There's little the non-Tesla automakers are doing to stop you. They aren't helping you, but they aren't stopping you. The biggest problem is there's basically no market for it right now. I used to build stuff for this market (more-or-less). Only a tiny fraction of vehicles need anything. It's far cheaper to sell your vehicle to someone who doesn't mind 70 miles range and buy a new one with all the scale advantages of mass manufacturing than paying for the shop labor ($100-300/hr) and amortized cost of a battery few people want.
The classic environmentalist solution is to live a smaller life, with fewer things. That is a hard sell and runs counter to innate human instinct to gather resources. On the other hand, economic policy can’t seem to move past fighting symptoms, and does its very best to pretend the growth model isn’t the root cause of all environmental problems. Does anyone have a handle on a real and pragmatic solution I wonder?
This means society may tend to fall back to authoritarian systems like feudalism, when put under increasing external pressure.
The struggles and lack of coordination caused by this failure to act as a collective with modern technology present will lead to a fast and indiscriminate decline of the worlds population, I think.
This is an odd straw man to bring out, when the goal is very explicitly to reduce carbon output. Also nothing so far implies that the legislation is impossible to fix once the electric fleet exists.
Approaching ten years of life, most of these cars have lost <10% battery life (and loss is fairly linear in lithium) so in 20 more years we'll have cars with 70% of their original battery life. They'll still be perfectly usable for many people. So long as fossil-fueled vehicles are in use, let's get more EVs on the road instead of upgrading the ones we have.
Cars should be a different story but we'll have to fight for that even.
Battery packs are structural components for safety reasons more than anything. Weight and volume savings are secondary to safety in regards to anything with high energy density, be it a battery pack, fuel cell, or gas tank.
But though they _contain_ batteries, a battery pack is not a battery any more than a car is an engine. The battery inside the battery pack remains non-structural and non-load-bearing.
The individual cylinders are made from steel. The steel is used structurally. Perhaps next you'll tell me the "battery" is actually just the anode, cathode and electrolyte?
Thank you.
> Perhaps next you'll tell me the "battery" is actually just the anode, cathode and electrolyte?
No, next I'll tell you that this isn't Reddit and you don't have to be a dick to "win an argument on the internet". On HN you can simply point out the facts, like you did above.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chinas...
That doesn't mean it wouldn't work today, but probably a harder problem than it looks.
Unfortunately battery packs are very vehicle-specific. Hopefully we'll eventually see some standardized form factors so you can just install a generic battery. Until then, 3rd parties will have to make a different battery pack for each model they want to support. Most of the problem is just the physical dimensions and shape of the pack, but also there are a bunch of electrical connections, battery-management system (BMS) integration, coolant hoses, and so on that would vary from one vehicle to the next.
Hopefully as the technology matures, batteries get physically smaller and lighter, and therefore easier to shoehorn into weird spaces.
They're apparently expanding into more countries. I really like the concept of these things. It should be possible to make drivein charging stations for cars that do the same. But obviously you wouldn't be able to do that manually and designing such a system is a lot more expensive.
I've been thinking of a similar solution for e-bikes and electric scooters (like Bird and Lime for example). Swapping a battery would be SO MUCH BETTER than having to fully recharge your own battery.
If I had to make a prediction for 50 years in the future, I'd guess that Tesla and others would study a way to hot-swap batteries in the car at the "e-Station" in a couple minutes instead of waiting for your own battery to recharge.
https://www.e-scooter.co/vinfast-klara/
in Vietnam is just one example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4nS_tSQiVQ
There is quite a big commercial opportunity, I expect the sector will grow alongside the growth and ageing of EV's.
How this works is usually you would replace/fix individual parts of the engine until it works again. When you buy one ready to swap in, it's because a third party has taken the time to fix up an old engine - usually with no help from the original manufacturer.
A lot of car parts you cannot buy new replacements for. Engine parts you usually can, as pretty much everything there is consumable, but I mean things like body panels or interior parts. However a lot of cars end up damaged beyond repair, which means there are usually enough parts in the surrogate market so old cars can be kept running.
In this case it's not reasonable to ask manufacturers to be selling new battery packs 10 years after discontinuing that model, but they should make sure it's possible for third parties to make/remake them and have them behave the same as an OEM battery pack.
While this could be true, I certainly wouldn't assume it to be so. I dunno how integrated the battery pack is to the system - when you press the gas, does the car do things like draw more from some cells and less from others based on their degradation and capacity? Certainly on the charge side of the system it's very integrated, with the charge curve changing as individual cells (or at least modules) age/degrade.
As far as the motor controller is concerned, the battery might as well just be a single cell. If you change to a different kind of battery, you might need to change some of the motor controller's parameters (like maximum current limit) if those were designed around the limits of the old battery.
edit to add: when it comes to the charger and BMS, that stuff might or might not have to be replaced depending on the extent to which it can be made to work with a different configuration. And just like replacing an engine in a modern gas-powered car, there's probably a host of sensors that will trigger a whole host of warnings if they aren't reconnected to equivalent new sensors or spoofed in some way.
Basically the only way for car manufacturers to make this interface hard to replicate with third-party packs is by introducting some kind of DRM-like signatures on the messages from the BMS.
"This will make the upfront cost of the electrical 2 wheeler (2W) and 3 wheelers (3W) to be lower than ICE 2 "
https://www.livemint.com/auto-news/indian-govt-to-allow-regi...
Structural packs are nothing new, even cars like the iPace have structural packs and so do many. Hell even the Model S was structural and that had a swapable battery. Tesla or BYD structural packs are no different.
The actual innovation when people talk about 'structural packs' nowdays is that the cell themselves are part of the structure. However, this has nothing to do with how the pack is connected to the car.
Sadly the discussion on these topic gets totally confused by people endlessly repeating the same myths without understanding what they are talking about.
Just don't get into a car crash without the pack inside.
If you look at some recent photos [1] of the Tesla Berlin tour, the "structural battery pack" is still a bolt-in part of the car - it just carries some of the loads and has the seats bolted to it. If it's a standardized design, eg used for multiple model years, it should be a fairly standard replacement part in another decade or so. And the more efficient structural will reduce steel consumption by thousands of tonnes per year and reduce curb weight and increase mileage. Win-win-win for the environment.
I'm an optimist.
[1] https://electrek.co/2021/10/10/tesla-unveils-new-structural-...
Because an engine change on a modern ICE car is far from easy. In major part because of the same bullshit with electronics incompatibility caused by manufacturers.
Wrong serial numbers on injectors/ECU/sensors? Welp, fuck you, buy compatible original parts or swap the whole engine, every little wire and all.
It's like needing to swap the battery+controller+motors on an EV.
Then again, government regulations play a part here, at least in Europe. Can't just have you riding around in your now "custom" car.
In 2031, it should be possible to by a long-past-warranty 2021 EV, replace the battery pack (with one made from recycled EV batteries!), and have it just-work. Just like you can replace the engine of a classic car today if you are so inclined.
It should be possible because the electrical connection of the batteries to EV drivetrains are relatively simple - although I'm sure that will take a lawsuit (like was launched against Nespresso to allow 3rd party coffee pods) for EV manufacturers to release the specs required for this to happen.
It would be unfortunate if EV batteries were non-serviceable except by the manufacturer after they were out of warranty, like phones are today. Instead, battery replacement would potentially allow the tertiary used EV market to flourish, and make them more accessible to people of modest means.