Slashdot Mirror
Developing Battery Replacement Infrastructure For Electric Cars
FathomIT sends in a NY Times profile of Shai Agassi, owner of a company named Better Place, who is working to build the infrastructure to support large numbers of small-scale charging spots for electric cars, as well as fast, automated battery swap stations.
"The robot — a squat platform that moves on four dinner-plate-size white wheels — scuttled back and forth along a 20-foot-long set of metal rails. At one end of the rails, a huge blue battery, the size of a large suitcase, sat suspended in a frame. As we watched, the robot zipped up to the battery, made a nearly inaudible click, and pulled the battery downward. It ferried the battery over to the other end of the rails, dropped it off, picked up a new battery, hissed back over to the frame and, in one deft movement, snapped the new battery in the place of the old one. The total time: 45 seconds."
Swappable batteries will stop being cool as soon as the iCar comes out, anyway.
I'm one to keep a car till it falls apart. I feel this might be a problem with a hybrid of sorts due to the battery life. I heard it rumored the battery replacement is a significant cost of the vehicle...not something I would want to deal with I don't think...
Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day.
In future news, Apple announces the release of their new, sleek iCar! With touch-screen capabilities, smooth acceleration, and lots of eye candy. Better Place, however has been stymied by the fact that the iCar's batter is sealed and hidden inside of the frame of the car, and cannot be swapped out. Millions of iCar fans can only hope to travel 250 miles and struggle to find their lost iCar charging adapters, while Microsoft and PC-maker made Windows-Roadsters take advantage of the Better Place swapping program.
gCar and kCar enthusists, while having the first electric cars out there can be seen at the side of the road, can be seen hand-wiring in their own D-cell battery replacements every 100 feet, soldering gun in hand.
Good idea this. The main complaint about totally electric cars is the charge time and this would negate this for a small cost. The company taking the battery could charge it up and use it as stock for the next hot-swap to come in.
If they can get this right (both the infrastructure and the price for the service), it could really help electric car adoption in the future since you'll be able to "re-fuel" just like a normal car, in some respects.
One of the major benefits of this is that the batteries can be charged independently from the car being at-rest - basically, charge according to electricity supply rather than demand.
When (if) we finally start to make the major switch to renewable electricity and electric cars (the only long-term sustainable solution for personal transport), we will need to ensure that our load on the electricity infrastructure meets supply. This is a good step in that direction. That, or charging stations with really big capacitors - which is similar in concept.
Read David Mackay's Without Hot Air for more clear thinking.
Meta will eat itself
When you buy a litre of petrol, it should take you a set distance. When you fill up on LPG, Hydrogen or whatever, the same is the case. There is one important factor in the battery swapping idea that is fundamentally different though. Batteries degrade and can at times do so in strange ways.
Say, for example, that someone has let a spare battery sit idle for some months, charges it up at home and, knowing it's rubbish now, goes off to the nearest fuel stop to change it. Automated process charges it, dispenses it. You get stuck on the freeway after only a few kilometres.
If you stick to your own battery, then you can tell the condition of the battery over time. No dramas. Even with thorough checking though, battery changing services have a lot of questions in regards to reliability and liabilities if it is to work. Who picks up the tab for a dead battery? The owner or the 'fuel' vendor?
sudo mount --milk --sugar
This requires all batteries to have a standard size and compatible electrical properties. If we settle for a standard now, it will hamper development of better models that require changes that break the compatibility. Current technology appears to be unsuitable for widespread electric car use, so this is not the time where you want to slow down any improvements.
This is similar to the Propane Tank business model.
The BIG problem I see here is that with a propane tank, you always get the same amount of propane in return. I see potential for old batteries to float through the system, getting less charges.
Now that I think about it, I bet this will be like buying "premium" gas.
Premium = Batteries 2yrs old, etc. /rambling
bit slow, don't you think?
not that its a hard-to-discover idea.
after owning an electric scooter and being limited by the 15mi battery on it, it was OBVIOUS that a battery-swap station would make sense. people do that all the time, informally (the hard core ones do). they'll leave a battery pack (on scooters they are semi-sealed fabric covered 'modules') and charger at work and when they scoot to work, it sits there on charge ready for the return run home at the end of the day; but you also do have a spare batt in case you need it. the idea of battery-swap locations just is obvious to anyone who has owned a limited-range electric vehicle.
hats off to the guys in the company working on this. I'd join their company if I could - I believe in this concept *that* much. too bad there is so much resistance (no pun intended) in the US toward alternative non-oil solutions. if we opened our mind and stopped keeping Big Oil on top and in power, we'd have this trivial (it is!) problem solved by now. its mostly not a tech problem, truth be told; but more of an acceptance toward the mind-shift of a swappable resource instead of an 'owned' one.
we're slowly getting there, though; you can go to many supermarkets and swap your empty propane gas tank for a full one. we just need a 'heats and minds' campain to make this a US goal to convert to x% of battery-swap use by a certain date.
think of how this would scare the pants off the arabs (lol) if we showed INITIATIVE to get off their crack^Woil habit. we'd FINALLY have a true scary bargaining chip that they simply won't be able to ignore. money talks and if we can cut off our *need* for mid-east oil, that would finally tip the balance of power away from the oil rich middle east nations. stripped of their oil power, they have NOTHING to threaten the world with. they become powerless and financially stripped.
its a great dream. can it be real?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
In most regards it is THE solution to our CURRENT rapid charge systems. Here is the (evil) part of this battery swap equation: it may somewhat stifle rapid charge development. What does this mean? It means we now have to now rely on the company that sells you the battery. A battery that is now standardized and must be instantly removable and that has a fixed input system.
Rapid Charge development provides you the customer to choose your electrical source. You may choose municipal energy (like Pepco here in DC), the company that sells a rapid charge, or your choice if you choose to fuel it from your personally generated source such as solar, wind, etc. That is why rapid charge as a fuel distribution method of is by far superior to a standardized and source weakened swap distribution system.
Tesla motors a very small barely known company was recently able to develop a 45 minute rapid charge battery system. Instead of two steps forward and one back, lets take three steps forward. Our nation can spur development and make this benchmark come down to 5 or even 1 minute rapid charge and offer ubiquitous fueling source distribution if we put our minds and money to it.
Shai's plan for electric cars was featured in Wired last year. The idea only sounds crazy until you learn more about it, and then starts to take on the air of inevitability. It makes so much sense and is so practical (and profitable!) that someone is bound to do it. Israel and San Francisco signed on to the plan, anyway.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I've tried to compare this to:
* The propane tank exchanges used often by BBQ owners. The used/empty propane tank is exchanged for one that has a "full charge" and is fully functional. The tank itself might not be new (scratches, rust, paint chips etc..) but it holds a full charge of propane. Sometimes if you get a tank that is "nice and shiny" you can find places that only refill and don't swap.
* Laptop batteries. I couldn't imagine randomly swapping my laptop battery with another persons. As I could be swapping a brand new battery, that currently is discharged, for one that has had many many cycles and won't hold a charge as long. Even my Li-Ion battery in my laptop isn't as good as it used to be after 3 years. If I have to swap and can't quickly charge it (15minutes?), then I could end up with a battery that is junk.
The next item is battery theft. You might laugh and say they're too bulky, but battery theft has become a serious problem here. The race between locks and thieves was altered by the presence of a widely adopted new design, so thieves just started pulling batteries out of electric bikes and taking those instead (about a third of the bike's cost to replace). Now, there's a new cage add-on thing that you can buy to enclose your battery in a protective shell. Crazy. Point is, I've been riding around on the same battery for a while, it's time to change, and I wish there was a replacement depot I could dump my old battery on and get a fresh new one for free.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I was wondering when this would come up. I know way (way) back in the day when they were first almost seriously talking about electric cars, they seemed to indicate swapping the batteries.
A battery swap makes a LOT more sense than recharging in the vehicle. Waiting for an hour or more for batteries to charge would really ruin a road trip, if you had to do it every 300 miles or so. Every 4 hours of drive time on wide open interstates would become 5 hours or more.
Think of a cross country drive. 2500 miles between two places I've driven between a few times takes 41.6 hours, when average 60mph. I could usually average 60 by only stopping to buy fuel and go to the bathroom (same stop). Ya, even those stops really ruin your average speed. That would make it a 52 hour drive instead. I'd rather be at my destination for those 10 hours, rather than still driving. :)
But, there would be other considerations. Does the battery swap location have sufficient batteries to handle peak demand? Like, on a holiday weekend, when everyone's driving electric cars, and they're all going out of town, a swap/recharge facility may be swamped, and not be able to have charged batteries fast enough.
I worked in a warehouse for a while. The battery room not only recharged, but rebuilt the batteries as needed. All the heavy equipment in the warehouse used the same batteries (more or less). We had moments, particularly towards the end of the day, where equipment was being run hard, and they had simply run out of charged batteries. It was simple enough to move people over to doing things by hand if they couldn't use the heavy equipment. In the case of a car, towards the end of a busy day, customers aren't going to be satisfied with "Sorry, we're out of charged batteries. They'll be ready in 2 hours, but we close in an hour. Come back tomorrow, or plug in for the next few hours and charge it yourself."
They will also have attrition to contend with. As batteries fail, they will be pulled out of service. This is a good thing as far as the car owners are concerned. We have the same situation with propane tanks right now. They have a life, where they must be reinspected before use again. There are plenty of places that take your empty tank, and hand you a full one. I've been BBQing for many years with propane, and never had to buy a "new" tank. I have been refused a full tank because they didn't have any though. It's not pleasant to hear that I can't BBQ when friends are already coming over, because I can't get a full tank. Luckily, I've always been able to find another location with available full tanks. It gets tight on holiday weekends though.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
This is a really stupid idea. Batteries for cars can costs upwards of $20-30k. What happens when some crook swaps out a fake battery for a real one? Are these stations really going to check the quality, retention, chemical composition, and other physical properties of every battery in 45 seconds? HA. These batteries aren't propane tanks for grills, the fraud will be HUGE!
Someone needs to shoot this battery idea in the head.
RTG is the only logical source of power for a tractor-trailer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator
You need A LOT more power per gram than batteries will EVER allow for if you intend to start replacing infrastructure.
People KNOW this. Why, then are they pushing us towards failure? What's in it for them??
We just need to get cars equipped with hooks like this. Then the charge station will be more like a drive-thru..next to a sub-station.
If you own the battery swapping is unworkable for the reasons you state. As most people would quickly realize this and swap their old dead batteries near end of life.
You have to have leased batteries for this to make sense. But then leasing costs for the battery would end up being more than Gas and remind people how uneconomical BEVs really are.
What is going to replace the batteries for the robot when they run out????
Is hydrogen economy scrapped or still under development?
That's interesting, since a co-worker bought her Prius in 2002 and got a surprise battery replacement in 2006. (She hadn't noticed any problems, and isn't the type to ask questions; she took the car in for routine maintenance, they told her they'd replaced the battery and weren't charging her anything for it, she said "Cool!")
I don't know how prevalent this is, but for my N=1, I'm seeing a 100% replacement rate at four years.
Of course, the weasel words "due to wear and tear" let them get away with anything.
The whole reason all this battery replacement talk is happening is that people are comparing electric cars to gas cars. And guess what, they are not the same. Electric cars won't work for everyone. If you want to drive cross country, they aren't a good option. Eventually they will get higher capacity and faster charging times. But electric cars are not there yet.
Many people argue that electric cars won't work because they sometimes take far trips in their cars. I would argue that electric cars might work for 95% of many peoples actual car use, and that renting a gasoline car for the occasional trip makes a lot more sense than trying to extend range of electric cars. People want cars to work for any possible need, hence people commuting in Chevy Tahoes. That mentality isn't practical.
But replacing batteries to extend electric car range? I think it makes no sense. Batteries make up a large percentage of the cost of electric cars. And companies like BYD and Tesla are already talking about selling batteries with higher capacities as options. Now would you want to swap out your battery, that is a huge part of the value of your car, with just any battery the charging station has? What if the battery you swap with has a shorter lifetime or limited capacity due to use? I think a more likely future schenario is quick charging, not swapping.
WHy not in addition to this, make the roof have solar panels, seeing as solar panels are getting more efficient every year. This way while your at work, its giving a little extra charge so you may not need to race to the replacement station every day. Also if you know you are traveling far, but have half a charge are you supposed to pay for a full battery charge, seeing as your just doing a swap(propane exchange comes to mind). Kind of a waste of unused power.
Just remember to get the automakers to buy in and actually *use* standardized batteries and mountings.
Good luck with that. I don't see many advantages to Toyota adapting their designs to whatever Ford chooses.
I don't see car makers actually choosing even very limited (2-3) types of battery/mounting combinations. There are more variables in vehicle design than that, and it's unlikely that you can accomodate the same configuration in a next-gen Prius that you do in an electric Escape that you do in an electric Civic.
Of course, we could all drive cars very similar in size, layout, and rear-end shape. Sure. that's the solution, make us all drive the same car. I'm sure whatever they have in mind will let me drag home a few bales of organic mulch, or a new big-screen TV, or that new sofa I've been just creaming over at the store.
Nope, not likely. Nice idea, and if it serves 50% of vehicles out there, it might be worth it. Just don't think it will be the one-size-fits-all fix. I wish him the best of luck, and hope he can make it work for half of us.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
What I like about this idea is that the company operating the battery replacement station gets to deal with any issues about battery life, defective batteries, improvements in battery technology, etc.
A Prius battery may be guaranteed to last ten years, but it's still around $3,000 to replace one, and pure-electric cars will need much higher capacities and presumably cost more. Batteries may be reliable on the average but it could be a major bummer if the premature failure happens to you.
This way, the station operator, who is presumably buying these in large quantities, spreads out the replacement cost and the risk. You obviously will pay more than if you owned your own battery and charged it yourself, but it will be a predictable cost that is easier to budget for.
Plus, if you do get a bad battery at one of these stations... if we assume there's a vast, dense network of them... the inconvenience of getting towed a few miles and having them just push the button for a quick, automated robot replacement will be far less than the inconvenience of getting an appointment to get your battery replaced under warranty at a car dealer.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
technical rant section:
1. batteries in general are a poor solution because of several things:
a. poor energy density compared to chemical energy
b. battery production is inherently filthy, and quite bad for the environment on its own
c. charge times are awful. people like the model of gas. several hours to deplete the energy, but you can replenish it at a filling station in under 5 minutes, assuming you don't have a semi or something.
d. even the best batteries are quite heavy, and thus make the car less efficient.
happily, there is a very good solution. ultracapacitors, sometimes known as ultracaps. they hold more than batteries, weigh an order of magnitude less (sometimes 2 orders) and can be charged, quite literally, in seconds. (not with plugs at your house... you'd have to go to a filling station that can generate a LOT of current to recharge this fast. you could still trickle charge at home in the evening, but for a quick fillup, you'd need a power station). ultracaps are not dirtier to make than LiON batteries. ultracaps have good staying power, last virtually forever (no practical limit on charge cycles) and hold much more than a battery of similar size, and orders of magnitude more than a battery of the same weight.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
Swapping requires standardization.
Electric car development is still in its infancy.
So...if we adopt and enforce some standard now, we might cripple future battery developers.
If we don't enforce standards, every electric car will have a battery with different size, shape, voltage and connector placement. Kinda like mobile phones, or portable computers.
I see how hard it is to get E85 (require a fourth fluid system in gas stations) and hydrogen stations off the ground. There are only handfuls of either in the USA. Battery replacements face a similar financial and consumer hurdle.
If stations are so rare, then so will be the vehicles. How do you break the logjam?
With fast charging batteries this will be obsolete before it is deployed.
Say we consider 10 minutes an acceptable charge time.
The Tesla roadster fully charged is about 53 kWh, assuming we use a fast charging battery pack
with this capacity in total ( such batteries already exist ) from flat we need to deliver 190.8 Mj in 10 minutes
10 minutes is 600 seconds, so the necessary power is 318 kW
Batteries will likely be able to handle this power since the better models have an efficiency exceeding 99.8%. I.e the heat generated close to batteries will likely be less than a kilowatt, which can probably be tolerated with careful design given that such a large battery pack will have quite an area for heat dissipation.
Lets say we cap the allowable voltage at 1kV for safety reasons. The required current is then 318 Ampere.
American Wire Gauge 1 can take 130 A of current, so we need 3 wires if we use 3-phase AC. Using AC does mean we need high efficiency and high temperature diodes for rectifiers, and unless precautions are taken to ensure the battery cells charge at the same rate it might be necessary to switch to DC towards the end of the charge cycle. Silicon Carbide Shotkey diodes would seem ideal given that they can operate at high temperatures and have a low forward voltage drop. There's already diodes rated for 1.2 kV in the reverse direction so the voltage should not be a problem either.
Of course all of this assumes a full charge, if you recharge before battery depletion the requirements can be relaxed.
Given the last two posts, I feel that in order to fit in I should say something about a particular organization for African-Americans of unorthodox sexual orientation. Either that or I could share an anecdotal story about a strange experience in a men's lavatory culminating in very strange items being put into a freezer.
I hate printers.
This plan fails as you are going to have a hard time knowing that the battery you get is going to be as good as the one you gave. It will be little comfort that you get a free replacement when you are stranded 20 miles from nowhere. Even if this only happened one time would you ever do it again? Nope. Also, it has been shown over and over that if given the choice, Customers will pick the option where they own the product.
So we can drive confident in the knowledge that, as we're tooling along on a 116-degree-day in Arizona with the air conditioning cranked up or crawling home through a miserable Maine blizzard with the heater on, even though our electric car will have to be recharged every couple of miles, the battery swap will only take 45 seconds?!
I'll keep my gas guzzler until they work out the comfort issues, thank you. Everybody doesn't live in San Diego where the average temp is 80 degrees (leastwise according to the Chamber of Commerce it is).
"I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans..." --Wintermute, William Gibson's "Neuromancer"
would solve the "I got a lousy battery" problem
Except for complete failures requiring an expensive tow, or complete failures resulting in a traffic accident (stalls on dark highway just over a hill, or lost motor power and power brakes on very steep hill, or the shock of railroad tracks causes complete failure in just the wrong spot). How about complete failure resulting in death of all passengers, like during a blizzard in a rural area and they all freeze to death?
Oh, and except for spectacular failures, like bursts into flame with occupants inside, car seats full of kids, etc.
Or the battery swapping machine crushes their curious toddler. Or crushes a moron, or their pet dog. Or the unmaintained swapping gear damages the car in any way. Hard to directly destroy a car with a gas nozzle or electric plug (indirectly thru fire, I suppose), but what amounts to a multi-ton forklift could directly utterly destroy the car and/or the delicate innards of the car, or give whiplash to whomever sits in the car during the procedure, or shrapnel breaks off and someone loses an eye, etc.
And who pays for the dead battery? The renter eats the cost of "cheap" propane tanks that die in their posession, I'm sure if you drew the short straw and got the almost dead battery, and it died in your care, you will be charged the full retail cost of a brand new battery, plus the some penalties and fees, plus towing, plus of course you'll have to pay out for yet another battery to use. I can afford the liability of a propane tank that slowly predictably goes out of hydro or rusts, but I simply can not eat the cost of a dead battery that could happen at any random time.
Then there is the weird liability issue of possession of stolen property, if somebodys car gets stolen, and after passing thru the hands of 20 innocent people, you get the stolen battery. Now, how long is the jail term for receiving stolen property? Certainly after the police reclaim it you'll be out the cost of the battery plus you'll have to get towed to get a new battery, etc. At least stolen gasoline and wall outlet power doesn't have a unique serial number.
Either the "electric station" will have legally limited liability, in which case you'd be crazy to risk your life on their probably unmaintained dangerous product, or they'll have unlimited liability, in which case, as the deep pockets, they'll be sued for every accident that happens, so they'd be crazy to go into the business, or if they are crazy enough, they'll be sued into oblivion momentarily.
The whole idea of battery swapping is simply a non-starter. Its like a business model of swapping empty gas tanks for full, or transplanting full human stomachs in the place of empty ones.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I was listening to NPR on the way to work this morning. Apparently the Chinese auto market is the world's largest auto market now. The Chinese government is offering huge incentives to its domestic manufacturers to develop electric cars and renewable powered vehicles. Given the size of the market and the type of incentives offered, I would say to look to China for future enhancements to battery and car technology. In the U.S. we'll likely be licensing the technology instead of developing our own.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Personally I don't see why it is they can't just standardize all these rechargable cars to a regular USB connection instead of making us buy a proprietary charger for each and every rechargable car we own; I want the freedom to just plug my car into my desktop computer at work every morning when I arrive and let it charge up for the ride home.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I didn't see this posted, so... http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html
That's a great idea!
Brawndo! It's what cars crave!
I think this Shai Agassi guy is mostly hype.
He's previously proposed battery-swapping stations in two places where they actually make sense - Hawaii and Israel. In both places, you can't drive very far. So the number of battery swap stations needed is small.
But deployment isn't actually happening in those locations. Instead, he's going for more PR, not an initial product rollout. Hype.
Battery swapping was actually used around 1900. As with this new scheme, the batteries were in a big rectangular box on the bottom of the vehicle, and there was a mechanical arrangement to swap the packs quickly. But the competition was horse-drawn cabs. A similar scheme was tried in London in 1896. Interesting, their problem was tires, not the batteries. In 1898, New York got electric cabs with battery-charging stations. The battery change time was 75 seconds. Tires were still a problem; the battery weight overloaded existing tire technology. The New York service was modestly successful and ran until 1907.
The problems with this idea are 1) it requires standardization of cars, 2) it's liable to be overtaken by improvements in fast battery charging technology, and 3) it takes a huge infrastructure investment before it's useful at all.
When this guy gets Honolulu or Tel Aviv running on his battery packs, it's time to listen. Until then, forget it.
Why would a person potentially wish to swap out their new battery packs for potentially older or even non-working battery packs?
JohnE
jobbank.com - Search jobs, post resume,
That's where the future lies, not H2 and not LiIon. "Recharging" involves removing the spent anode and inserting a fresh array of zinc rods and can be done fast. The salt can then be processed off-site to retrieve the zinc metal, usually by electrolysis (that's the true recharging step).
It's a proven technology,already powering mass transit and postal systems in US, Europe and Singapore, it's cheap, has good power density while still having room for improvement, what's not to like about it?
Wrong. Welders typically just exchange their oxy acetylene tanks, they don't refill the same tanks over and over.
anything in terms of emissions reduction in the long run, aside from shifting the emissions to a different part of the automotive lifecycle, unless battery plants run on unicorn magic and recycling centers are powered by pixie dust.
this is the same with hydrogen powered fuel-cell cars (it has to be refined from something) and most other alternative fuels. the only way to reduce our total carbon output is through more efficient cities, and less use of fuel at all stages. **waits for the trollmod**
Good people go to bed earlier.
Batteries wont work in the long run. They:
-get old and lose capacity
-are slow to charge
We need better ultracaps. For example this
http://www.maxwell.com/ultracapacitors/products/large-cell/bcap3000.asp
has approximately same capacity as a standard AA battery (3 watt-hours) and can output(be charged at) sustained 7.5 KW until its empty. Thats almost 3000 Amps at 2.7 Volts.
Lets look at something bigger:
http://www.maxwell.com/ultracapacitors/products/modules/bmod0063-125v.asp
125V, 60KG
sustained current 150A
peak 1 second 750A
My broken math tells me its equivalent to ten 12V ~2Ah batteries.
Tesla's pack is 450KG 56kWh, 225kW for the engine (600 amps at 375V), needs 4 hours to charge. Lets assume 9 bmod0063-125v modules.
540KG, 375V, 450A, 2250A peak. 168KW. ~2.2kWh.
We need breakthrough that will bump ultracaps capacity ten-twenty fold. That would bring us to current Li-Ion levels, but with charge times measured in seconds.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Many argue that there can be some emissions reduction achieved by shifting to more efficient mass-generation of energy at at power plants rather at the micro-level under the hood. This emphasis on keeping the ways of travel, commuting, and lifestyle generated 60 years ago is frustrating the transition to a lifestyle that actually will be sustainable when global income improvements push energy prices to levels that make even electric vehicle travel expensive.
Why not abandon the development of expensive and environmentally-dubious approaches like electric cars, ethanol, nuclear, wind, and solar in favor of persuading people to live closer to work, school, and the other places they go?
Most cite as the key barrier to getting folks to leave the suburbs and move into the city where they work and where services and shops exist close-by the poor quality of urban schools and poor public-safety. Why not use the money that was to go into electric cars and their infrastructure to improve urban life by:
-- Improving urban schools
-- Putting cops on the streets
-- Building effective urban mass transit
Tell me why we can't do that. Tell me why there aren't lifecycle CO2 savings from getting people to move into walkable neighborhoods.
Hint: It's not because no one should incentivize one way of living over another, because we already does that in the form of providing trillions in freeway infrastructure, rural electrification, rural fire protection, universal service fee for telephone. Run the numbers, rural libertarians -- I subsidize your lifestyle.
It's a nitch market and they are not depending on their tank as their primary transportation either.
As the driver of a Miata-sized car, I would rather not be carting around a battery appropriately-sized for a suburban. I'm sure the suburban driver would rather not have battery sized for a Miata either.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
will not be able to put a fire out.
That's kind of important with a fire extinguisher. You don't want to find that out only when you've got a fire to put out...
has been developed decades ago. It's called the diesel-electric locomotive. Why they haven't been used in the trucking industry is beyond me.
Currently, I drive ~30 miles per day. I need to worry about fuel every 10-14 days.
Given an 80-100 mile range for batteries, now I must stop and 'refuel' every 2 or 3 days to maintain a safe reserve.
Not necessarily a dealbreaker, but still an issue to take into account.
and the chances of that happening are precisely f'all currently.
Look at laptops, phones etc - things we have nowadays
Wouldn't it have been nifty if all laptops used the same sized battery packs - or more realistically a limited selection?
I'll give exceptionally good odds that the battery packs will be unique per manufacturer. Then they'll be people selling patterned sets. Then the car manufacturers will start ripping up warranties, putting all manner of 'original only' chippery etc etc in then. We'll then have people complaining about the rip-off prices, then the counter-stories about dodgy sets bursting into flames - blah blah blah.
Its one thing for a gas station to have a couple hundred bucks of extra propane tanks that get swapped out in low volume. Its completely another thing to expect every gas station to maintain 100+ spare batteries on hand every day. Battery prices are high because of manufacturing costs. They aren't going to drop much anytime soon. You expect all these stations to fork over $500k in battery inventory so they can make it back $10 at a time? If anything, the sudden request for millions of extra batteries will raise their pricing because they rely on exotic manufacturing processes/BOMs that can't be solved by mass production.
This posting is anti-insightful. I bought a tank of gas from a gas station once. It did not take me the "set distance". It took me 1/2 mile and the engine died. Bad gas (water contaminated). I never bought gas there again. The station went out of business not too long thereafter. Exactly the same for an EV battery-swap business. Load-testing the battery as part of the charging process is straightforward. Any battery-swap business that wants to survive will do that. There are lots of hard problems to solve for this business to succeed. Avoiding giving your customers bad batteries is easy to solve, not hard. -Jay-
Shai Agassi is somebody I've been watching for a while. He's the only person I've seen with a plan that:
1) Will not result in a loss of quality of life for US citizens
2) Can eliminate the US' dependency on foreign oil.
3) Can "fix" the problems that the power grid has with "alternative" energy sources, which generally produce energy as available rather than as needed.
4) Will actually *save* money and resources over the current transportation system.
5) Eventually result in a power grid that's virtually immune to natural disasters and/or terrorist attacks.
Every so often, there's somebody who really, really, really groks the biggest problems society faces. Henry Ford was one such fellow, Shai Agassi is another.
I hope hope hope hope that the United States gets firmly behind this guy, because he's the one that could actually do it.
He understands that Ethanol and Hydrogen are effectively red herrings that favor the petroleum industry. His solution works with wind, solar, coal, nuclear, biomass, etc. His solution, if implemented, would result in a power grid that could maintain its stability even with a severe disruption of power flow due to the distributed nature of it. (Every car becomes a potential power source as needed, with rules determined by the owners of the cars)
There are few people who really, really, really get it. Shai Agassi is one of them. No, I'm not in any way attached or related to him, or his company. I'm just an upper-middle class American who gives a damn about the future of his country and mankind.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I think part of this battery swapping scheme has to include having multiple batteries in a vehicle. This is necessary so that different size vehicles could all use the same standard batteries. Larger vehicles would use more and smaller vehicles would use fewer. It would also greatly mitigate the issue that you're talking about since, if one battery fails, you still have the others. A somewhat less critical, but still important factor is that multiple batteries would allow for the possibility that a customer would only want a partial fill up. In other words, they would replace some but not all of their batteries at a given stop.
We need a public standard for battery interfaces so the replacement process is cheap and the batteries can be trusted. That makes swapping them cheap and robots like this can improve to be faster and cheaper, and battery manufacturers compete broadly across all electric cars on cost, performance, range, and durability.
The US could ask existing players for comment, establish the standard, then enforce it to incentivize interested businesses and ensure consumers can trust the battery claims on what they swap in.
With this kind of competition freed up, you separate the car, which is largely a style choice, from the batteries which advance rapidly every year, avoiding justified fears of obsolescence.
I don't get the the current hype about alternative fuels. In Sweden where I live, they introduced E85 a couple of years ago...despite reports already being available about how ineffiecient it was compared to petrol and diesel and how third world countries would have to starve to supply consumers with the capacity needed if Ethanol replaced fossil fuels.
It's the same with batteries. There are a lot of precious materials that go into making a battery, whether it's Nicam or Lithium based, and if everyone on the planet runs their mobile/laptop/car/iPod on batteries, then we are quickly going to run out of those elements needed to make batteries, which is just as bad as running out of fossil fuels.
National Geographic did an excellent article a year or two back that analysed the efficiency of different fuels, both the efficiency of making the fuel and the efficiency of using the fuel (read: energy required to manufacture the fuel and miles per gallon respectively). They found that algea based, or bacterium based fuels offered the absolut best manufacturing efficiency, and one of those (cannot remember) offered a miles per gallon efficiency that blew petroleum and Ethanol based fuels out of the water.
That is the direction we need to go! efficiency is King: Ethanol and batteries are NOT the answer.
Why do I not see many references to Hydrogen cars? Honda Clarity is in production and in use in California according to Top Gear. It runs off liquid Hydrogen; the most abundant element in the universe, and we already have the infrastructure to supply it via normal petrol stations. It may not be the most efficient fuel in terms of miles/gallon, but it will not run out, is not a precious resource and we do not have to re-tool our entire planet (in the form of building new infrastructure: "filling stations" etc) to provide the fuel to consumers.
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
What REALLY worries me is that we already have exploding notebooks, what about your car setting ablaze due to a defective battery?
After Obama won the the presidency in November I submitted a plan for transitioning the US automobile industry to electrics along with a very similar power module swapping plan to replace gas stations which would be implemented as a public works project to help out with employment. I also submitted it as part of the discussion here on Slashdot at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1095855&cid=26536657 I wonder when I'll get my profit sharing checks? :)
Be as you would have the world become.