It sounds like Agassi has thought it through.
Robots that build cars are a HUGE capital investment. When you build a car you do it in a plant…not put a car building robot in every service station in America. I’m honestly baffled that you seem to be handwaving away major issues as if they were nothing.
I don’t believe that a system such as you describe is either practical or economical. For every car on the road we’d need several batteries…so, if we scale that up we are talking about hundreds of millions of batteries. That would be a lot of capital even if they were a dollar each…as opposed to thousands or tens of thousands each. And of course this doesn’t even get into all the standardization issues.
Yes, I’ve read about this in Europe. And in Europe such a system MIGHT work…though again there are huge technical challenges even there that you are hand waving away (you’d have to build the smart energy infrastructure for one thing…as well as retrofit in the batteries to the grid). I seriously doubt that such a system could be made to work here economically.
I doubt it. Rather they are trying to leverage the huge capital investment some what, to defray costs. Since this system hasn’t even been tried on a large scale in Europe yet I have my doubts that it’s feasible.
Sure, I will try and take the time tonight from my hotel room. I’m doubtful that it’s going to say anything that discounts my objections…as I said I’ve read similar plans in other sources, and mostly they just handwave away the real engineering issues…as well as the economic issues. But I’ll certainly take a look…I always like a Wired in any case and it’s pretty entertaining.
-XT
If Battery cells were subject to some sort of industry standard then it can work. Anytime you go to the station you just swap out the batteries. It’s figuring out which batteries should be the standard that’s the problem.
Winsling The stuff about propane tanks is inapplicable as the uses for Propane tanks are very different. It only takes a couple of minutes to fill a propane tank just like a gas tank. If charging batteries takes longer than filling your gas tank then everyone will be perfectly happy to change out their batteries.
villa You are assuming that people would perceive ownership over the battery as opposed to just seeing batteries as something that you swap out every day and as such have no attachment to. Occasionally you’ll get a bad battery, but you also occasionally get a rotten sandwich or a fountain drink that is mostly water.
xtisme and gaffa Likely if there were a standardized system it would be built on an incremental philosophy. Rather than being some large battery it would be several small ones. You’d just pop the hood rip out the batteries that show a lack of charge on their meter and leave the ones that show a full charge in their place. Say having 50 batteries good for 10 miles instead of one battery good for 500 miles. There is no reason we’d need robots to do the job for us. Besides if we wanted to use some kind of rotating technology it would be no more complex than a CD Changer.
Also, the battery station doesn’t need to be a massive warehouse. It can be industrial strength chargers that you place your dead batteries into when you get the fresh batteries. By the time they make the entire revolution of the belt fed system, they’ll be fully charged. Just like a pump at the gas station, there can be battery stations that each have a thousand batteries in the system. You just swap out the batteries.
It would be faster than filling your gas tank. If you had a full service station you just have a guy who takes them out of your car and replaces them, and then they replace them in the charger with another attendant so you are not slowed down by the recharge process in any way.
That would make the task even more complex I’m thinking. If I have to replace 10 batteries in a car, that also means I need hundreds (thousands?) on site and charged up at any given time in order to swap out to the customers. And that means I’m going to need to manufacture 10 times as many batteries…and take all that stuff through the standard life cycle, including eventual disposal or recycling. There are more cars than people in the US…so, if we are talking about 300 million cars (say), and if we need 10 batteries per car, we are talking about 4 billion batteries…and that’s just the batteries IN the cars. Not the replacements. How many additional batteries are we talking about to make such a system work? 1 battery on the shelf for each car? 2? 5? And how much per battery? Like I said, the batteries today are something like $17k per car…it’s the most expensive thing on an electric car. So…say each battery would be between $1-2k. Times…billions.
I just don’t see how such a system could ever be feasible. When we swap out for propane tanks we are taking about tanks that cost a few bucks and are easy to manufacture. And dispose of…they are, after all, simply steel with maybe a bit of brass…easy to recycle, not too harmful if just dumped in a landfill. Car batteries are a different beast.
And leaving all that aside, how are you going to get the car manufacturers to standardize on one battery design? They will all have their own sub-manufacturers and designs which THEY will want to use. Herding cats isn’t even in it.
-XT
Don’t bother, xtisme. I’ve been down this road and there is no convincing some people of the utter economic and engineering stupidity of swapping out batteries rather than recharging them.
Of course recharging is simpler and cheaper, but is it more practical for drivers? While it may be true that the majority of people drive less than 40 miles per day, that’s not universal. On any given day a person might plan to travel a few hundred miles and then what?
If you can’t make the engineering practical and transparent enough for most drivers then all electric may not be the ultimate solution. It may be relegated to a niche technology and instead we go in another direction entirely (hydrogen, hybrid, some other alternative fuel, Mr. Fusion, etc).
This is one of the reason I don’t want to see the government impose a solution on us by fiat…or that I’m wary of dumping a lot of research funds into any one potential technology. Ultimately it may simply not be feasible to do…or the solution may turn out to be completely different than what we THINK it is (say, using fast charging capacitors in some way instead, or maybe embedded power in the infrastructure, sort of like the old slot cars…or maybe magic unicorns will pull the cars along, who knows?).
-XT
Fuel cell technology issuch that we will shortly have the ability to easily supplement electric vehicle driving ranges with backup fuel cells (if needed) . These will be integrated into all electric vehicles. This obviates downtime and lets the car charge when convenient if it’s needed for an extended period of time between charges.
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/01/12/electric-cars-nanotech-tech-sciences-cz_as_0112nano.html
“Phoenix recharges its electric truck battery in 10 minutes with a 440-volt charger–four times the amount of energy in a home wall socket. Scaling that operation, however, would be a challenge: Existing electric grids couldn’t easily handle the power drain of rapidly recharging millions of such electric batteries.”
looks like the problem of quick charge batteries is being worked on, now they need to figure out load balancing of the electrical system.
Then he rents a regular car, given the oodles of money he just saved on gasoline.
THAT is a practical idea. And the rental could be a plug-in hybrid.
They need not be mutually exclusive. Say you plug in your car when you’re at your house, or even put a charger in designated spots at Wal Mart or the grocery store, which can be a revenue stream for them and a convenience for you. But if you’re trying to make time on a 1000 mile drive, it might be more feasible to swap out the batteries at the battery station.
xtisme Swapping out batteries for TV remotes, Wireless Game Controllers and Boomboxes is just unfeasible. If every item needs two batteries and some need up to eight batteries and you think of the eventual disposal of those items and that every person is going to have multiple components and multiply that by 300,000,000 people, eventually you’re going to need billions of batteries. It’s just not feasible!
On the assumption that you meant this to be a real analogy, and not tongue in cheek, I’ll go ahead and answer:
It’s not a valid comparison because the scale is different, the technology is different. When I buy batteries for my boombox (or whatever) I can expect to use said boombox for many hours of enjoyably pissing off my neighbors. And I can expect to pay a few dollars for the batteries I’ll be putting in…say $10 for the batteries I need to use the boombox for days or even weeks of use. We’ll leave aside the fact that I don’t need said boombox to get to work every day.
Ok…using your estimate of 10 batteries for a car and based on what I recall the current price is for a viable battery (say, $20k), that would be $2k…per battery. These batteries are obviously more powerful and more advanced than said boombox batteries (in fact, they don’t exist yet), and probably use more advanced and exotic materials. But let’s just say for a moment that they are equivalent. So…$10 for a whole pack of batteries for my boombox vs $20k for ONE pack for my car. Which I’ll need to take out and replace, what? Daily? Weekly? Whatever…doesn’t matter.
Starting to get a feel for why there is a difference here? Well, there is another point. Any idiot can replace the batteries in a boombox…it’s a completely turn key operation. Perhaps that will also be true in the car…but I sort of doubt it since no one is relying on their boombox for their livelihood…or their lives. Most likely it’s going to take trained specialists to service, test and evaluate these batteries…or at least specialized tools to do so by grease monkeys.
When and if you can replace costly and exotic battery technology with the equivalent of a pack of D-cells then come back and you will have a valid point. Until then your analogy doesn’t measure up very well. Of course, if you were whooshing me there then…well, you got me. 
-XT
xtisme I can change the battery in a car now, and it would be quite easy if it were merely a matter of the restraints. You can easily design better mounting systems than they currently use. There is no reason why you would make it so anyone cannot change the batteries whenever they need to. In fact that would be a pre-requisite. I swap out the battery pack in my X-Box controller every day, there is no reason that cannot be scaled. As for the price of $2k per battery you’re simply pulling numbers out of thin air. If they are being mass-produced there is no reason they cannot be much cheaper. Also, if you are using them for a short time you don’t need to pay the full price. The full price can be amoritized over the course of their lifetime. There’s no reason a single battery cannot be charged a thousand times.
The problem here is that all of your arguments to the contrary are either numbers you’ve simply made up, or technical limitations that are absolutely irrelevant. The way you are talking we are going to regress in battery technology from where we stand today. Why would you need specialized knowledge to check the charge on your battery? You can get a battery tester at any radio shack. My laptop has a meter that reflects battery charge, so why not put something similar in a car?
There’s no reason that you can’t simply pull out a battery pack from a little panel on the fender or hood, and push a new one in. Why would changing a car battery be more difficult than changing the battery on a laptop or in a Boombox? Many people depend on their laptops for their livelihood too. Sure you’d need a technician to fix it, but an electric car could actually end up being simpler than combustion engine as all you really need is a voltage regulator to determine acceleration, a breaking system, and cheap electronic components that monitor the charge of batteries. The rest is simply wires and chassis.
The only reasonable arguments I’ve ever heard on this one:
- The infrastructure that would need to be in place is immense.
- There is no standard battery system.
- Battery technology is still a bit behind on capacity.
None of those are insurmountable, but they are certainly different than the arguments you’re offering.
Rapid charge batteries already exist and they are light weight. I’ve seen demos of capacitor batteries in place of 18volt battery packs for power tools. They recharge in minutes. The downside is that they have about 1.5 times less amperage available which means it would take 1.5 times more batteries to replace Ni-Cads and whatever the difference needed to replace Lithium Ion. A mini van would work because the whole floor could be used as well as the normal space used for battery packs.
I’d rather see diesel’s as the interim solution to energy requirements as that is an off the shelf solution that can be augmented with bio-diesel production.
Biodiesel production could not meet a fraction of the requirements. Certainly it will reduce the need for diesel in commercial fleets and will make a dent, but there simply wouldn’t be enough to provide for fuel. A friend of mine is running a biodiesel company in New York, and he’s doing very well. He collects waste grease from restaurants and provides it to several local trucking fleets.
I think it’s completely and utterly infeasible due to the high value of the batteries. Aside from having people trying to get rid of bad ones, how would you secure them? A station would have to store tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of batteries. They would get robbed all the time. If not by robbers, then by employees.
I disagree. Bio-diesel from algae could meet ALL the energy needs. We’re talking about 5,000 gallons per acre per year and we have the land to do it with. It has the added benefit of using CO2 scrubbed from coal power plants. The technology to do this is probably a lot closer to reality than batteries and the end result is a real car. Battery powered cars are too limited in range and utility and they will be sold at a premium. It makes more sense to build a real car using existing engine technology and focus our resources on the fuel source.
Algae bio-diesel startup companies.
The reason I’ve pushed this idea so hard is that it is the simplest idea that utilizes all the existing engine and fuel distribution technologies. It also incorporates CO2 that is currently getting scrubbed from power plants. I would rather have a car that gets 50 mpg and will go 500 miles between fill ups from existing gas stations. Nothing has to be adapted. When I look at battery hybrids all I see is higher cost, lower trunk space and a car that can’t tow anything. I don’t want to leave the office in the winter only to find out the batteries are too low to get home or I can’t find a specialized filling station.