One somewhat popular French electric, the Bolloré Bluecar sells for a mere €19K, including a battery contract that is a sort of €80/mo lease on the 30KWh battery. As capacity goes, 30KWh is all but worthless in the US west of the Appalachians.
The page you linked to estimated the battery range at about 90-95 miles. My understanding is that even west of the Appalachian Mountains, the average driver goes only about 30 miles in a day. So while this car wouldn’t work for a long trip, it should be OK as a commuter vehicle.
In the time frame we are talking about (the next 10 to 15 years), self-driving cars may be common and this makes a rental approach much more attractive–since the car is driven to where you want to start from. So rental car 1 picks you up for your long trip, drives 300 miles where you immediately switch to rental car 2…
We’ll all have flying cars or even ::gasp:: teleportation by then.
For a more serious answer, when I go to the Catskills I usually end up in a B&B, onstreet parking only. It’s the same issue rowhouse/hi-rise apartment-dwellers face of no dedicated overnight parking but with it being for a tourists, I expect less pressure for the government to do something about it & with the relatively low density of tourists I question the economics of Level II private filling stations near my accommodations. The same issue applies in city cores. Not every hotel has their own garage; would private garages see the ROI on putting in a bunch of Level II chargers. Them putting in five does you no good if you’re the sixth car in the lot. Yes, there will be more Level III charging stations but I question the viability of expecting overnight charging away from home.
Propane tanks don’t last forever; initial certification is 12 years & recertification is some lesser amount (based upon recertification type) - that’s what those letters & numbers are that are stamped into the collar are telling you. The tech filling them is supposed to make sure that the tank is not expired & at least not showing any obvious visual defects before refilling. I see no reason if we have swapable batteries that it can’t work the same way; the tech recharging them makes sure they meet some minimum standard or he moves them to the side to a reject/expired pile
Are you suggesting that we have to unpack & repack our luggage at some roadside swap station? It’s much more enjoyable driving with a sleeping toddler than one who’s rammy & wants to get out of their strapped in seat because you just woke them to detach/attach their car seat into a new vehicle. What about the stuff I keep in my car but don’t necessarily use on a regular basis (various USB charge cables, ice scraper, flares). Would I need to swap all of those things or check that the new one has them?
I’d imagine that one of two things would be the case with swappable batteries. One, the “useful capacity” of the battery would only be 75% of the actual capacity, and there would be circuitry to prevent drawing past that. This would allow for a substantial amount of degradation before the actual battery “capacity” would be affected.
Second, if the above isn’t the paradigm, then you’d pay for X amounts of amp-hours, so if you got some janky old battery, you’d pay less for it because it would hold fewer amp-hours than a newer battery. So if you were on a road trip, you might want to swap in fully charged new ones, but if you’re tooling around town and have less cash on you, you might choose to take a quarter-charged one because that’s all the money you have on you.
Personally I think super-fast charging will be the way it goes; maybe instead of charging the whole battery bank through one charging cable, you’ll have the ability to hook up 4-5 chargers at once (or have a special plug or something) that lets you charge all the battery banks in parallel. Think of it as charging four 2000 mAH AA batteries at the same time, instead of trying to charge one single 8000 mAh battery.
Couple issues with that. The first is that the charging station has to be able to deliver the watts to get you there. That is a massive power draw on a grid that may be near peak load already (most people do not drive through the night, when loads are low).
The second issue is that supercharging puts a lot of stress on batteries, meaning the more you use them, the faster your batteries wear out. The real solution has to be more range. Once we get to structural batteries, the weight of the vehicle will go down a little, meaning its range will go up that much. Once we have passed the 500 mile range mark, the situation will have improved considerably. Driving more than 500 miles in a day is quite uncommon.
But do people want to pay for and carry around 500 miles worth of batteries? Driving more than fifty or a hundred miles a day is uncommon, let alone 500. What range do people want?
Perhaps the cars will have a limited range, of 100-200 miles, but a lower cost, with additional range available as an (expensive) upgrade.
Different people want different things. In 18 months of driving my iPace, I found that I rarely go more than 150 miles in a day. Very rarely. Usually, I’m between 20 to100 miles per day… Thus, the car’s 240 range gives me a good buffer and I wouldn’t bother paying for more. As pointed out here in various threads, other people have very different driving habits than I do.
My wife’s Model X can charge to 350 miles, but we’ve never even fully charged it. It’s sett to charge to 300 miles, and–like me-- she never has come close to using all her range. I can imagine a post-COVID road trip, where we’ll be happy to have the extra capacity. 500 miles of range sounds nice, but I can’t imagine it making much of a difference to people like us.
Well, in the first place, all the extra range means you do not have to remember to plug it in every day (though there is a hazard to that as well) or can get away with forgetting to. And if you have 500 miles and do plug in every day, you can set it to stop at 70%, thus keeping your battery in the sweet middle range (I just saw a stat that said keeping the battery between 70% and 20% can increase its life by twelve-fold). It is kind of like the answer to the '70s question “why the hell do you need a 200W amplifier?”: it is way too loud at that output, will probably rip the cones out of all my speakers and probably sounds like shit, but I tend to run it at about half a watt, which means all that performance headroom makes it sound very good.
A couple of months ago, Toyota announced a solid-state battery they’re developing that can go 500km/310miles on a charge and can be recharged in ten minutes. This may not work out, of course, but others are developing other new battery technologies.
I added a Tesla charger with a 50A circuit, even though my total household is 100A service. I can schedule the charging at 1AM since then it won’t conflict with the dryer or oven for power. (Only autonomous big draw would be water heater). Rarely do I need more than 2 or 3 hours charge, since 40A charges about 58km/hr (max draw is 80% of circuit breaker rating). I guess the question is - how much of a condo’s 100A draw is actually being used? Car charging is unlikely to be a big factor during daytime air conditioning use in Florida.
If I had a suggestion, it would be to put in a few chargers and assign parking to those wo want to buy EV’s. Put them at the farthest parking spots (although I assume you have assigned parking already) so that people who are truly dedicated will be the early adopters. Build the infrastructure so it’s easy to add in groups (i.e. 10 at a time). Obviously, an extra charge for such a convenience. Se whether scheduled charging in off-peak is an option - Teslas also have a “be finished charging at” so that the car is not going to start charging the moment it’s plugged in.
Another point overlooked in the discussion - now that cooler temperatures have arrived; in city stop-and-go with -30C temps my Tesla will use up to 3km range for each km driven. Heat is a function of time, not distance. At highway speeds, it drops to about 2:1. At 0C/32F it’s about 1.3:1. Nominal range is meaningless in winter.
I charge my Model 3 to 80% consistently, overnight starting at 1AM. Rarely does it take more than 3 hours, unless I’ve driven a lot. I’ve charged it to 90% twice for big road trips. Newer superchargers allegedly will fill the battery in much less than an hour. And… battery tech is still evolving. As others discuss above, there is a tradeoff between range and charging time. The faster batteries can charge, the less need for extra range. Most current gasoline autos already have a tank size “sweet spot” of about 6 hours highway driving, and I consistently would stop far more often than this. Consumer experience with 10-plus years of Tesla tells us that the batteries will probably last adequately for the life of the car. The one example I read was a car that used superchargers daily (several times a day?) as a taxi between LA and Vegas. This was a few years ago, and the battery pack failed due to a faulty battery after about 180,000 miles and was replaced. (A major repair effort) With proper charging, current vehicles should last much longer than that.
Has anyone mentioned plugshare.com - a good source of finding assorted chargers, fast and slow. There are a decent number all over North America, and more all the time. Biden in his speeches suggested adding thousands more chargers across the USA as an infrastructure project to encourage EV take-up. Note too that an EV is typically a rolling computer. (Aren’t most cars nowadays?) It will give a much more precise estimate of range left, and can tell you where chargers are available. Teslas will even tell you occupancy status of their chargers and whether they are online.
As for trucks - I suspect local delivery vehicles returning to a central depot are a prime target for electrification. Similarly, I expect vehicles like the Tesla Semi and competitors will first start hauling a few designated long-haul routes where charging stations are in place, before eventually spreading out to the rest of the country. it’s an evolutionary process.
It would seem like a charge supply unit could be placed where two spaces could be served by one unit. If parking could be laid out retail-style, one box could have four sockets to serve the four spaces it sits at the corner of. Owners, of course, supply their own cables (will cable theft become a thing in the future?j.
Highway trucking seems a much better candidate for swappable batteries that passenger vehicles. Space isn’t at a premium, so you can just whack a big standardized slab of batteries in the highway tractor, and at truck stops they could have swapping stations.
First of all, there can never be one “identical” car for the same reason that there isn’t one form factor now: Different people have needs. I need an SUV, not a sedan, for carrying my bicycle around and occasional light cargo and the upright riding position. My stepfather needs a pickup, not an SUV or a sedan, for hauling construction materials around. My sister needs a sedan because she’s not comfortable driving a pickup or SUV. Other people might need a minivan for large families. So you’d have to stock at least four vehicle types at a swap station.
Second, imagine how swapping cars would go on a road trip. You pull up and check in on the app and are told which car to use. Then you have to transfer six suitcases, readjust all the controls and seats, remove and reinstall your child seat for your kid, make sure you transferred your phone, wallet, house keys, and whatnot. And you have to clean your trash out of the car you’re leaving to avoid a cleaning charge.
This takes close to an hour and you have to go through this process five times on a road trip from Minneapolis to Chicago and back. Hopefully the previous occupants of the car didn’t have COVID-19 or some other illness and didn’t leave a syringe or used condom behind that the cleaning crew missed for your kid to find.
Actually, for long-haul trucking, why bother? You just have a tractor swap. By the time electric trucks are common, they will be automated anyway. The logistics company will simply plot the route for truck-swap-stops. The spent tractor will spot the trailer and trundle off to be refilled, while the fresh tractor will come in, hitch up and be off.
Imagine driving down the freeway alongside a bunch of semibots that are tuned to get where the load has to go within a timeframe, not stressed about deadlines or trying to shave an hour that they want to spend down the road at a bar. Autonomous trucking sounds very appealing, as long as the control system is advanced enough to handle adverse conditions, which currently seems to be a weak point.
And as mentioned before, the middle step may be the hybrid of a skilled lead driver with several autonomous semis tightly slaved to that lead vehicle with V2V communication, as a platoon, accelerating and braking in unison.
If tractor swaps made sense with autonomous vehicles, they’d make even more sense with vehicles with drivers. With autonomous vehicles, the cost of the tractors themselves are the primary cost for trucking companies, and so doubling the number of tractors would mean doubling the company’s costs. With human-driven vehicles, at least you don’t need to pay another driver for each tractor.
Not sure how you think the swap means any more tractors?
It’s using the tractors to carry loads nearly all the time they are not actively charging, not quite 24/7 but much closer to it than tractors are on the road per day now. Many more miles per year put on each tractor (so fewer not more tractors). And product getting to destination much faster - along the lines of the old Pony Express, swapping out fresh horses at each stop, and as soon as the horses have been rested and fed, hooking them up to the next postal carriage coming into the stop.
That’s certaily the approach we use in airlining.
Done ideally, a pilot delivers, e,g, 8, hours of vehicle-in-motion per 24-hour day, then hands off to another pilot to put 8 more hours of vehicle-in-motion on the same machine that same day, to hand off to maybe a third who can put 4 more on it for the day.
For some situations where the flight durations add up just right, airplanes can be kept in motion 21-22 hours a day every day until needing to be pulled from the rotation for maintenance. That’s how you max-perform the financial return of an expensive asset.
An obstacle to implementing that in trucking is that the airline biz is used to paying for hotel rooms for the pilots while they’re resting between workdays and somebody else is moving the jet they just left behind at the jet-stop.
Conversely, the trucking industry gives the trucker a cab and expects the trucker to live in it 24/7, only getting out to refuel the truck, refuel himself, or to crap or take a shower every day or two.
Keeping the cabs moving with multiple drivers airline style would involve the trucking company picking up the need to house the off-duty drivers. That’d get expensive quickly.
Trucking does have something called “team driving”, where two people, often a married couple, share a cab as their home away from home and each drive the max hours every day. In theory doubling the daily productivity of that cab.
Sadly, sleeping in a cab while it’s being driven isn’t very restful and this results in zombies behind the wheel and low life satisfaction for the workers that leads to rapid turnover. The two people are always physically nearby, but only together a couple hours a day. Not good.
At some point, the loss of ICE vehicles is going to lead to a dearth of gas stations. If you are driving the last Impala ever made, you’ll likely have a hard time finding gas for it - sort of a reverse of the current charging station issues.