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A comment on Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go: study. Parent comment

Re:Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go: study by theluketaylor on Saturday September 24, 2022 @01:53PM (#32965024)
Hardly 99%. With a 260 mile-range car I only need to plug in about once a week. People who drive more obviously need to plug in more often, but it's a pretty rare person who would absolutely need to charge every single day. EVs are not for every single use case yet (like long distance towing) and that's okay. They will handle more use cases with each passing year. We certainly don't have nearly enough slow charging points yet, but it doesn't need to be anywhere near 100% coverage before many people who don't have dedicated parking can use an EV with minimal to no disruption.

Battery swapping isn't more efficient or cheaper. You still have to build out massive charging infrastructure all over the place to charge all the swapped batteries, plus you need staff, locations, and equipment to do the swapping, and storage space for the batteries while they wait to be placed back in a car. Plus every manufacturer has to use the exact same battery physical and electrical specs, eliminating all possible innovation in packaging. No one is saying it isn't possible, it just doesn't actually make sense at scale.

I recognize having a private driveway and garage is a luxury, which is why I'm highly supportive of laws requiring multi-unit dwellings to add charging and offering tax breaks for both landlords and tenants to get them installed. Also highly in favour of tax breaks for employers to offer charging in their lots. I also think municipalities should be upgrading the existing streetlight wiring to offer charging alongside street parking.

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Re:Charging cars at home at night is not the way to go: study by badrabbit on Sunday September 25, 2022 @12:56AM (#32969050)
To be a bit reductive here, it needs to work for everybody for it to be a viable fossil fuel car alternative. You can't have 1% of people for whom it doesn't work for because for 300M people that is 3M people. Often the people for whom it doesn't work for are the poorest and most vulnerable as well. Imagine taking off the cost of battery ownership and having battery leases subsidized, now you electric cars become even more affordable. Battery swapping from an infrastructure perspective is not mutually exclusive to charging either. You can charge cars with swappable batteries at charging stations. You just need the government to force standardization of both charging and swapping connections. Capitalism will take care of where you have swapping and charging stations. Of course you can force people to buy hybrids as well but they are not well liked due to difficulty of repairing them and that still means fossil fuels.

If fast charging car batteries in less than 5min can be done in 15 years and hybrids are acceptable maybe that is the way to go but even then as a consumer a 20second swap is better than a 5 minute charge. Ignoring what consumers want is always a critical mistake.

I have no doubt fossil fuel cars will go away, the question is do you want them to go away in 10 years, 20 years or 30 years. The sooner they go away the better it is for climate change right? If so, long term "holistic" engineering has no place here. Swappable+chargable battery designs are best imo.

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