dtilque, while the technology to DC charge that fast exists it is not the agreed standard or one that is under much consideration.
The Better Place model OTOH can have a vehicle leaving in less time than a gas fill-up. Again, I’m not sure how important that wil end up being.
kanicbird, Under that model the battery pack is not theirs, it merely is the means of delivering the fuel. They pay much less for the car as they are not paying for the battery. The cost of batteries is built into the charge for delivering the electricity instead and Better Place delivers the electricity. They have no worry of the pack wearing out … ever. Better Place instead keeps up to date with keeping fully functional batteries and upgrading as better battery technology comes along.
And as for the radio stations … really? You don’t think that these cars would be made in a way to preserve the stations?
But any savings I might get would be in that 100 mile trip to Grandma’s. If we are just talking about a 6 mile commute to work, why wouldn’t I want to keep my gas car, even if it was $7 or 8 per gallon?
What if I want to go to lunch? Can’t, car is recharging.
What if the family wants to go out to dinner? Can’t car is recharging.
What if there is an emergency in the middle of the night? Car is recharging.
I would guess that your answer to those would be to just use the other gasoline car, but if that’s the case, then what’s the point of paying many tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for the electric car if it is just a souped up golf cart?
This is why. The savings is in the usual miles people drive in a usual year.
Yes the cost of the vehicle with battery needs to drop down some more, along with gas prices staying this high or higher, for it to make sense without any tax credit, but realistically by the time the credits are gone both of those are very likely to have occurred.
Unplug the car and go to lunch. Go to dinner. Take car of the emergency. You think it needs to finish topping it off before you can use it once you plug it in?
What pure EVs are not good for is the cross country trip. Rapid charge even would force a leisurely drive with longer more frequent stops than many would want to make. (Even though some corridorswill have that in place soon). And it is possible. Placing Better Place swap stations across the interstates seems unlikely. It is better suited for places that function as “islands”, like Israel or a major metropolitan area. And for fleets that put on many many miles and want to keep going. A taxi for example that puts on 100K a year, something like 275 miles a day, rolls in and out of a swap station maybe three times a day and keeps going, saving a ton on fuel and maintenance costs in the process.
This model has been suggested as a workable option.
Another one I heard about many years ago was to replace the anode only, or was it the cathode, anyway the battery was made with aluminum that would be the sacrificial part, the aluminum would eat away itself in the reaction, I think I’ve heard it can be recycled and reused but not sure. The battery was basically a non-rechargeable design, so no home recharging, you needed to replace the plates, and aluminum plates are far lighter then batteries.
So say we do this, do we actually produce enough electricity to be recharging all of these batteries (wherever it may be done). I assume so, because I never see anybody talking about it, but does our current electrical output even support the sheer amount of extra work this would take (assuming everyone magically switched to driving electric with this battery swap model).
Yes, we already have enough capacity at off-peak times to fuel converting 80% of the light duty fleet per some expert calculations. (Although our own energy expert on this board thinks such is somewhat overestimated by them.)
What would be the electric service provided to such a service station? How many KW?
If one ‘charge’ is 16KW as in the Nissan example, and let’s say the station has to recharge 500 cars over an 8-hour night-period.
that’s a loit of space to store those batteries
I make it that’s a 1 megawatt supply, or ballpark 2K amps at 480V
That was a crappy, quick calculation but I’m getting the feeling that’s far more power than even a small commercial building gets - we’re talking maybe a small substation.
Maybe 100 cars is a better estimate, and maybe they can ‘rotate’ the charging over the full 24 hours, but the numbers are still kinda big.
Large
Heavy
Expensive
High technology
Easily rechargeable at home
Problem #1, you need a machine to get under the car and move the large, heavy batteries.
Problem #2, you need a large stock of expensive fully charged batteries ready to install, and stored conveniently for immediate use
Problem #3, you need manufacturers to standardize technology that they currently use to differentiate themselves in the market
Problem #4, you need manufacturers to build their cars around your batteries
Problem #5, you need to convince consumers to give you their brand new, expensive batteries in trade for used batteries
Problem #6, people can and will regularly recharge their batteries at home, giving them enough range to handle their daily trips without needing to swap batteries at all*. When they do need to swap, it will be when they are planning a longer than normal trip, like on weekends at which point your stations will be swamped after being empty all week.
By the time batteries become small enough, light enough, cheap enough and standard enough to be swappable, you’ll have a range long enough to practically eliminate the need for road side recharging.
I find it unlikely that the typical person would eagerly buy a car that they would have to fill up with gas (or swap batteries) every single day, unless there were no other alternative.
This is one of the different schemes being debated. The main problem currently is that most electric-only cars today are prototypes of some kind or other, and that each car company is using their own different, unique, akku battery make and model. This is complicated by the fact that the makers of akku batteries themselves are having a race trying to develop better, longer, cheaper, lighter akkus.
This means instead of swapping one empty standarized propane bottle for a full standarized bottle, you had 15 to 20 different sizes with different pressures.
Or how the akku batteries in cell phones and video cameras and laptops all have different voltage and shape and can’t be swapped.
