Bykfixer

Will there ever be a point where one can pull into a petrol filling station and instead of filling up the tank of the gasoline powered auto one can instead drive past the pumps to the battery station and have an attendent swap out the electric fuel cells……the batteries?
If/when they reach that point the interest in electric vehicles would be sky high. Used to be before the horseless carriage one had to wait on the horse to eat and drink or on a long journey a proprietor could swap out horses. We're kinda at that point again without the proprietor who can swap out.
Will there be a time where an alternator of sorts will charge the EV while it drives and one could go coast to coat without having to plug in?

geko29

Packs would have to be standardized, and there would have to be some method and calculation for value exchange. If you bought a brand new Tesla with a battery worth let's say $20,000, drove it for 400 miles and then got it swapped for a battery with 120,000 miles on it, you'd be pretty peeved.

You are talking about a perpetual motion machine. The laws of physics do not permit this.

Toys4RJill

What would anyone really want to do this? I also don’t think a battery is a fuel cell. Hydrogen solves this dilemma if there was a some battery swap idea

pbm317

A lot of this.

People would have to disconnect car ownership and battery ownership. That all batteries are meant to be swapped and changed out and common across all brands (good luck there). Look at how many power tool battery ecosystems exist to try to trap you into one brand.

I think the industry is waiting for some sort of ultra step change in technology to allow for a 5 minute charge vs having the cars use the same batteries.

Dorsai

Not quite...what he described was a Chevy Volt - an electric vehicle whose batteries are charged by an on-board generator. You can indeed cross the country without plugging in, you just have to make the occasional stop to refuel the generator.

geko29

I did consider bringing that up, but did not because the Volt is not an EV. It is officially categorized as a Plug-in Hybrid. In this hypothetical cross-country drive, it isn't actually any different than a Prius.

Bykfixer

Ok, so a battery (pack) costs $18 grand? There's one problem. Realizing the first one through the wall usually gets the most bloody, that sky high cost is likely one reason Johnny Sixpack has no intentions of ever trading in his Chevy pickup.

Then you set out on a journey to drive oh I dunno say from Alabama to oh I dunno, Seattle. How many times in that journey do you have to pull over and "feed" the battery pack like you would a horse? Another reason why Janey Johnson says no way to electric cars.

And I'm not advocating prepetual motion, just a way to recharge the battery pack enough to extend the range 3x? 4x?

At one point "they" said tungston will never work for a light bulb filament. Now what if everybody said "sigh, ok I give up"? "They" said a tubeless tire will never hold air. "They" said the automobile is just a fad. Heck at one point "they" said leeches are great for curing pnuemonia and the world was flat.

I'm not talking about in a year, but in 10……15. But if the electric vehicle industry never makes electric vehicles convenient than Americans as a whole will never go for them willingly. Electric buses and trains, sure but the automobile liberates us so to be forced to pull over every couple of hours and wait for the car to charge? Keep that.

I'm all for electric cars, but if it means I have to pull into some rest area on the way to see my sister and wait an hour for a plug to be available, then wait two more for a quick charge? No thanks.

EZZ

If you build out the infrastructure, there is no waiting for a charger to open. In fact, the Tesla system shows you on the map, how many open stations there are at each location so its never a guess when you get there. Also, my Model 3 charges from 10% to 80% in 22 minutes. Thats about 210 miles of range in 22 minutes and my car is a couple years old using the old tech. The new stuff coming out will be much faster so you can probably get that in 15 minutes like the Hyundai Ionic which is an 800V architecture.

jmavila

This actually was an idea proposed about 13-14 years ago. There was a startup called Better Place, founded by a serial entrepreneur, Shai Agassi. The idea was ahead of its time, but envisioned a nationwide infrastructure of battery swap stations like gas stations, where someone could pull in and swap out a battery tray in as little as 5 minutes. The company raised around $1 billion - an astronomical sum at the time. This was well before startups like Uber and WeWork were able to raised hundreds of millions. Renault was a partner and cars were retrofitted with swappable batteries. The company ultimately went out of business and declared bankruptcy. It was a fascinating concept and the company had many big name investors, but it was ahead of its time and they were never able to execute on the vision.

geko29

So that's already being done. All electric cars (and hybrids) use regenerative braking. Energy is used to drive the vehicle, and some of that energy can be recaptured when not needed. The logic and hardware will improve over time, but from current state we're talking 10-30%, not 300-400%.

In order to get to 300-400%, now you're talking an onboard generator (like in the Chevy Volt) and a pretty large fuel tank. At which point the car isn't a BEV anymore, it's a plugin hybrid.

Cars aren't magic. There is a finite amount of energy that can be stored in a battery--which yes, increases over time with technological innovations. You can use what you have more efficiently, and you can recapture energy more efficiently. But since both of those things are already being done at least fairly efficiently, the upper bound on how much farther you can go is limited by the laws of physics.

In order to extend the range like you're talking, you would either have to recover more than 75% of the energy that is used to drive the vehicle--which is pretty close to perpetual motion--or you need to add energy to the system from another source. That could be by increasing the battery capacity by 500%, adding a generator, or finding a way to externally power the car while in motion, such as electrified roadways. But simply "adding an alternator-like device" to an existing car isn't an option, because it's already there.

FatherTo1

Tesla demonstrated battery swap a few years ago but it’s easier and more practical to build out the charging network. If EVs can now charge 200+ miles in 15 minutes then why deal with the risks and challenges of automatically lifting a 2.5 ton vehicle and swapping the HV battery pack? It is a situation of diminishing returns. You are not saving much time over charging but will need to put enormous investment to build all those battery swap locations.

Och

iTrader: (3)

So much this lol. EVs are currently a negligible portion of cars on the road, and already there are hilarious videos online of long lines of Tesla owners waiting for available chargers. They are going to need charging lots the size of airfields to accommodate all the demand if everyone switches to EVs.

FatherTo1

Those videos are from Thanksgiving 2019. I remember all the media coverage back then. That is pretty bad but is rare that lines back up that long. Since then Kettlemen, and other locations, have added more and faster Superchargers.

EZZ

They are about to add a 100 Charger station at Harris Ranch soon. It will be the largest in the world.

Och

iTrader: (3)

Even 100 chargers are a drop in the bucket, but besides that, one these charging lots become large, they become very hostile and unpleasant, with everyone driving in every direction, blocking paths, etc - much like rest areas along highways.

Also, land in prime locations is expensive, and I'm not sure if a charging station can be a viable business without a bunch of subsidies.