Meanwhile, on this planet, the necessary standard didn't emerge from government or industry.
Do people care about range with internal combustion vehicles? Not really, if they can get between gas stations. It takes very little time to refill, and each vehicle (regardless of manufacturer) uses the same stuff.
The trouble is that standardizing when there is hot competition is very political. Things need to cool down a little before it can be done, and you don't want to standardize until designs naturally converge.
You don't want government to get involved early when engineering is involved.
EVs will be a pain until a standard emerges though. I can't wait until I can drive up to a station and get a pre-charged battery.
Don't standardize the chemistry, or the voltage, or the current limit, or the charging rate, or anything else... just make it fit. Then require the industry to adopt standardized power converters and chargers under similar auspices. For the hardware, don't specify voltage, don't specify cost, don't specify charging time, don't mandate anything except the ability to charge a particular class of battery.
Simply mandating the form factor, connector, and handshaking could have made all the difference. We would have manufacturers competing to see who could build the most economical and/or performant batteries, chargers and converters. Charging could take place at times and places that optimize efficiency. Filling up an EV could take less time than getting gas, not more. And there would be no chicken-and-egg problem to impede adoption, as we're seeing now. You would not be stuck with the batteries or the charger that your car came with.
We will kick ourselves for the next 50 years for not doing this.
Apple would argue the EU was stepping on their toes by imposing USB-C. Maybe whatever proprietary connector Apple comes up with is better in some technical ways. But that benefit has to be weighed against the emergent benefits of standardization.
Maybe 120V AC isn’t objectively the best. But isn’t it nice you don’t have to think about it before plugging into a wall? I think so.
Just like miles and gallons..
It is not indeed, 240V AC is better as you need only half the current for the same amount of power.
The way to get best range+efficiency out of an EV these days is cell-to-pack where the pack is basically integrated into the frame. I think it's on the order of 20% better range for 10-20% lower production cost. There's no way a standardized swap pack could match the engineering numbers of that, which makes it an economic no-go.
And by the time the swap standard was implemented, demonstrated, and platforms changed to it, it would be 10 years. Batteries with this tech, sulfur, alu-air, etc will triple the density for half the current cost by then. An EV will go 800 miles on a pack that is 2/3 or 1/2 the size/weight, and remember there's a pseudo-rocket equation on these big battery packs.
If someone doesn't immediately and intuitively get that -- and you're hardly alone in that respect -- I've found that no rational, math-based argument will persuade them. The ship has sailed, your side won, and now we all get to deal with the consequences.
Batteries with this tech, sulfur, alu-air, etc will triple the density for half the current cost by then.
Exactly! But you will have to buy a new car to take advantage of them, because your current car was designed as a battery with wheels rather than as a drivetrain powered by a battery. It didn't have to be that way, but again... your side won.
The point is that to compete with ICE, you need the extreme integration to break the ICE point-of-sale cost advantage. I agree in a perfect world a swap would be so nice to have as an option, if only for a cheap repair or upgrade as you point out.
I think the other problem was economics. You buy an EV, a massive component of the cost is the battery, yet you might get a lemon battery next time you swap, and then the "swap service" refuses to accept it back. Yes the battery could be a service and never explicitly owned...
Also, it is hard to imagine such a massive component being swapped without extreme wear / damage on the swap site. Sure theoretically it should be solvable, but real world? people freak out over microscopic paint chips.
IIRC Teslas were originally designed to be swappable in some manner. But it was never done.
The other thing is that it will likely happen with semis I would guess, which have longer lifespans and invested value in the actual equipment.
That's always been the most frustrating point to argue against, I think. Batteries can be insanely well instrumented. You can tell exactly how much charge has been sent into the battery and pulled out of it. You can tell how old it is, and you can tell how many charge/discharge cycles it has undergone. When you get a 'lemon', you are not going to have a hard time convincing the refill station that (a) the battery isn't delivering the stated performance; and (b) whatever is wrong with it isn't your fault.
There is no reason any normal human being should feel any pride of ownership towards a car battery. No reason on God's green earth. It is no different from the propane grill cylinders you swap out at the grocery store, except that with the battery you can see its entire service history courtesy of the embedded controller. You pay for the gas you use, and you pay for the charge you move.