to be as easy to use as possible. If I had an electric car I would have to go to home depot and rent a truck every time I wanted to tow the boat. This is too much yak shaving.
In conclusion, my advice as a boat owner is: Never buy a boat.
The vast majority of people don't own a boat though ... and it's not like ICE sedans are any good at towing either.
Also, how sure are you that EVs are bad at towing? Don't they have lots of low-end torque? The Model X apparently has the highest towing capacity of any passenger vehicle. Beyond that you'd need a bigger truck anyway.
I think the future for urban dwellers is fast charging your EV while shopping. With large enough batteries it should only be necessary to charge the car once a week.
Also, most streets and parking lots in urban settings are already by law required to be electrified for minimum lighting requirements and/or parking meters. Extending the electrification requirements to include car charging seems only a matter of time. (Potentially especially in the cases where it makes sense to push for Smart Grids at the same regulative time.)
Some companies have already built interesting versions of street lamps and parking meters that double as car chargers (including at least one London company that was working to make sure that they could meet historic preservation standards of the street lamp design in London's core).
Road-embeddable induction chargers could even be an option soon in urban environments (particularly large parking lots for instance) where there isn't such existing "furniture" to take advantage of.
Maybe eventually there won't be an advantage... We might need the battery capacity to stabilise the power grid if we add more renewable sources like solar.
People are trying, Tesla is investing HEAVILY into battery technology and research.
CPUs 30 years ago were 8 bits and barely scratching 10s of mhz, we arrived at our modern era through incremental improvements, not by saying "we need to stop and wait for someone to invent something better!"
Fun story: the Hydrogen Fuel Cell. Yesterday's miracle battery of tomorrow that never quite happened, right? Well, the big picture story is a bit different. It was invented shortly before the lead acid battery and US civil war. It accumulated a few refinements and fewer practical uses over the years, until the Apollo era when there was a huge breakthrough (polymer electrolyte membranes). Then it went back to slowly accumulating incremental advancements, and that's still the story today.
Exploitation is exponential (the scale of each success determines the resources people are willing to bet on the next win), but exploration is a punctuated equilibrium, and it's a recipe for disappointment to assume that all progress should behave like the former rather than the latter.
Cpus were new tech, brand new tech. They have only been around now a few decades. Batteries have been studied for centuries. Even incremental improvements are much less likely, and much more expensive, when dealing with such mature technology.
That is true, but they are also immensely complex - I wouldn't say it was 'wasted' effort (as the above poster did), but modern ICE engines are ludicrously complex electro-mechanical devices. If this much effort is expended on improving battery technology (as I think it will be), then the future is very bright for EVs because they are already much better than ICE in many ways - simplicity and reliability as well as emissions.
I think it will be much like in F1 - remember when the limitation on gearbox and engine replacements in a season were introduced and many commentators said it would lead to there being no cars on the grid at the end of the season? What actually happened was the engineers created hitherto undreamt of levels of reliability. I'm sure the same will happen for EV batteries once they are the only game in town and ICE is no longer any kind of option.
That's like arguing that cigarettes are a bit less harmful than they used to be. They're still a crap technology. Of all the possible ways to move a vehicle the ICE is the stupidest: essentially it's a device for burning oil as close to humans as possible while destroying the planet. Oh and by the way, those 'reduced' emissions were faked.
I disagree with the premise of the question. How many people really need a 500 mile range? How often does the average person do a long road trip? Is it really such a hassle to stop and stretch your legs (and maybe eat) while charging in the middle of a once-annual road trip?
Hell, even if you're doing that drive weekly, you might still prefer the electric since it'd save you a lot on gas money, even though it enforces a mid-trip break.
Most new EVs have more range than the average human bladder. After four hours of driving, most people are going to need to pee. Current-generation EVs on 50kW fast-chargers can hit 80% charge in 30 minutes, which is only slightly longer than the average dwell time at a freeway service plaza. 150kW chargers are now commercially available, which (when connected to a vehicle with suitable battery cooling) cut the time to 80% charge to about 15 minutes.
I'm sure that some people do drive for over four hours without taking a break, but I don't think that it's a safe or healthy thing to do.
The technology is good enough already - we're just waiting for it to become widely distributed.
Ever time yourself? I'm not doubting your estimate, but I wonder how close your are. Out of idle curiosity (and for more purposeful reasons), I've timed myself on the motorcycle. Pay-at-the-pump, and don't get off the bike, and I'm out of there like a LeMans pit stop. But getting off, hitting the restroom, and grabbing/paying for drink took longer than I would have guessed.
And as sibling comment points out, it all goes out the window if you have passengers.
I'm with you. 5 minutes to fill and maybe 5 minutes to hit the bathroom and grab a drink, maybe even skip that and bac on the road.
It's way different with family in the car though. That's where you hit 30 minutes. Everybody needs the bathroom, everybody needs to pick out a drink, everybody wants food, etc.
Also assumes that your need to pee/charge coincides with your proximity to a rapid charging station. I don't even know where one is close to me. There are a few in my state, but none within 50 miles of anywhere I normally go. It's not like gas stations where there's one at almost every single interstate exit.
Also assumes there is not a wait. At 30min/charge, I could easily see a crowded charging station requiring a 60-120 minute wait.
I'm surprised there isn't a discussion of the Goodenough lithium glass battery [0]. The fact that I haven't read about replication or a failure to replicate is really weird to me given how world-changing such a technology would be if it were proven to be viable.
This is coming from a person who would like to buy an electric car. But lets say we get to batteries that can survive incredibly high charge rates, aka the 10 minute charge time.
Some quick math:
100kWh battery needs 100 kW to charge in an hour.
To charge in 10 minutes we need 100kW * 6 = 600kW.
Now that is a bit of an over simplification but it gives the magnitude of instantaneous power needed.
From a grid perspective charging a lot of cars slowly is not terribly difficult to handle because it appears mostly as base load, but if you have ton of cars starting and stopping charging at 600kW you will get massive fluctuations.
Thankfully a lot of cars will just slow charge overnight most of the time. Then for a fast charging station they could have large batteries or super capacitors to help offset the fluctuations.
EVs make it easier to manage the grid - the challenges are in local distribution.
The vast majority of EV charges are overnight, because that's when electricity is cheap, because that's when we have more supply than demand. Most generation sources can't be quickly switched on and off; renewables generate whenever the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. EVs help to balance the grid simply by sucking up lots of off-peak capacity.
The next generation of cars and charging points are expected to support vehicle-to-grid technology; in exchange for a reduction in your cost of charging, you allow your car to be used as a grid storage battery when you're not using it. A few million cars with 40kWh batteries add up to a very big storage reserve, even if you only take a couple of percent from each car.
There is already a way to manage that: remove the petrol from petrol stations and add huge batteries / capacitors. Charge those at normal grid load when no one is using the station then unload like crazy.
Alternative solution: when technologies like resonant inductive coupling improve enough for efficient medium to long range wireless transfer of power we could just build cars with small batteries or capacitors that are almost always trickle charging.
Talk about moving the goal posts. Tesla's are way less flammable than gasoline cars and some have more range (my dad's Ford has like 250 miles of range)
>Tesla's are way less flammable than gasoline cars
This is false. Talk to any tow truck driver. A breached battery is almost a guaranteed fire. A breached gas tank is nothing of the sort. A battery pack provides its own ignition source. Gasoline needs external ignition. While external ignition sources are available on cars they don't seem to ignite with nearly the same frequency.
In theory the EV can be less flammable. In practice they seem to be about the same (Volt, Leaf, etc) or worse (Model S) than your average ICE car. It all comes down to the design. Pinto < Tesla < average ICE car.
"Mechanical failure or malfunction was the leading contributing factor of highway vehicle fires (45 percent). These mechanical failures include a leak or break in a component of the vehicle, automatic or manual control failures, or the use of an improper type of fuel. An electrical failure or malfunction, such as a short circuit, was a contributing factor in 21 percent of highway vehicle fires. The misuse of a material or product, such as spilling flammable liquid or gas too close to the vehicle, was the third leading factor contributing to the ignition of the fires (13 percent)."
That same document goes into lots of detail about what heat source initiates those fires and what materials are actually catching fire.
"Where the necessary data were available, the leading category of items first ignited in fatal highway vehicle fires was “liquids, piping, filters” (65 percent). Flammable liquids and gases in general were, by far, the most deadly (67 percent of deaths). Specifically, fuel in or from the engine area was the second leading item first ignited in all highway vehicle fires (18 percent) but was, by far, the leading item in both fatal fires (43 percent) and deaths (45 percent). Additionally, insulation around electrical wiring or cables was responsible for 29 percent of all highway vehicle fires, but only 2
percent of fatal fires and 2 percent of deaths."
Most cars have greater than 250 miles in range. I think most end up in the 350-400 mile range, with hybrids being considerably more (550-600 for a Prius).
I really thought a Volt like car would be the answer. Electric for most of the year, but a gas powered motor to go for those vacations away. I don't know why that wasn't more popular.
So one of the major perks of electric cars are fewer moving parts. Once you add a gas engine to the car, you increase the weight, remove space for batteries, add cost, and finally add a lot more complexity and moving parts. Now the gas engine added convenience but personally it doesn't add enough to compensate for the downsides.
But I would not rule out plug in hybrids, from what I have read GM stopped making it since it was a sedan which are not selling great for them. But also because the newer bolt platform is a better base for an EV or PHEV, since it was designed from the ground up to run on electric motors.
Yeah, GM killing the Volt seems more a weird side effect of GM's manufacturing plant shell game than an intentional strategy. The Volt was original intended to be the "savior" of the venerable Hamtramck plant, as it was the future of what was to be built there. The original goal was to make more of the cars over time at Hamtramck resemble the Volt, which was closer to a cross-over in G1. The short-sighted decision for cost cutting in the G2 Volt was to push it more proper sedan-like to make it more like everything else that Hamtramck was producing. So the Volt shutting down was further short-sighted side effect of GM killing all sedans/Hamtramck.
Obvious rumors are that GM is already in the works on a new cross-over PHEV. It's dumb that the sedan-ification of the Volt brand between G1 and G2 probably means that it will be yet another new brand instead of just the obvious Volt G3. (It's also a dumb shame that GM didn't actually save Hamtramck in what could have been a smart move of electrifying more of it and moving it all more cross-over-esque according to the original Volt plan.)
GM shut down all sedan manufacturing including the Volt (and Cruze and others), which described before the Volt was probably more of an accidental bystander than an intentional part of GM's electric strategy. The whole thing was a short term financial move that some Shareholders just about demanded after Ford did similar and eliminated all their sedans. Americans "don't buy" American sedans right now and so all American automotive manufacturing is focusing solely on SUVs, Trucks, and Cross-Overs as of 2018, again. Everything about this cycle is cynical and short-sighted, as Americans are still buying European and Japanese sedans at basically the same rates as always, and the SUV/Truck market (and maybe the Cross-Over market too) and its gleefully (to Shareholder earnings) high margins rises and falls directly in proportion to gasoline costs.
> Americans "don't buy" American sedans right now and so all American automotive manufacturing is focusing solely on SUVs, Trucks, and Cross-Overs as of 2018, again.
GM is keeping the electric Bolt, which is not an SUV, Truck, or Crossover.
The Volt, as a hybrid, doesn't fit their long term strategy, so wasn't spared the axe coming down due to the short-term situation with the sedan market.
The Bolt is closer to a cross-over than a true sedan (which mostly just goes to show the categories are dumb and another reason "no one buys sedans" is a stupid statement because the distinctions are more gray than black-and-white), but more importantly has never been manufactured in the sedan-mostly Hamtramck plant.
GM turned around and admitted that PHEV hybrids are still in their current long term strategy, to expect at least a "true" cross-over version in the near future, if not also SUV and Truck plans. Like I said before, the problem with the Volt seemed to be that G2 was nothing but a sedan made in the sedan plant that GM wanted to drop, not that it was a hybrid or electric. I still think that Volt G1's form factor would have been spared because it would have been easier to retool it next to the Bolt or in another cross-over facility.
So add a small gas turbine range extender. Like the BMW i3’s range extender but use a small gas turbine instead of a scooter engine. Also make that optional. No need for a conventional ICE drivetrain.
Paying to haul an engine around when you don't need it is using extra energy for nothing.
I do think that a market for trailers [possibly rentals] that have a small generator and some trunk space could exist. When people go on road trips they not only need the engine which is normally not needed, but they also want to have extra luggage. 4 suitcases and a small generator can fit on a trailer and run your electric car all day, leaving space in the trunk for other things.
The majority of drivers really aren't qualified to tow a trailer, not even a small one. It's going to be a mess. Just imagine the chaos of SF Bay Area residents trying to tow trailers up I-80 for a winter skiing road trip.
Most cars do not have the suspension system to handle that. The average family is often already putting their car at the max load before adding suitcases. (for ride quality reasons engineers design them that way) A trailer putting most of the mass on a different axle is much better answer.
You cannot just take the engine out of a car and replace it with batteries. The weight balance changes so you need to reconsider the whole suspension system. (yes people do this all the time, it works okay but even a small increase in warranty claims is enough to make a manufacturer unwilling to do that.
>The majority of drivers really aren't qualified to tow a trailer, not even a small one.
The majority of drivers will be fine but backing up will be a challenge until they get used to it. We're not talking about an overloaded rental trailer, we're talking about a ~20hp genset on wheels.
> Just imagine the chaos of SF Bay Area residents trying to tow trailers up I-80 for a winter skiing road trip.
As much as white collar professionals tend to suck at everything even vaguely mechanical I have a hard time imagining it could be any worse than your average boat ramp. Boat ramps work out fine even though half the people there in the afternoon are buzzed.
That said, I don't think towing gensets everywhere is the solution to range issues.
There are loads of them available and many are popular, heck even Toyota Prius has a model that has this capability (Prius Prime).
I am on the market for buying a PHEV, because fast charger availability in my country is very limited (which is weird given that we are super green electric giants), so pure EV is going to be hard unless I have a backup car for road trips.
Kia Optima is the one I like the most, but I may end up buying Tesla Model 3 and just ship it through the Atlantic (yes, we also don't have Tesla in my country) and have a backup car, or rent/borrow a car when doing road trips
As a volt owner, I agree. I love this car to death, especially because I'm not in a living situation that would make at-home EV charging easy (apartment).
PHEVs are perfect. I drive EV 80% of the time but still have all the convenience of gas. One day, when I buy a house, and charging networks are a bit more mature I would love a BEV, but right now PHEV's are a great inbetween.
Hybrids are a stupid hack, but a necessary stupid hack. I'm no tree hugger, but I went straight from ICE to EV. I don't want to haul around a battery pack in addition to a gas motor (or vice versa), but it's insane that everyone* drives around cars that simply turn their kinetic energy into heat every time you want to slow down. I've always hated the hybrid driving experience, but it's a necessary evil in the bridge to full EV world for those who can't go EV today.
I thought the same thing. But back when it was introduced, batteries were really expensive.
Now, a battery pack for a ~250 mile electric car would cost ~6k. That still isn't ideal for long distances, but it would make a fantastic commuter car and an occasional long distance trip would only become inconvenient, not impossible.
Effectively it covers the same space and the cost increase to make a serial hybrid (like the Volt) is no longer economic.
Super inefficient to haul around a gasoline engine and all the associated parts for the rare situation that you might need it. With gasoline powered cars you can haul around extra weight because range isn't an issue on gasoline powered cars. On electric cars, range is a make-or-break.
The range balance is a little off. The Volt electric range is about 40 miles or so? That would barely get me to work and home. If I have other errands, I'm on the gas engine.
Something like a Volt with a ~100 mile electric range would be ideal. Probably diesel too, because the fuel keeps much longer than gasoline. Or maybe Propane/CNG.
Now that's strange. Electric cars are working pretty well, and then this guy comes along and says we have to wait for a new technology that doesn't work yet. Who is "David Stringer", anyway? A pseudonym, perhaps? ("Stringer" in journalism is a freelance journalist paid by the article.) There's a minor Arizona politician by that name, but that's about all Google has to say.
They could work better, be cheaper, be safer, charge faster, have better range, and have longer cycle life for the battery, don't you think?
Better batteries are needed. Solid-state batteries have the potential to outperform conventional batteries. We'll see who commercializes them first.
ICE cars are still more practical than EVs today. ICE cars are cheaper to buy with better range and faster refuelling. If I want the most car for the least dollars then I'm buying a sensible Toyota, not a Tesla.
We're at the beginning of the end of the ICE car. EVs with fast charging, energy dense, highly durable solid-state batteries represent the genuine end of ICE cars.
> Who is "David Stringer", anyway? A pseudonym, perhaps?
That's an odd criticism coming from "Animats". Who is "Animats" anyway? A pseudonym, perhaps?
> There's a minor Arizona politician by that name, but that's about all Google has to say.
DuckDuckGo says David Stringer is a senior reporter at Bloomberg:
I hold "ANIMATS" as a US registered trademark. I own "animats.com". I'm not anonymous. When I originally signed up for HN, I tried to use my own name, but it was taken.
For an electric car, here is my summary: For a car, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with.
E.g., the US is dotted with high density with gas stations, can fill a 20 gallon tank in just a few minutes, and at 20 MPG that tank will fuel the car for 400 miles.
For a battery, apparently so far the range is about 200 mile; for the readily available charging sources the charging time is much longer, maybe hours; and from a really powerful charging source the battery will get hot and need cooling (e.g., see the Jay Leno piece on the new, all electric Mercedes which does cool the battery while charging).
The weather is a significant issue: In hot weather, the battery needs more cooling. In cold weather, the battery loses lots of its power.
So I agree with the OP: For a good electric car, need a better battery. IIRC long ago a Ford executive stated "You build me a good battery, and I'll build you a good electric car."
Actually, all electric cars are not new but old and go way back to the first days of cars, e.g., before Ford's Model T. And as Leno mentioned, for all or nearly all the time since then, battery technology hasn't made much progress. Right: Battery technology is still based on basic chemistry, and that chemistry was understood well enough in 1900.
Of course, people saw all this 100+ years ago and for one solution tried hybrids where a gasoline engine charged a battery. Apparently, net, that meant that the car had two sources of power, gasoline and a battery, and could get by with just one, the gasoline, which is just what has been done since then. Still there is some hope for hybrids.
Yes, there are some uses for electric vehicles. Still:
Yup, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with.
This page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density) has a chart on energy density shows that gasoline contains roughyl 36 MegaJoules per Liter and 46 MJ per kg of energy density while a lithium-ion battery has less than 3 by both measures.
Also, as I've done a few times, can take your 36 megaJoules per liter and ...: Let's see, a Watt is a Joule per second. So the energy in 36 megaJoules would be a million Watts for 36 seconds. A liter is ballpark a quart, and a gallon is 4 quarts, so 20 gallons is 80 quarts or ballpark 80 liters, and even with a megaWatt power source we're talking charging time 36 times 80 seconds, a bit over 40 minutes.
So, drive up to a gas station, convenience store, plug in the mega Watt power source, get some lunch, check the air in the tires, clean the floor mats, put in a DVD for a movie, ....
Before you connect that megaWatt cable, let me step back about 50 feet and look in a different direction.
Let's see: My house has 100 A at 240 V, that is 24,000 Watts. So a mega Watt is ballpark 40 times that much. If use only half that power to charge the car battery, a mega Watt is 80 times that much. So the 40 minutes becomes 3200 minutes, something over 50 hours, two days. "Sorry, Boss, I'll be charging my battery on Monday and Tuesday and will be in on Wednesday. Since my commute is 100 miles a day, I'll need to do this two day charge once for each four working days. Or, I'll be okay Wednesday through Friday, drive another 100 miles on the weekend, and will charge again Monday and Tuesday of next week, too." Right, he could charge at work. Each day at work will need about six hours of charging at the full 100 A at 240 V.
Uh, at 10 cents per KWh, the 40 minutes at one megaWatt would cost: A megaWatt hour would be 1000 times a KWh and cost 1000 times 10 cents or $100. The 40 minutes would be 2/3rds of that or $66 or the same as gas at $3.30 a gallon. Not a bargain.
And that $3.30 per gallon applies wherever have to pay 10 per KWh, at a charging station, at home, at work, at a restaurant, etc. People don't give away gasoline and won't give away electric power for charging. In particular, a full charge like 20 gallons of gas at home, at 10 cents per KWh, will still cost the $66. Right, the gasoline burns with maybe only 30% efficiency, but there are efficiency losses from heat when charging the battery and again when driving the car.
Yup, for powering a private car used as they commonly are, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with. For an electric, range is too short and charging time is too long. With electric power at 10 cents per KWh and gas at $2.75 a gallon, the cost will be ballpark much the same, no big savings either way.
Ah, maybe it's just me: I want a Corvette or Dodge with 700 HP! :-)
The article is written as if solid-state battery designs are going to be the future. So my honest question is, is that really so? What about others, like Graphene batteries and supercapacitors [1][2]?
No mention of graphene in the article and this is the only mention of it here. We can't have the battery discussion without graphene. It's the future, imo. Soon as we learn how to charge it and maintain stability while doing so.
What we really need is a standardisation to cover for the improvements in the background. Kind of like a USB interface for batteries.
Imagine, you could buy a car, that has slots for you to attach standard batteries. You could leave the batteries charging at home, office, shops that lease you charged batteries(like gas stations) etc. It would also take care of "I live in an apartment and park my car by the side of the road, so no home charging.. problem".
Also, gets rid of the range anxiety if you know you could get batteries everywhere or at-least charge yours everywhere.
Now, when technology genuinely improves by a magnitude, replace the cells, but keep the interface for a decade or so.
Bonus if that standard catches on for other uses. Imagine same batteries being used for power tools at home, emergency power supply at home, camping stuff, plug those boxes into the edges of solar panels while they are not in the car etc.
Leave it to the competing business that are "battery suppliers" to figure out how to make them more efficient, cheaper, and do further R&D.
Car companies can stay at making cars that are essentially safe, aerodynamic shells with electric motors waiting to be powered up by customer supplied batteries.
The batteries are too heavy and bulky for most people to physically carry and install. The only way regular battery replacement can work is with a large automated system, which means it would have to be in a dedicated service station rather than an apartment complex.
This is a good article on solid state batteries. But I think it is all wrong in claiming that we will have to wait for them before BEV autos will take over.
The fact is that BEV's are already better than ICE's in many ways, and the best, Tesla's, are so good they are busy taking away market share. And lithium ion batteries are steadily improving in characteristics and also getting cheaper. Furthermore, China, the world's largest auto market, is putting a very big push behind BEV autos, and many other governments are also making efforts.
From what I have read a tipping point is coming around 2023-25 when consumers will start flooding to BEV's, and ICE sales will start dropping rapidly. And then in another half decade or so solid state batteries will be ready and the trend will accelerate.
The basic message is that the century-long dominance of ICE cars is coming to an end and in the not-so-distant future, it's just a matter of time.
It's fine now, but if anyone gets close to the mythical solid state battery it would change everything. Trucks, trains, and bigger vehicle have no chance without them they'd weigh to much.
My big fear is weight. Road damage scales with the per-axle weight raised to the 4th power. EVs are quite heavy to compensate for the lower energy density of lithium ion batteries.
Taking a 4000 pound car (typical mid-sized sedan) and ballooning the weight to 5000 pounds (Tesla S) is 2.5x the road damage. (Tesla 3 is ~4000 pounds vs the 3600 of a comparable A4, so a factor of ~1.5x.)
By comparison, four 16000# axles on a trailer are 8192 times the road damage per mile (and likely drive a lot more miles) of the 4000# sedan.
I agree that semi trucks represent a massive amount of road damage, and iirc the way we structure our road costs represents a $60B transfer of wealth to the trucking industry. I wish we’d reverse that, as we could then start seriously looking at trains as a more reasonable means of moving most of our bulk goods.
Of course, it’s not like EV semitrucks won’t have the same weight issues as passenger cars. The same issues with energy density apply there too. EV semitrucks will either need to be heavier or more plentiful to compensate for the loss of range or towing capacity compared to diesel.
As an aside, we need to revisit the 4,000lb standard for sedans. The heaviest Honda Civic weighs 3,000lb, my Mazda 3 weighs under 3,000lb, and a Mazda 6 weighs at most 3,500lb. These days you need a luxury or performance sedan before you start touching the 4,000lb mark.
>we need to revisit the 4,000lb standard for sedans
Agreed. A quick Google search shows the average US vehicle is 4,000 lbs or above, but that includes vans and trucks and SUVs. The average sedan is closer to or below 3500 lbs.
> These days you need a luxury or performance sedan before you start touching the 4,000lb mark.
Agreed. I picked 4000# as the reference against a Model S (which clearly competes more with an A6 or E-class than a Civic) and the Model 3 I compare more to an A4.
None of those are "standard" sedans. Not by a long shot. It's perfectly reasonable to compare an A3 to a Model 3, but it's not reasonable to say that the standard sedan is 4000#, since Civics & similar outnumber Audis & similar by an order of magnitude or so.
The point still remains that an EV is about 8-12% heavier than a sedan in its same class (see sibling comment below). This will apply to semitrucks too as those electrify, which'll be a bigger deal than sedans.
A Civic or an A3 is not a mid-sized sedan by any stretch of that category. I used 4000# as a typical mid-size sedan as-driven weight with an allowance for a person or two and fuel.
> A Civic or an A3 is not a mid-sized sedan by any stretch of that category.
The Civic sedan is only 2" smaller length wise and 2" narrower than a Tesla 3. Size wise, this is a perfectly fair comparison, and the Civic weights 1,000lbs less. That's a pretty close comparison from a size perspective.
You are correct about the A3, it is indeed much smaller than a Tesla 3. But the A4 is 1" longer than the 3 (identical in other dimensions), and weighs about 400lbs less.
> I used 4000# as a typical mid-size sedan as-driven weight with an allowance for a person or two and fuel.
Curb weight includes all necessary equipment, including oil and gasoline for ICE vehicles. Given that there is no reason to expect that an EV driver is a different weight than an ICE driver, it's completely fair to compare the two by curb weight only.
Electric cars are not that much heavier than ICE cars. The Model 3 is pretty much on par with its gasoline competition. The real road killers are not passenger cars, but heavy trucks and semis. They have a multiple per-axle weight of any car.
> Electric cars are not that much heavier than ICE cars.
this isn't really true. a model 3 is about 400lbs heavier than a base a4 (~12%) and 300lbs heavier than a base 3 series (~8%). that's a pretty big difference for a midsize sedan.
your overall point is valid, of course. any sedan is going to do negligible damage compared to a large truck.
300-400lbs is the weight of two passengers. If we were that worried about per-axle weight on the roads, we wouldn't try to encourage HOV lanes or carpooling, since more people in one car increases per-axle weight.
Increasing occupancy reduces total road wear (the 300-400 pounds you cite is around 10% increase in weight, adding that much in passenger weight adds under 50% to road wear under the usual per-vehicle-wear is proportional to fourth power of weight rule of thumb; whereas adding two equivalent vehicles to the road adds 200% to road wear), except when it is increasing capacity rather than reducing wear.
My point is that 300-400lbs isn't significant in the grand scheme of things. There are plenty of things that add weight to cars that no one mentions. It's hard to then argue that electric cars are too heavy to be mass-market.
No one is advocating for fewer passengers per car, even though each passenger adds weight. In fact, we prefer more passengers per car because (among other things) it is fewer engines pumping out pollutants. The same can be said about electric cars. Yet electric cars are getting complains about another 300-400 lbs, but gasoline-powered carpools are not.
No one here has complained about the added weight of the unnecessary cargo most people carry. No one is mentioning the weight of a full tank of gasoline (an average full tank is ~100 lbs) and advocating for smaller tanks or to run with just enough fuel to get to your destination. Air bags and anti-lock brakes and automatic transmissions and air conditioning and stereo systems all add significant weight to the car. No one would advocate removing those things from cars. No one complains about the added weight of things designed to make cars more fuel efficient because we like the fuel efficiency. Yet batteries do just that, and here we are.
My point is, arguing that electric cars have a problem because they're as heavy as a gasoline powered car (with no gasoline in it, since curb weight is empty) with two passengers is disingenuous at best and harmful at worst. It's a complete non-argument. Especially when passenger cars are some of the lightest vehicles on the road, by an impressively huge margin. An electric car may be 12% heavier than a gasoline car, but a semi truck is still 1600% heavier than that.
I'm not sure why you're upgrading my concerns about weight into "too heavy to be mass-market", I never said that. Conversations will typically be much more polite if you engage directly with what is said, rather than what was not said.
What I am saying is that the weight is a factor, especially since I am particularly concerned with the (in my opinion) unbearable cost of America's road network. You might disagree with with how much of an effect an EV will have, but ignoring tradeoffs and (unfairly) characterizing my concerns as "disingenuous or harmful" is neither helpful nor polite.
> An electric car may be 12% heavier than a gasoline car, but a semi truck is still 1600% heavier than that.
It's rather uncharitable of you to not apply my concerns to the EV conversion of semitrucks, since it's a direct and obvious parallel.
While Tesla's semitruck is expected to come in at the total weight as a Diesel truck including cargo, they are quite mum about how much the whole the truck itself weighs. This is important because a heavier truck means more trucks to compensate for reduced truck capacity. Walmart doesn't want less stuff shipped just because the truck carries less stuff, after all.
My concerns are even worse with semitrucks, because semitrucks do a lot of damage and pay very little for it in the terms of gas and usage taxes. An EV semitruck will be a complete free-rider when it comes to gas tax (they'll still pay for usage tax), representing an even larger transfer of wealth from the state to trucking companies than what already exists.
we are in complete agreement that the road damage caused by sedans is negligible. I said in my very first post: "any sedan is going to do negligible damage compared to a large truck."
I am only trying to clarify a couple specific points. the first is that EVs really do weigh a good bit more than comparable ICE vehicles. how much of a problem this is depends on the conversation you are having. and since you mentioned it, I also would like to point out that, as defined by the EPA in the US, curb weight does include a tank of gas filled to the advertised capacity. [0]
They will probably be the same since the limit on weight is the road not the truck. The only question is what difference in cargo capacity there will be.
The base models of the named cars have of course much less powerful engines than the Model 3, so the weight difference goes down as you equip the ICEs with larger engines. Yes, some weight differential is left, but a small one compared to trucks and semis.
the engines of the named cars are essentially on par with the lowest specced (and lightest) model 3 that's currently available. the only situation where the model 3 has a strong advantage is in sprints from 0-60, a number most people pay entirely too much attention to in my opinion. edit: I'm actually wrong, according to car and driver, the 0-60 numbers are really close on all three cars.
I don't want to digress too far on the performance characteristics of the cars, as this starts to be a bit subjective.
I would love to have such batteries but I'm not sure we need them. Doesn't hot-swapping effectively achieve net charge rates faster than discharge?
I can see why people might be less interested in hot-swapping for personal vehicles, but why isn't hot-swap on the table for buses and cab fleets? Is it because few people are willing to invest in R&D and infrastructure when sufficient batteries seem to be just around the corner?
Tesla tried to do the hot swap, and it presented a few problems.
First, the infrastructure cost is massive. You have to keep an inventory of expensive parts (the battery) on hand. Tesla tried to fix this by having you set an appointment, but that eliminated the whole point of hot swapping: convenience.
It's also harder to put a warranty on a battery if you're swapping them all the time. What if you get a dud swapped into your vehicle?
Really? This is a problem?
How is a battery any different from any other auto part? Radiator, water pump, alternator, etc. Yours goes bad? You go to the auto parts store and get a new one with a "core" fee. You return your broken radiator, water pump, etc. and get your fee back and the re-manufacturer rebuilds yours for someone else to use.
We don't NEED to have the same mileage as ICE vehicles. 80% of drivers are just fine on 100 miles a day.
We don't NEED just ONE battery pack for all vehicles.
Just get er dun, and get me my electric pickup!
Also: extremely limited availability of the require isotopes. Even NASA has had to redesign missions to use solar instead because their supply was running out.
Limited in the amount of current it can generate. Doesn’t respond well to changing power requirements. Horrendously toxic if the casing is breached traumatically.
I'm thinking of a modular battery that is hot swapable at the charge stations and where you only pay it's depreciation based on what you actually use. This would significantly lower ownership costs for light users and drastically increase efficiency and flexibility for heavy users who are no longer dependent on charge times. Since it's modular, you load the number of units you need, say one battery unit for a Leaf, two for a Model S or 10 units for a light truck, all in standardized format and with their own computing that tracks things like life span, charge cycles performed by the user himself for proper billing etc.
I know Tesla experimented with and later abandoned battery swap, but that's predictable without the proper business structure in place, no one is going to leave the most expensive part of their car back at the charge station. If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics.