On long trips stopping for 20-30 mins every few hours is ~normal anyway. Stretch my legs, use a restroom, have a drink, get back on the road.
Newer cars charge even faster. I don't think battery swapping is going to be important in the end.
Nio Inc. has videos of the process, and that's what you'd expect (and I assume what tesla tried at one time), you drive to a booth, the car gets locked in and the battery is replaced automatically, then you drive out.
This map has real time stats on battery swap. Unfortunately it's only available in Chinese. NIO has done 35 million battery swap to date and you can see where the swap stations are located. Not quite as accessible as your gas stations but not far off especially in the large cities.
Wake me up when I need nothing more than the payment card I already carry.
> The stations are primarily deployed in three regions: Asia Pacific (over 2,000), North America (over 2,000), and Europe (over 1,000).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Supercharger
Some supercharger stations also work with other cars. I used them over Christmas with my Kia. Surprisingly they were faster and cheaper than anything else in the area.
I'm sure they are the best, those Tesla stations, you're just gonna have to go out of your way for them, around here at least. Hope you got the right card. Or your leasing company. Or your car rental. Etc.
https://www.motortrend.com/features/tesla-nacs-charging-port...
Edit Although I should add, even if they work, they may not support the full power charging. My Kia works, but nowhere near 250kWh.
It really is! My port is on the front centre and depending on how others have parked, it's quite tricky to get the angle required to be close enough.
But these are just niggles. We absolutely need standard hardware.
And even if they had then here top, they'd be useless to me, because Teslas are too large for me.
https://www.tesla.com/en_eu/findus
Model 3 is a normal sized compact car, but if you live in Italy or on an island, it could be too big.
The Tesla Model 3 is a Medium car by NHTSA standards and a Compact by EPA standards.
However, in the EU Euro Car Segment standard, the Model 3 is a D-segment or "large car".
Musk is inextricably tied to Teslas brand.
All good when he was ‘space Howard Hughes (pre-hypochondriac shut-in)’, since that brand resonated with people with money who were going for the ‘better future’ image.
Now his antics remind everyone of their asshole racist uncle that they can’t stand. Not a good brand association, as asshole racists uncles aren’t as popular with those with a lot of money.
But since Tesla is leading the bottom in reliability scores, it's still quite unlikely I'm getting one.
There aren't claims, these are physical constraints. For heavy vehicles such as trucks and busses (and trains) there might be a market, provided the H2 is an otherwise unused byproduct of some process and needn't be produced, but for the majority of personal mobility major breakthroughs are required to make it competitive.
So much denial in the anti h2 crowd.
I'm not anti H2, why would I? I'm not part of any crowd. I just did part of my physics training on the subject.
20 years ago, while there were more H2 vehicles on the road, nobody in the H2 storage fields thought it would last. On a basc level, the physics of getting electrons out of a material is better than getting protons out. And then there is an already preexisting infrastructure for free.
The biggest issue is the need to build out an entirely new fueling infrastructure with a highly explosive fuel. EVs can piggyback off of the existing electrical grid.
To replace fossil fuel transport will require an entirely new infrastructure regardless - if it's electric the existing grid will essentially have to be built out by a substantial factor.
A hybrid future is entirely feasible with long established city to city truck transport routes using hydrogen from dedicated planned end points and mid points along with lighter EV vehicles and non standard route EV trucking.
Maybe it took too long, but we've got a single standard for high powered charging going forward, and I think J1772 is universal for PHEVs and slow charging of EVs. Eventually, people running charging networks will figure out how to keep their machines working and add card readers. My favorite broken charger is the wireless ones --- someone has run off with the cable, but hey the advertising display still works.
The bigger issue is scaling down cracking stations so you can use stranded electricity from solar and wind to generate the H2.
It’s like saying, “It’s easy to ship fragile glass sculptures. You just smash them into little bits and put the bits in an envelope, I don’t see why people use all that styrofoam.”
You’re obviously not a New Yorker
It's not a problem. At all.
Likewise, “It’s possible to ship and store H2” is not the same thing as “it’s not a problem to ship and store H2”.
It's not a problem. At all.
And nobody said "preventing" adoption, since that's easy to misinterpret.
It's reducing adoption a lot, compared to what it would be if hydrogen was as easy to store as butane or kerosene.
Not to mention the technical challenges (assume we can handle) of the low volume density, low temperature..
There may well be, we don’t really know because we haven’t been looking for it at any scale.
But outside of that, these things will improve, although your numbers are a bit out there.
One person in this thread, was talking about cars, with no knowledge or understand that 3 separate manufacturers have h2 products on the market. Not 3 cars. 3 manufacturers. Another was discussing things as if it's an insurmountable task, that having h2 in cars is "really hard", yet these cars are being sold and used all over the world, with loads of adoption in Japan.
People make up weird claims about efficiency. About storage. About where h2 comes from. On and on and on. It's so ... absurd.
This isn't a 'my team your team' thing, yet it seems like, especially americans, are wired this way. "It's not thing $x, thus evil! wrong!! We must, absolutely must destroy any hope of this other thing existing.
h2 is the future for many application and usage spaces, and I can see batteries the same way too. It's not either or, and made up claims won't help the green movement at all.
In contrast, an electric car uses electricity to charge a 99% efficient battery, and discharge to the 90% engine. So, 89% efficiency - much, much better.
For such people, and there's a lot of these people, h2 is less work (quicker fill up) than electric charging.
Right now, electric cars are targeting the wealthy. Wealthy people tend to have houses. That could certainly change, but even if it starts to target those with less fiscal fortitude, many such live in apartments with no charging infrastructure.
What then?
It can supply energy slowly, perhaps at dozens-of-amps.
The only time when an EV gets into hundreds of amps territory is when it is doing real work: Work like accelerating, or going uphill (or both).
Maintaining a speed on a straight stretch of highway is not a huge burden in terms of work, and that is where I think that a trailer-mounted battery might shine brightest.
The car's internal battery can take the brunt of rapid acceleration tasks and get filled back up over time, just like it already does in normal charge-daily EV use.
So to put some of this into real terms:
20A at 355V is 7,100 Watts, or about 9.5 horsepower. That's a ton of real work.
100A at 355V is 35,500 Watts, or about 47 horsepower. Way more than plenty to keep a portly EV heading down the highway.
The connection for the trailer APU doesn't need to handle the peak current draw of hundreds of amps. It just needs to be able to (slowly) pick up some slack and thus provide greater range.
Like the BMW i3 with the gas-fired range extender: The EV drivetrain could consume a ton more peak power than the built-in genset could produce, and that's OK.
It's not like people are using these in endurance racing or something. Most real-world driving is pretty mundane, with only occasional instances of rapid acceleration.
You still need standardisation between all manufactureres for it to work.
Gogoro currently do more than 400,000 battery swaps / day, primarily in Taiwan, but are expanding into other Asian countries.
My point is it can’t be much more of a hazard.
I used a gasoline stove for a while and it is bonkers how hard that thing is to light. You can spill the gas or do all sorts of things—the only thing I could do to get a fire out of it was to follow the instructions, exactly, and keep the stove perfectly level. I later learned that gasoline only burns if you keep the gasoline / air mixture within a narrow range. I know that gasoline is implicated in a lot of fires, but it’s also just so damn common and people are careless with it.
Powerful batteries scare me more, to be honest. Not a lot more, just a little. Not trying to fearmonger here. It’s just that I love those sparks and that fire, and have spent time playing with batteries and playing with gasoline or other flammable substances. If you short a battery, it will basically dump as much energy as it can, as fast as it can. It’s easier to accidentally short a battery.
Properly stored & maintained batteries are fine. I just get a little nervous holding a wrench, sometimes.
There may be safety concerns (e.g. if I understand it correctly, the swapping process is fully automated and the car locks the doors and takes over steering, so I'm not sure how this deals with emergency scenarios where the driver might need to leave the car or intervene) but as far as the driver is concerned they never touch the battery so the risk of accidents from improper wiring is significantly reduced.
She asks me to deal with the batteries in the TV remote.
These considerations are why I think we'll eventually move to battery swapping, when the market is mature enough to have standards for batteries. When there are as many battery swapping stations as there are gas stations now, the problem will be greatly diminished.