Making it replaceable means sacrificing range, because the battery must be smaller and there's more weight for a frame to hold the battery pack(s).
This is in addition to the more practical problems such as standardizing packs, network of swap stations, ownership of the batteries. If the packs are big you need a machine at every station (which can break), but if they're small enough for a driver to swap you sacrifice even more range and increase other potential problems like theft.
Batteries would need to be a communal resource - with them being expensive i don't see it happening. Batteries need to be cheap for companies and people to take the risk of swapping their battery with a random one.
What if you don't own the batteries, just buy the car without a battery and sign a contract for X years and $Y that you will get the battery replaced on each station?
> with them being expensive i don't see it happening
People rent cars that are more expansive than batteries.
https://www.cycleworld.com/story/motorcycle-news/swappable-e...
Edit: added brands
If you have a car in the city, you probably only need to charge once a week depending on usage, is it really that outlandish to think that in an entire week you won’t take your car somewhere with a charger nearby? Besides that, you can slow charge off mains voltage using an extension cord in many cars.
We have wired every room in every building in every city across most of the globe to have electricity. I really don’t think it’s much of a stretch to run some extra wires to the curb as ecar adoption rises. The current system of moving billions of gallons of highly explosive liquids to custom built dispensing facilities placed every few kms on valuable real estate is far less practical when you think about it.
My flat is about ~50m from the road and 3 floors up. I absolutely get what you're saying, but charging from a cable inside the building isn't practical for anyone in this block (or many of the blocks nearby).
Could agree more with regards to the explosive liquids - but you can be in and out of a petrol station in ~5 minutes. I may only need to charge once a week, but it still requires my car to be somewhere with a charging point for an hour (or whatever) a week.
FWIW, I don't have an answer. I just don't think we're there (or close) yet. I suspect EV adoption will start outsides the cities and spread in.
A government will instantly approve of a plan to install dozens of parking meters per block at a cost of thousands and thousands, and then employ an entire department to wander the city and enforce the rules. It really can't be that much harder to make it so that some of those meters also work as a charging station.
I imagine as battery and charging tech progresses, the difference between getting petrol and charging a car will narrow to the point that it really doesn't matter. e.g. For the better part of a decade Tesla had been able to charge to 80% in ~30 min. That's more than enough for the average city dweller to get their shopping done. This is one area where I think techno-optimism is extremely warranted.
I'd assume eventually it will work exactly like you suggest - I just think we're very far from it right now. I see it very much chicken and egg - trying to encourage your local council to put charging points every 3 or 4 spaces on every street is going to be next to impossible when there's just not enough EVs; too much hassle/uncertainty to own an EV in the middle of a city if you have to park it on the street (and your charge options are super limited).
That said, I'm sure it'll change and change will come quicker as more people in the suburbs (with the space to charge at home) buy.
But I stand by my original point - it's hard enough to find somewhere to park, never mind the parking spot next to the charger.
There was an Israeli company in the past, Better Place. It failed because car makers didn’t participate. But that was almost 10 years ago, so EV adoption was way lower.
Even now on a mountain west traffic-free interstate I don’t really count on going more than 500 miles in a day. And that includes a meal break.
Both of these use cases sound like they would be very minimally disrupted by planning my stops around a charging break.
I think that range anxiety is largely overblown for a huge majority of use cases.
I think, while battery technology is rapidly evolving, the incentives of EV manufacturers is not to create “open interfaces”, but instead to integrate the battery into the hardware as much as possible. This gets better performance but also creates lock in.
In short, my theory is that until there’s a “battery company” ecosystem that sells up to auto manufacturers, this dream of swap stations will not materialize. Barring some regulation, I guess.
Is there anybody pursuing the idea of charging stations where one swaps your EV’s battery for a fully charged one, and pays a fee proportional to how expensive it was to charge that battery at the local electricity rate?
Specifically, what are the barriers? Legal? Technical? Patent-related? Capital? Or is it not worth investing in this vision, because there’s reason to believe we’ll reach ubiquitous availability of charge stations with <5 minute charge times for a 350 mile range (i.e. equivalent to a full tank fill-up at a gas station) in the not distant future?
To understand the use case better, we own a car and only use it to “get away” (i.e. 200-600 miles over the course of a day into somewhat remote locales). We’d love to have an EV, but the idea of pausing to take a long charging break in the middle of an already long drive is very unappealing.