The Quest For an EV Fast-Charge Standard

An anonymous reader writes "This article explores one of the stumbling blocks currently facing EV adoption: 'Sure, there are already public charging stations in service, and new ones are coming online daily. But those typically take several hours to fully replenish a battery. As a result, the ability for quick battery boosts — using a compatible direct current fast charger, the Leaf can refill to 80 percent capacity in 30 minutes — could potentially become an important point of differentiation among electric models. But the availability of fast charging points has in part been held up by the lack of an agreement among automakers on a universal method for fast charging — or even on a single electrical connector.'"

Comments

My solution

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

I think some of the battery arrays should be able to pulled out of the car and swapped in with a charged battery array. This process could happen in under a minute.

Re:My solution

[hipp5]

I think some of the battery arrays should be able to pulled out of the car and swapped in with a charged battery array. This process could happen in under a minute.

Someone is working on that.

Re:My solution

[Registered Coward v2]

I think some of the battery arrays should be able to pulled out of the car and swapped in with a charged battery array. This process could happen in under a minute.

While it's a compelling solution, there are few obstacles to it becoming commonplace, for example:

As with plugs, you'd need a standard battery. Given manufacturers want to compete on things such as range, a standard battery would remove one area where they could differentiate their product; making it unlikely.

You'd need an accurate way to assess battery quality - or else you'll wind up trading good batteries for problematic ones.

I don't doubt that may become solution someday, but think fast charging with a common plug / charge setup is a more likely short term solution.

Re:My solution

[Cryacin]

I don't think they would sell it like that. You probably would purchase a "licence" for a battery, basically, the right to a working one for the pool, pay for the charged swapover, and have failure replacements calculated into the swapover expense. The concept of "new" and "old" battery wouldn't really come into it.

Re:My solution

[camperdave]

I agree with this. Part of the reason ICVs were adopted is that re-energizing the vehicle was simply a matter of pumping gasoline into the tank. A five minute process and you're back on the road. Unless EVs can match the convenience of Internal Combustion Vehicles, they won't be much more than a fad. However, if the automakers can't even agree on an electrical connector, there's no way they'll agree to a swappable battery rack.

Re:My solution

[lucidlyTwisted]

I might be a little picky about swapping my brand new cells with an unknown station's current cell stock.

Treat them like gas canisters then. The canister remains the property of the company and all you do it buy the contents. The company is responsible for ensuring the canister is functional, safe etc. If the battery develops a fault - you can simply swap it free of charge for a new one. Obviously you are paying for this in part of the fee when you pick up a fresh battery, but it saves having to horde your own precious batteries.
To be honest I am surprised that the industry didn't do this from the get go since such schemes (as mentioned above) already exist all over the globe for many things. All there needs to be are a few agreed standards on size etc. Again, just like gas canisters really.
If one company makes a better battery that can fit into the same volume, then they can compete. heck, such standardisation could stimulate a new battery market.

Re:My solution

[Riceballsan]

Even better question, how would you prevent tricks. Fake batteries etc... Heck who knows maybe even cheap chinese knockoffs that seem real but have 1/16th of the battery life, maybe even perform similar tricks to that loopback flash drive that registers as a 8GB and then just rewrites over the old data whenever it hits the 16MB of storage it had, could a similar trick be done on a battery to fool the chargers?

Re:My solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily. They could make a standard, relatively small standardized battery pack (10cm x 5cm x 2cm, say), and then engines use arrays of these (setting parallels and series to control voltage and longevity), then it would be a matter of a machine being able to handle the specific array of an engine. Perhaps they could even have a couple different chemistries as well, each with a different size, it would still work. Now all an engine would need is a bar code or RFID tag to specify what kind of array it uses. A mechanical arm could read that, pull the batteries out, place them in the proper charging pool, and then grab charged batteries from stock.

Re:My solution

[Joce640k]

I don't think a battery swap will ever be viable. The people who would need a fast charge will largely have stuff in their trunk, and swapping batteries becomes impractical from a design standpoint. How would you get them out of the car?

Are you seriously saying you can only imagine batteries being placed in the trunk of the car and the only way to get them out being upwards?

I see why you post AC.

Re:My solution

[chill]

The same way that is stopped now with every other item you purchase. By complaining to the store and authorities, and by suing them if necessary. At the very least, stop going there and tell everyone you can.

Fraud is a crime.

Re:My solution

[Joce640k]

Those scams only work when you don't really have any way to get a refund.

If it's the charging station on the corner then you know where to send the battery police.

Re:My solution

[networkBoy]

If they can't all agree on a single charging standard, then they will never agree on a battery pack geometry, let alone chemistry.
And speaking off the summary:

or even on a single electrical connector.'"

I sure as shit hope they don't agree on the same connector if they are going to disagree on things like voltage and current.
Same connector: one at 96 volts, the other at 144 volts. Plug the 144volt car into the 96 volt port and likely nothing happens (or at best you charge very slowly up to a partial charge). Plug the 144 volt charge circuit into the 96 volt car and *boom*.
-nB

Re:My solution

[Riceballsan]

I'm not implying the charging station being the origional distributer. For charging stations to be viable, they need a large amount of customers. So joe swaps out his good battery for a crap one that can only go 40 miles per charge, drives 35 miles to a swap station, trades the crap one for a real battery, drive 1 mile, change the new battery for another fake, head to another station repeat. Preventing this means adding more paperwork tracking etc... into the system of the batteries, which eliminates the convinience of the swap and opens up privacy worries.

Re:My solution

[Joce640k]

While it's a compelling solution, there are few obstacles to it becoming commonplace, for example:

As with plugs, you'd need a standard battery.

This is exactly the sort of thing that could be mandated by law.

(And given that cars are different shapes and sizes I think the only practical way is to have multiple smaller batteries per car instead of some monolithic "battery").

Given manufacturers want to compete on things such as range, a standard battery would remove one area where they could differentiate their product; making it unlikely.

You won't pay a fixed amount per charge, you'll pay by the Watt.

This lets them compete: "You want long life or regular?"

You'd need an accurate way to assess battery quality - or else you'll wind up trading good batteries for problematic ones.

Management of bad batteries will be built into the system (it has to be!) and you only have to keep them as long as it takes to get to the next charging station and swap for a different one.

Re:My solution

[Joce640k]

Or...downwards? Down to where the robotic battery swapper is?

Re:My solution

[bazorg]

I believe that you'll struggle to defend ownership of that idea. Reasonable as it sounds, I think it brings the disadvantages of rental to an industry with millions of consumers used to owning their stuff. Do we need more financial services getting in the way of good technical solutions?

I would prefer to have always the same battery pack installed, having an internal combustion engine feeding the battery when needed and then having buried power rails installed in locations in the city where many minutes and hours are spent waiting for the traffic to move. It would be a mix of an induction hob with the Opel Ampera (AKA Chevrolet Volt).

Re:My solution

[jellomizer]

As someone who recently had my normal car battery fail after 1 month of usage. I would be displeased if I had to pay say $20 a battery swap and have some days where I can only go 10 miles while other days I can go 100 miles. On those 10 mile days I may not be able to loop around an go back to the same dealer for a refund. And I doubt you will have competing companies honoring someone else refund for faulty products. So I get a battery swap at Exon Mobile, then 20 miles later I do an emergency stop at Hess. Will they give me a free swap of a battery... No. If they did how long do you think it would be for some shady companies to load cars with faulty batteries that can get them to their competitors and having to do the swap out just to drive them out of business.

 

Re:My solution

[pnewhook]

With smart battery packs you would assume there would be some sort of identification of the battery characteristics to the charger to prevent things like that. This way any battery would be compatible, and backward compatible with any charger with a common plug and agreed to communication standard.

Re:My solution

[iamhassi]

I agree with this. Part of the reason ICVs were adopted is that re-energizing the vehicle was simply a matter of pumping gasoline into the tank. A five minute process and you're back on the road. Unless EVs can match the convenience of Internal Combustion Vehicles, they won't be much more than a fad. However, if the automakers can't even agree on an electrical connector, there's no way they'll agree to a swappable battery rack.

100% agree. EVs with gas-electric generators are the future, and like you said they can't even agree on an electrical connector but people think they're going to agree on one standard battery for ALL electric vehicles? Never going to happen. It's also impractical, tiny 2-seater EVs are not going to need the same battery a EV 1-ton truck would need.

Anyone working on a universal swappable battery for electric vehicles is wasting their time. Your best bet is just to put a small gasoline or diesel powered engine in the vehicle to charge the battery when needed. Jaguar is working on a range-extended EV that uses a turbine engine to charge the batteries:
"When it runs out of juice, it can be topped up via a standard household mains outlet or be given a boost via two 70kW (94bhp) micro gas turbines."

Re:My solution

[jimicus]

Easy solution to that - instead of storing the fuel source in the form of a solid lump, make it some sort of energy-dense liquid. That way the manufacturer differentiates themselves on the basis of how much liquid the vehicle requires to travel a given distance and how much liquid their vehicle can store, and the charging station simply pours liquid into some sort of tank until the tank is full.

Re:My solution

[jonwil]

Some cellphones and portable devices now have special charging setups where you just put the device on a charging mat and it charges.

Scale that up in size and voltage and embed it in the road and let EV drivers charge up whilst sitting at the lights or driving down the interstate.

Re:My solution

[skids]

This way any battery would be compatible, and backward compatible with any charger with a common plug and agreed to communication standard.

That made me laugh. Battery makers are second only to the A/V industry in almost never adhering to existing standards -- unless of course they can make money on the churn in doing so, and then release a newer standard (which the then don't follow for a few years) thus guaranteeing the obsolescence of the old standard.

Re:My solution

[Dishevel]

Sure.
More government will fix it.
Whenever I see a problem I just think to myself "How much more government will it take to fix this?"
Then I add government and the problem is fixed.

Re:My solution

[grimmjeeper]

Fortunately for the rest of the world, you're not the only one who is coming up with ideas on how to make it work. There are already pilot programs (in Tokyo I believe) where you pull into a station and a robot drops the battery pack from the bottom of the car and swaps in a new one. Works pretty well in fact. Only takes a minute or two for the swap. Each battery pack is charged at the station. They track each battery pack in service via a bar code on it. They know how many times it's been recharged, what it's expected remaining life is, etc. When one goes bad prematurely, they can just pull it out of service and recycle the contents for the next batch of batteries. For a densely populated urban center with power to spare, it's not a bad system.

Re:My solution

[skids]

Easy -- make them slide out somewhere other than from inside the trunk.

If they could get the gravimetric energy density of flow batteries up, however, then you could just exchange liquid electrolytes. Not that I think this is better than sliding out sealed cells, but people are used to fueling up with liquid, so it might go over better with the muggles.
 

Re:My solution

[grimmjeeper]

That's an amazing concept. If only we had such an energy dense liquid readily available to consume...

Re:My solution

[Gription]

That is so obvious that I would suspect that a large company or a government could never get the idea out of a committee. Everyone who has had a R/C car is familiar with the idea because you want to use the thing instead of watch it sit there plugged in...

Two things would be required to make this work out:
- The cells would need to be packaged in one or two standard formats.
- They would also have make it so the condition/replacement of the batteries are a group thing. The charging stations swap out any dieing cells so and that cost is spread across the whole marketplace.

Re:My solution

[SuricouRaven]

Batteries can be made quite flat. It's common practice in EC car design to put them beneath the car body,either side of the driveshaft, with enough shielding to make sure they don't get damaged by an overly-high speedbump. In that position, robotic changeover would be quite practical, if prohibitively expensive.

Re:My solution

[SuricouRaven]

Expensive. Inefficient. And useful to all the people who realise they can load their back seats and trunks up with all the batteries that will fit and collect enough energy to run their house for a week.

Re:My solution

[Joce640k]

DC step up/down converters are very small/efficient these days. It would be easy to make a car which accepts any voltage from (eg.) 48-240V.

They won't do it of course. The same people who try to lock us into memory sticks and sell us $50 camera batteries are currently planning how to use this as a new way to screw consumers.

This is one place where government could actually step up and do something useful. Want to bet whether they will...?

Re:My solution

[hedwards]

They're taking their time as well they should. ICVs are on their way out, doesn't matter whether the alternatives are less convenient, we only have so much oil available in places that we can get it and we've only got so much pollution that we can dump into the atmosphere, both of which are becoming harder to justify.

The technology for electric cars is likely to be in place for a really, really long time, probably longer than we've been driving ICVs.

Re:My solution

[Joce640k]

The government doesn't actually have to do much: "You have six months to agree on a standard between yourselves. If you fail, we'll pick one company's proposal out of a hat at random."

Of course that's only in the sort of government I'd run ... real life governments don't work that way. Sigh.

Re:My solution

[hedwards]

Except that if you're carrying a generator around with you take a significant hit to your gas mileage. Besides that we've already got those, they're called hybrids and in the long term they carry the same deficits and deficiencies that other gas powered vehicles do. Albeit at a lesser rate. But you're still going to have to keep the things fueled and for folks that are just driving around town there's no advantage at all.

We can be pretty confident that it's the case because the only reason that anybody's interested in electric cars is that gas and diesel powered ones are on their way out. And those gas and diesel vehicles are on their way out because we don't have limitless gas nor do we have limitless ability to emit noxious fumes either.

Re:My solution

[scharkalvin]

Probably from under the car. Drive the car over a pit, battery is removed, lowered out of the car, new batter is raised into place. The process could even be automated and done by a robot.

Re:My solution

[hedwards]

Not going to happen. The amount of energy that's wasted charging a cell phone is pretty minimal probably only about as much as from a traditional charger. However trying to charge a car like that would come with all sorts of issues like cancer risks and wasted energy. At the end of the day you'd be better off just having charging stations providing free juice as it would be a lot less expensive and a lot less risky.

Re:My solution

[realityimpaired]

The point being, you *wouldn't* have some days where you get 10 miles, others 100 miles, because you'd return to the station to do another swap.

It makes a degree of logistical sense to have all charging done at centralised charging stations. The impact on the grid of plug-in electric cars isn't very big right now, but imagine the impact when there's suddenly 2 million of them being plugged in overnight.

Re:My solution

[Joce640k]

...for how much longer?

PS: There's this crazy idea called "sustainability" I heard about...

Re:My solution

[Mongoose Disciple]

Unless EVs can match the convenience of Internal Combustion Vehicles, they won't be much more than a fad.

I don't think I would say 'fad' so much as 'niche'.

For someone who lives in a city and rarely if ever drives outside of that city (and that describes a lot of people I know, even if that's still definitely a minority of drivers) even the current setup of EVs is pretty solid.

But then there's a lot of people for whom it's totally impractical, too.

Re:My solution

[grimmjeeper]

True, but where will the energy come from to produce the electricity in the future? That's just as much an issue as finding oil in the ground. Electricity doesn't just magically appear. It's not an energy source. It's a medium to transport energy from the producer to the consumer. Electric cars do not solve the problem of limited energy resources.

Re:My solution

[pnewhook]

Agree completely. What needs to happen is the automobile manufacturers to grow some balls and define a standard, then only buy batteries that conform *exactly* to that standard.

Re:My solution

[grimmjeeper]

A short term disruption due to bad planning does not invalidate the premise.

Re:My solution

[Joce640k]

It's all just engineering.

eg. A really clever battery could have built in redundancy - spare cells which swap in if one fails. Battery maintenance could be performed at the charging stations if batteries reported failures.

Of course that makes the battery bigger and the main problem right now is that they're too big. Point is: Technical problems can be solved.

The bigger problem (judging by this thread) is the NIMBYs who precondition themselves to believing that they always get the dud battery, etc. when the real problem is their leaden right foot. One more thing to complain about around the water cooler...

Re:My solution

[jimicus]

PS: There's this crazy idea called "sustainability" I heard about...

I know - which is why I was careful to say "liquid". There's no law that says the fuel has to be made of dead dinosaur.

Re:My solution

[Joce640k]

Electricity *can* be produced sustainably. If we can be bothered to get of our backsides and do some work.

Re:My solution

[Joce640k]

Maybe we could hang some electrified chicken wire above the highways and put up an antenna to grab it - like the bumper cars at the fair.

Re:My solution

[Dare nMc]

The problem is battery chemistry is not well understood at the point of what goes wrong with them, and how to predict life, beyond charging, then discharging to measure capacity. Then charge them for install. So any swap strategy with current technology is going to be fraught with the issues discussed above of not knowing how much power you were just given. So it is going to be expensive and wasteful to keep all the batteries at some 90% of a new battery capability. Maybe you can have some lower tier of battery swap where you can get the end of life 60% capable batteries at a lower cost, but your going to have a massive headache and cost of swapping batteries. Seams like your going to need a standard logger charge controller, tamper proof... just begging for tons of fraud to have any chance of pulling this off at any scale.

Re:My solution

[grimmjeeper]

Between political wrangling, NIMBY attitudes, etc., it's going to be very hard to develop sustainable electricity generation until we're really desperate.

Re:My solution

[jrumney]

As with plugs, you'd need a standard battery. Given manufacturers want to compete on things such as range, a standard battery would remove one area where they could differentiate their product; making it unlikely.

Having a standard battery would make it clear which manufacturers are actually competitive on range, and not just using the good old American solution of throwing more cc's at the problem.

Re:My solution

[DigiShaman]

Weight. Moving an entire canister of liquid is heavy. Pumping liquid however distributes the weight while in transfer. Besides, think of the delay in progress and increase in hazards by moving full canisters of fuel. You only move them if they're small enough to be lifted by your average man. Say, for lawn mowing and emergency trips to refuel a stranded car on the road.

Re:My solution

[Dare nMc]

>because we don't have limitless gas nor do we have limitless ability to emit noxious fumes either.

Actually we do, ethanol, bio diesiel, paper to butanol are all options. Ethanol for example is much aligned as requiring so much energy to produce, but is a closed carbon cycle, and for E85 (not mixing, that is a mess.) If you just produce E85, that can be done by anyone (not legally in the USA, need a still which can produce alcohol, revenuers don't like.) It is as simple as taking corn (enough corn to produce ~5000 gallons can be produced on 2 acres, and maybe 10 gallons of fuel input) letting it get ripe, add yeast for a week, that you can buy online or at any brew your own shop. The Energy cost is that you need heat to distill (heat to 185F) the ethanol, get that from somewhere green and renewable (say waste heat from a power generation plant, or solar), you have a clean burning closed carbon cycle, dense power source... The only other major issue I can think of is this fuel can be used to drink, and OMG think of the children. (also most new cars are E85 capable, or very close, old vehicles, not so much.)

Re:My solution

[Joce640k]

What's really needed to push this along is something to make gasoline cars less attractive (usually this means fuel price).

Re:My solution

[cforciea]

That is again simple to solve. Don't just take any battery that they give you to trade in. Only take the battery with the correct RFID/other authentication to show it was the one that was given out by the system.

Re:My solution

[spage]

There are no issues in covering south-facing roofs with solar PV, except for cost.

Re:My solution

[grimmjeeper]

Capacity is an issue. Solar panels only do so much. By themselves, they won't solve the problem. They won't produce enough electricity to cover all of the demand. They may help out in residential areas but they won't even begin to touch industrial use.

Re:My solution

[uninformedLuddite]

They don't want to. You can't make them. They will ever be legislated into correctness.

Just like laptops!

[OITLinebacker]

You can't even get a single laptop maker to standardize within the models they currently offer. I find it difficult to believe that an industry that can't even standardize on the tires to agree on their connectors. It's a wonder they even all agreed to use Gasoline (and even then you have models that "prefer" specific octane).

Re:Just like laptops!

[lucidlyTwisted]

I find it difficult to believe that an industry that can't even standardize on the tires to agree on their connectors.

Different jobs, different tools. Tyre's do follow standards however. Once you have a set of the correct size, you can fit them to any vehicle. It's not like manufacturers have proprietary wheel hubs. Same thing for batteries, there will be standard sizes, just not one. Although I can see that is may take legislation force manufacturers to co-operate; and perhaps global legislation at that.

It's a wonder they even all agreed to use Gasoline (and even then you have models that "prefer" specific octane).

They didn't all agree, just ask Monsieur Diesel.

Re:Just like laptops!

[werfu]

They didn't standardized on fuel. At the automobile beginnings, you used what you had available as fuel and engine where conceived that way. It's not until late that even producer have been able to regulate strictly quality (octane level) and that a common process prevailed. If 100+ octane level would have been common at that time, it's what we would be running on today.

Re:Just like laptops!

[networkBoy]

I think he was German... Might not like the prefix "Monsieur" ;)
On another note:
Other fuels that have been tried, but failed included Acetone and something that "smelled of almonds" (that's all I found).
Fuels that have been used in place of gasoline: syngas (from re-formed coal, WWII Germany), Wood gas, Ethanol.
There is a rough standard about fuels, but there are certainly other fuels out there.
The very first cars were steam engines, fueled on oil, coal, wood, and anything else that would burn.
-nB

Re:Just like laptops!

[hcpxvi]

They didn't all agree, just ask Monsieur Diesel.
I think you will find that he was Herr Diesel (although he was born in Paris).

Re:Just like laptops!

[couchslug]

The laptops connect to standard wall outlets via their power brick.

Integrate the chargers into the vehicle. Use standard 220 single-phase outlets of appropriate capacity. No risk of getting stuck with an infrastructure of chargers which may not be appropriate to future tech.

Bonus:
High-capacity 220 is nice for welders, air compressors, and other equipment.

Re:Just like laptops!

[lucidlyTwisted]

I think you will find that he was Herr Diesel (although he was born in Paris).

I know, and I also knew that whichever one I picked someone would complain!
Hensieurr Diesel then. :-)

Re:Just like laptops!

[OITLinebacker]

Apple is a recent phenomenon. They did have some laptops that charged at different rates than others (Macbook vs Pro I think or maybe 15 vs 17 inch). In any case, they only recently have them all on the same page (sort of I think the iDevices may still have multiple wattage/amperage).

Re:Just like laptops!

[gman003]

Although they aren't 100% standardized, ASUS seems to be doing pretty well. They've got three chargers for their entire lineup - a 50W for netbooks, a 90W for most laptops, and a 150W for their high-power laptops. Which is a lot better than some laptop companies do (although I believe Apple manages one connector for all three of their laptop

Re:Just like laptops!

[OITLinebacker]

It's not like they are all that standardized on tires and it's not just the right dimensions, but also matching the hubs/rims/lugnuts. If I have a compact car from one manufacturer, I can all but be assured that those tires will not work for your compact car made bye a different manufacturer (or even a different model/year from the same manufacturer of my car). Gasoline vs Diesel argument is almost like the AC/DC argument. I know there are some major differences, but it seems appropriate.

Re:Just like laptops!

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

The very first cars were steam engines, fueled on oil, coal, wood, and anything else that would burn.

Bring back steam! I want a steam powered car!

Re:Just like laptops!

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Pshaw, "high capacity 220". My clock radio runs at 230V.

Try three-phase 400V at 20A, that'll get yer juices flowin'.

Re:Just like laptops!

[lucidlyTwisted]

Tyres are built to standards. So long as you get the correct size/profile they will fit and work. Whether or not they are the *best* tyre for your vehicle is a different question (and often comes down to a matter personal taste).
Consider the humble hammer. All different sizes and shapes, yet all conform to standards. e.g a claw hammer is a claw hammer, just bigger or smaller.
We could not have one tyre (or hammer) for all jobs as the variety of work required is simply too great. This is also true of batteries, however there is on advantage batteries have; they can be linked together to create "a bigger battery" to easily fit inside a given form factor. There are other considerations as well, but this is a possibility in some case. Maybe cars won't have single batteries, maybe they're have (say) 4 and you swap ones and twos as they become exhausted. Dunno.

Great

[hipp5]

It's cell phones all over again. Except 100 times the cost. Also, obligatory xkcd reference.

Re:Great

[royallthefourth]

It's cell phones all over again. Except 100 times the cost.

And none of the additional utility that a cell phone provides over a landline.
Electric cars are a bandaid to the problem of automobiles. Give us cities where people can walk, bike, and use an effective bus system and people will actually be willing to give them a shot. New York and San Francisco are expensive to live in for a reason...

Re:Great

[pnewhook]

Actually it's BluRay and HD-DVD all over again, with the exact same lack of market acceptance and high costs until a dominant standard emerges many years from now.

Re:Great

[CastrTroy]

Possibly, although you have to realize that people really like their cars. I don't own a car, and let me tell you, people think I'm crazy. I do just fine with bikes and the bus system, and I have a wife and 3 kids. It's not because of lack of money either, but not owning a car sure does free up a lot of money. But most people can't imagine not owning a car, and driving it daily. Most people I know drive their car everywhere, even if it's just something that would be a short walk, simply because they have a car.

Re:Great

[grimmjeeper]

That's all well and good but what about the people who need to live and work out in sparsely populated areas? After all, someone has to grow the food that is eaten by people in cities.

Re:Great

[m50d]

Electric cars do nothing for such people, their range is too limited. And while we'll eventually need to do something about the CO2 emissions of the what, 3% of the population who actually need to live out in the country, better to go after the big target first.

Re:Great

[grimmjeeper]

That's not unique to big city dwellers. It's human nature for people to not think beyond what they have around them. The country folk can't imagine why anyone would want to pack into crowded, dirty, crime ridden cities. City dwellers can't imagine being away from all of whatever draws them to the city. It's what they know and are comfortable with. They have some anecdotal evidence that supports their decision to live the way they live. They ignore, or at least dismiss any of the problems associated with where they live.

I've lived in small farm towns. I've lived in more than one major metropolitan area in more than one state in the US. I've visited several countries. I'm getting ready to visit another for my job. Every place had it's benefits. Every place had its drawbacks.

If you stop and think about it, rather than just applying your own standards to the entire world you can figure it out. But once you stop and think about what it takes for a large city to function effectively, it starts to make sense. But you have to open your mind to the concept that everything that shows up in the big city doesn't appear by magic.

Sure, if everyone lived in densely packed metropolitan areas we could do away with a lot of cars. But you still have to deal with the logistics of supplying everyone in those metropolitan areas. The cost to transport food and other goods from where they are produced to those cities is not trivial.

You have to figure out what has to be done to support the infrastructure that supplies those cities. First, you have to have the people who actually work the land out living on that land. You have to have the support infrastructure to provide them with the tools and supplies they need, along with the support and maintenance of those tools and supplies. Then you have to have the ancillary support for those people. Those people have kids that need schools to go to. They need to buy their own food from grocery stores. They need banks, gas stations, entertainment, etc. The people who work all of that need their own housing and support infrastructure. Pretty soon you start to figure out that you really do need towns every so many miles to make farming the land possible.

If you know anything about logistics, you'll know it's often more economical to process raw materials into finished goods where the raw materials are produced. In most cases, the raw materials contain significant waste material compared to the finished goods that are produced. Transporting all of that waste material requires a lot more energy. So it's cheaper to process all of that cotton into finished fabric, all of that corn into corn flakes, etc. before you send it off to the big city. So now you have industry spread around the country rather than being condensed in the big city. That means more people living away from the big cities in order to support those big cities, with all the infrastructure they need. Speaking of infrastructure, the transportation networks need to be built and maintained by more people who can't do their jobs from hundreds of miles away in the big city.

Shall I go on to the economies of designing and producing farm equipment near the farmland rather than in the big cities? There's a reason John Deere operates engineering facilities in Iowa rather than New York City.

I certainly don't disagree that in many cases, people could do their jobs in densely packed urban centers just as well as they could anywhere else. If people like that moved to the big city, we could reduce the number of cars out there. But that idea only goes so far. No matter what we do we still have to have people living out in the country doing work that can only happen out in the country. They can't move to the big city and do their jobs. It's just not possible for them.

Re:Great

[spasm]

One size never fits all. In the near term, electric vehicles have promise for moving small mass cargoes (ie people and their shopping) relatively small distances - which covers a huge percentage of all vehicle trips undertaken in cities (and over 60% of Americans live in cities where air pollution is at levels considered to be detrimental to health (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429131158.htm)). The combination of environmental concerns, strategic concerns about dependence on externally-sourced energy, and increases in fuel cost may lead to a lot more electric or at least hybrid vehicles being used in cities.

But combustion engines have a number of particular strengths against current battery-based electric vehicles that will keep them in use long after electric vehicles become dominant for city-based transport. Such as work vehicles in locations where long trips, often with high mass cargoes, are common.

Re:Great

[grimmjeeper]

So you really think using electricity from coal and natural gas fired power plants (by far the most predominate source of electricity in the USA) is going to solve the CO2 problem? Interesting.

And, despite your assertion, it takes a lot more than 3% of the population living in rural areas to supply everything needed by people in larger cities.

Re:Great

[grimmjeeper]

I certainly agree that one size does not fit all.

I also understand perfectly well that pollution is a problem in many major metropolitan areas. I lived in the Los Angeles are for a while. It's truly disturbing how nasty that air really is. However, I don't necessarily see that electric cars will really solve that. California already has a shortage of electricity generation. And while modern power plants could be built, it's virtually impossible to do so in that state due to political wrangling. Other states have similar problems. And let's not forget that so much of our power infrastructure is fueled by natural gas and coal. Burning these domestically acquired fuels to power our cars may reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and moving the power plants outside of the dense urban areas may spread the pollution to other areas. However, we are still generating tons of CO2 in order to power our transportation.

Electric cars do have a use. I'm not trying to suggest otherwise. I'm just trying to remind people that they are not the great panacea that others would have you believe.

Are they a useful alternative for some of the population? Yes.

Do they help with our dependence on foreign oil? To an extent.

Do they help reduce pollution? Not really, though they do spread it out which doesn't hurt.

Should we continue to study them and try to make them more useful? Absolutely.

Should we continue to find a permanent solution that addresses the shortcomings of the electric car? No question.

Re:Great

[cdrguru]

Don't worry. There will be only factories that make food with 100% robotic tenders. Some of it might still be grown in the ground, but still there will be nothing but robots tending to it.

People are too expensive and too unreliable. As soon as the free supply of Mexicans dries up the idea of using humans in agriculture will disappear.

Re:Great

[grimmjeeper]

Well, we may never run out. Though the idea of using humans in agriculture will change.

Soylent Green is people!

Re:Great

[jo_ham]

So... don't use an electric vehicle?

It's not rocket science.

In the same way that you wouldn't chose a subcompact for moving large amounts of goods from point A to point B, you won't choose an electric vehicle that relies on a charging infrastructure and limited range if you need to travel around frequently out of range of an urban centre.

Re:Great

[grimmjeeper]

Congrats. You figured out the point I was trying to make.

It's not yet time for a standard

[tulcod]

Battery technology changes virtually daily, we're not nearly far enough to standardize a rather significant part of the process.

Re:It's not yet time for a standard

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Battery technology certainly is evolving; but the "put power in" part is a fairly reasonable place to put a nice abstracted interface.

Re:It's not yet time for a standard

[GameboyRMH]

True, at some point there may not even be a need for public chargers as battery capacity and charge rates improve. You can just charge up at night and drive care-free all day.

Re:It's not yet time for a standard

[GameboyRMH]

It's hard to estimate battery development too far into the future unless you're an expert in the field, but I think 400-mile batteries will be doable within the next 5-10 years based on what advancements I do know about. That's the equivalent of a 40MPG car with a full 10 gallon tank.

A plug-in series hybrid with a battery like that would suit your (highly unusual) needs though.

Demand based

[Med-trump]

It is demand and competition based. When the demand and competition increase, we might see more universal standards coming up.

Re:Demand based

[compro01]

Yeah, exactly like what happened with cell phone and laptop chargers.

Oh wait, we had a massive mess of propitiatory connectors in the former before the EU smacked the manufacturers upside the head and forced micro USB and still have a mess of propitiatory connectors in the latter.

Re:Demand based

[GameboyRMH]

Laptops are all using some sort of simple round connector with the same polarity at this point (I don't remember what the polarity is, but it's the same). Voltages still differ though. But you can buy a multi-charger that comes with about 10 different tips and a voltage selector that will work with any modern laptop.

Re:Demand based

[hedwards]

Not at this stage with cars it isn't. The technology just hasn't matured enough yet for that to be a significant factor.The issue of powering a car via batteries isn't one that's easily solved, there are options like D cells that are very economical in terms of weight, but can't be recharged and there's ones that can be recharged, but would take a weak to charge using household voltages.

At this stage, they should be encouraged to experiment,chances are by the time they've got it figured out and the infrastructure is in place, that the patents will be readily available for other manufacturers. But, beyond that there's a compelling reason for them to ultimately standardize on something the power stations are daunting enough without having to have a dozen different standard adapters.

Re:Demand based

[Joce640k]

there's ones that can be recharged, but would take a weak[sic] to charge using household voltages.

Really? I was under the impression that most electric car owners were charging their cars overnight for a few cents from a standard socket.

Re:Demand based

[cdrguru]

Overnight? Yes.

Few cents? Hardly. The Leaf, for example, has a 24 KWh battery. To charge it at 100% efficiency is going to require 24KWh which is going to run around $2.88 in most electricity markets today. How efficient is the charging? My guess is a 24KWh battery is really going to take more like 30-40 KWh to charge fully which puts the cost at more like $4.80.

Yes, it is cheaper than filling up with gasoline today, but like gasoline, it is going to get a lot more expensive pretty quickly. We do not have much extra capacity for electricity in the US today and with the way the population is growing through immigration we are going to be soon hitting the wall. There will likely be enough capacity to charge car batteries overnight for quite a while yet but it is going to get pretty pricey.

But compared to a $100 for 10 gallons of gas in a year or two, the electric car will still be a lot cheaper to operate, if you can afford the initial price tag.

Re:Swap the battery?

[schroom5]

Here you go, already being done.

Battery type is key

[kurt555gs]

If these cars used Toshiba's SCIB batteries -> http://www.toshiba.com/ind/product_display.jsp?id1=821 - then they could go from dead to full charge in 10 minutes.

That would make electric charging stations at gas stations feasible.

It takes 10 minutes to fill an SUV with gas.

Re:Battery type is key

[kurt555gs]

Dear Anonymous, please read -> http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_size_is_the_gas_tank_in_a_Ford_Excursion - before you type nonsense.

Re:Battery type is key

[kurt555gs]

In any case, 10 minutes is a reasonable time for an electric fill up. It would pay for gas stations to install the electrical switch gear and meters. Obviously, no one would want to spend 4 hours at the "pump".

That is why "fast charging" batteries are so important.

Re:Battery type is key

[Dishevel]

10 Min is a bit too long for me.
Not way too long but a bit too long.
And also.
Will I only have to do this 10 min fill up once a week?

Re:Battery type is key

[hedwards]

And where do you get the electricity? You can charge things really fast, but having batteries that are powerful enough to move a car for an appreciable distance that charge in 10 minutes are going to require a huge amount of juice to power them. Not to mention the risk of explosion if the battery is damaged or fire if any of the equipment is malfunctioning.

Re:Battery type is key

[kurt555gs]

That is why I suggested gas stations. They have access to large capacity 3 phase juice. As far as safety, not an issue. Read the Toshiba info in the parent link.

Re:Battery type is key

[Spoke]

You're in luck. The soon-to-be-sold in the USA Mitsubishi i has those exact batteries.

Unfortunately, recharge times will be currently limited to about 30 minutes from empty to 80% - same as the Nissan LEAF. Probably mostly due to how much power it takes to do so. Peak charge rates are around 50 kW.

It's easy to forget to good we've had it with gasoline - each gallon of gas has about 36 kWh worth of energy in it - and your typical automobile only uses about 20-30% of it!

Re:Battery type is key

[toddestan]

The Excursion is huge even by SUV standards and they don't even make them anymore. Maybe something more like this? http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Gas_tank_size_2004_ford_explorer

Fast-charging is BAD

[RobinEggs]

Heat is bad for batteries, and fast charging makes batteries hot.

I understand that sometimes charging quickly is better than waiting 6 hours to drive somewhere, but if you want those batteries to last then ideally drivers would plan for and prefer the slower charging solution whenever possible.

Re:Fast-charging is BAD

[kurt555gs]

Not the case with the Toshiba SCIB batteries. I have seen it.

Re:Fast-charging is BAD

[philmarcracken]

I agree. Batteries are a high resistance storage method right? They don't accept power quickly and if you try to force it in the battery says fuck mein leben, this guy... Isn't that the reason they try and integrate super-caps with the regenerative braking system? So that they capture the bulk of the energy generated from the wheels and then trickle it back into the battery or used to give the electric engine the initial acceleration boost up to the speed limit. From a cold stop is where my instant Liters/per 100kms spikes, not that im a leadfoot. Project better place, as mentioned, has the better option in the long run, battery swap stations. The entire reason he thought of this idea was to eliminate the cost of vehicle manufacturers selling the 'well' of power with the car making it alot more expensive than traditional engines. By separating out this power source and offering it for lease like a mobile phone contract, it can work.

Re:Fast-charging is BAD

[WindBourne]

Actaully, all of the good cars, like tesla, have that covered. It is cars like Nissan Leaf that has no means of cooling that will destroy their batteries.

Re:Fast-charging is BAD

[Spoke]

The Tesla Roadster needs to very carefully maintain battery temps because it uses commodity lithium cells which do not like extremes in temperatures.

The LEAF and iMiEV have much more robust batteries which are more stable. They also have lower internal resistance which do not generate significant amounts of heat during charge and thus can tolerate wider ranges of temperatures without issue except perhaps some minor degradation of capacity over time if high temperatures are sustained for extended periods of time.

Re:Fast-charging is BAD

[91degrees]

You have a lot of batteries in an electric car. Surely it's just a matter of charging a lot of them at the same time rather than a single battery very quickly.

Or doesn't it work like that?

Re:Swap the battery?

[LordNacho]

That's brilliant, even the station itself is robotic. I was thinking you'd just yank it out and dump it in the station, plug in a new one. Now what is needed is critical mass, so that people don't need to stay within 300K of that place in Israel.

Great Misconception

[7-Vodka]

Why does EVERYONE have this great misconception that EVs and charging stations are like chicken and egg?

Every time research is done into EV owner driving and charging patterns they show that people really don't drive that far on a daily basis and always prefer to charge AT HOME overnight rather than at some charging station.

Why would anyone want to drive to a charging station and wait an hour when they can just plug in when they get home? That's like having a gas pump at your house, but instead wanting to drive 30 minutes to a "gas station" to fill up.

For EV owners who have longer trips, they can take their second car, rent a car or fly.

Re:Great Misconception

[sgt scrub]

People that are already driving EV cars are not the typical consumer. But I agree for the most part. People will want to charge at home so they don't partial charge the batteries thus reducing their life span. As far as the "rent a car on the fly" thought, that is insightful assuming they can keep the costs below taking a train or bus.

Re:Great Misconception

[CastrTroy]

Maybe the charging stations could get a better price on power for the end user since they would be a bigger consumer than a single person, and therefore be able to work out better deals with the power company. Maybe they could have onsite solar and wind operations allowing them to generate some of their own power, further reducing the costs to the end users.

Re:Great Misconception

[vlm]

rent a car

I only drive small cars, I like them small and fast. Other people with obese vehicles like trucks and SUVs take great joy in asking how I move stuff without having a F-350 dualie like they pay for.

Home depot rents a nice truck for $20/hr right off the street, bigger and badder than their pickup truck. For even bigger jobs, I have rented uhaul trucks for not too much more, per day.

I did rent a giant land barge once, for a special occasion road trip, and it was so uncomfortable to drive, and so slow, with such weird handling, and wobbly in the wind, that I never rented a land barge again for road trips. I take my little psuedo-sports car instead. People ask how I can survive a long road trip without driving an obese SUV, I ask, how can they survive a road trip with one?

In the last 20 years I've spent less at HD, Enterprise Rentacar, and Uhaul than one months car payment.

Its just not an issue.

Re:Great Misconception

[icebrain]

Instead of getting a truck, I just bought a small trailer for my Focus and installed a hitch. I've pulled appliances, bikes, a boat, a barbecue setup, sheets of 4x8 plywood, furniture, etc.

Re:Great Misconception

[MrLogic17]

As long as the solution to the fast "refuel" problem is "just drive your 2nd car", EV's will remain a luxury purchase for the wealthy with guilty eco consciences.

I want a single car to replace my single car. I don't want to have to pay insurance, plates, repairs, maintenance on an extra vehicle. That's saving no money, and not "saving the planet" if that's your thing.

I want an EV because it's: (1) Cool new tech with cool new features, and (2) A lot cheaper per mile*.

* - Unless you factor in battery pack replacement every x years, plus the inevitable per-mile taxes to replace gas tax.

Re:Great Misconception

[OITLinebacker]

This would be a great workplace incentive, providing free charging on your EV. I would seriously consider purchasing an EV as my commuter vehicle (and I have a less than 2 mile commute) if I could charge it at work (free gas, sort of).

Re:Great Misconception

[Solandri]

For EV owners who have longer trips, they can take their second car, rent a car or fly.

I agree with this sentiment. Rather than buying a single car which has to serve two purposes (short daily commutes, occasional long trips), buy a single car highly optimized for one purpose (short daily commutes), and use a different means to fill the other need (second car, rental, flying for long trips).

However, this runs counter to the way most people think. The car's operating expenses are neglected as noise, while the annoyance that the car can't handle a long trip is ever-present in their minds. That is, a regular car might cost $20k, cost $2k to operate each year. An EV might cost $20k, cost $500 to operate each year, meaning you have $1.5k "available" to use on a rental car for the long trip while still coming out ahead. But all people will think about is how they had to pay $1k "extra" to rent a car for the trip.

The same psychological mistake crops up all over the place. People ignore the exorbitant cost of inkjet printer ink because the purchase price of the printer was so much lower than for a laser printer. People write off nuclear power for electricity because of the waste problem, while ignoring that the extra cost of renewables far exceeds the what it would cost to handle the waste problem. People will prefer to overpay on their income tax withholdings so they will "get" a refund in April, rather than underpay, put the extra money into an interest-bearing account, and give up the money to the government only on the last day of the deadline.

So while I agree with the logic of your solution, it's just not going to fly in the real world. People aren't wired that way.

Re:Great Misconception

[Spoke]

If you have a 2 mile commute, you should be riding your bike or walking. Not lugging 2 tons of steel back and forth. If too lazy to do either, get an e-assist bike.

Re:Great Misconception

[Spoke]

I want a single car to replace my single car.

EVs are not for everyone! Perhaps a plug-in hybrid would fit your needs better.

Re:Great Misconception

[OITLinebacker]

Lazy has nothing to do with it. On the days that the weather is fine I do sometimes bike or walk. The problem is getting kids to school (which is on the way in) and the fact that while this area does get tons of snow (77inches on average), it does have lots of snowy days or at least days with snow on the ground (almost 100 days last year).

A better way...

[Anonymous Coward]

An idea came to me today because of the after effects of hurricane Irene. My neighborhood lost electricity for about 1 1/2 days and many of the neighbors had gas/diesel powered generators. What a great concept. Have a small, locally available gas powered engine to provide the power to charge the batteries.

They would really be a sort of hybrid between a gasoline powered car and an all electric car...perhaps we could call them hybrid vehicles.

Re:A better way...

[SuricouRaven]

If you put the engine on the car, you then have the problem of hauling a big engine around with you all the time. Weight means inefficiency, and less room for passangers, storage and batteries.

Re:A better way...

[PPH]

Well, we could get rid of all the batteries, electric motors and control crap. And just let the gas engine drive the wheels directly through some sort of mechanical transmission device.

[Running off to the USPTO].

Why?

[Mashiki]

I still don't see why the big desire for batteries. They're heavy, a pain in the ass to change even if you have a standard. You're looking at someone to do it for you, or knowing how to do it yourself using machinery in both cases. In the end, fuel cells will be the way to go, unless there's some amazing earth shattering breakthrough in battery technology.

Re:Why?

[SuricouRaven]

Because fuel cells:
1. Cost a fortune.
2. Run off fuels so explosive they make gasoline look like water.

The technology just isn't there yet.

Re:Why?

[hedwards]

Yes, and fuel cell cars are probably still 30 years away from being affordable.Whereas right now there are electric cars which are affordable, granted not to me, but it's getting to the point where normal people can afford to buy them.

Plus, what precisely happens if some unforeseen limitation prevents fuel cells from working substantially or delays their mass market release? You'd be stuck where we are presently and at some point we're going to hit some sort of hard limit on what we can emit without seeing significant consequences.

Re:Why?

[Twinbee]

Battery tech advances all the time, and so should get smaller and lighter over time. We can also apparently cut out the changing gear / clutch crap, and turn on the instant heating say, without having to worry about also having the noisy engine on if the car is stationary. Yeah noise will be a thing of the past too.

Additionally, the cost of electricity should also plummet over time as we build better nuclear power stations or even fusion in the future, and at that point, electric cars will be ready to immediately 'switch', because electricity is just electricity.

I'm sure there are many other advantages too...

Re:Why?

[jo_ham]

The technology was there in 1969 - the US took it to the moon. The problem is the storage of hydrogen because it has such a low energy density. Apollo solved that by storing it as a liquid (not feasible for a consumer item), but storing it as a compressed gas has issues since to get near the energy density of gasoline you need to *really* compress it - which means strong, heavy tanks and a lot of energy input to compress it like that.

There's currently a lot of research going into how to solve this issue - how do you store useful amounts of hydrogen safely and energy efficiently. The fuel cell is the easy bit!

Re:Why?

[SuricouRaven]

That, and the problem of accidents. Crash a car with a gas tank, you risk it catching fire. The gasoline isn't explosive, only the vapor is, but it still burns very well indeed. Crash a car with a high-pressure hydrogen tank, and it's going to go off like a bomb, launching bits of shrapnel around at near-supersonic speed in all directions and making a sizeable crater in the road. This is clearly not practical.

There are materials that can store hydrogen safely, but they all require very expensive rare elements. Platinum, or even more pricy. It's also impractical when the fuel tank costs most than the rest of the car put together.

Re:Why?

[Mashiki]

Yeah. It's not affordable to you. And it's not affordable to the modern family either, wrapping in at $29k-50k, fuel cells make for a better choice. Batteries are a poor choice, especially when you have environuts screaming no nukes.

Re:Why?

[Shadow99_1]

I think you'll be waiting longer on your fuel cell... No one has made a functional fuel cell that doesn't have considerable issues when scaled up to something like a car...

Re:Why?

[Spoke]

I still don't see why the big desire for batteries. They're heavy, a pain in the ass to change even if you have a standard. You're looking at someone to do it for you, or knowing how to do it yourself using machinery in both cases. In the end, fuel cells will be the way to go, unless there's some amazing earth shattering breakthrough in battery technology.

Every single one of your limitations applies to fuel cells, too.

Right now if fuel cells require extremely expensive and rare fueling stations making them a severe pain in the ass to charge. There's probably a handful of them across the country. And the cost of that fuel is expensive.

In the end - fuel cells are just another type of battery. Except more expensive than today's batteries and even harder to refuel.

Liquid batteries

[hat_eater]

Anyone remembers the Cambridge Crude? I wonder if they'll have a working solution (heh) in 2013.

Still not good enough.

[sunking2]

For the Leaf they give 30 minutes for 30 miles using a faster charger. For simplicity, assume driving 60mph, so your 30 minute commute now takes an hour. And this was for the fastest charge that they talk about replacing a gas station, at $40k installation it certainly isn't for the home. Not impressed.

Re:Still not good enough.

[Sockatume]

It only adds 30 minutes onto your commute if you wait until you're ready to leave, and then plug it in. I don't know about you, but I typically wake up more than an hour before I leave for work, and I'm sure I can find the five minutes to plug in the car somewhere near the start of the window.

Re:Still not good enough.

[hedwards]

You're assumptions are botched there. People with any sense at all don't do that. If you've got the car, then chances are you're going to be parking in a parking lot with a charging station. You're complaint here is tantamount to seeing a model T and being unimpressed because it's not useful outside the city limits because they haven't yet created suitable roads.

For most people though, that's more than adequate. I could just about drive all the way across town and back on a charge. Something I wouldn't do because I've got better things to do.Sure, it's less than ideal range, but it's pretty ignorant to suggest that most people, at least in cities, aren't going to get enough distance in a reasonable time to make it work.

Re:Still not good enough.

[ianare]

For your 50 km commute, you would've charged your car at home overnight. The Leaf has over 100 km range, so this is enough for your round trip. Eventually, as more and more businesses start adding charging stations to their parking areas, you could also recharge while at work. I fail to see the problem.

Re:Still not good enough.

[Eric Damron]

"For the Leaf they give 30 minutes for 30 miles using a faster charger."

No, that is not correct. The DC Quck Charger (The one that costs upwards of $40k but can be had for $16K) will charge the LEAF from flat to 80% in 25 minutes. You can go way farther than 30 miles with an 80% charge.

The Level 2 chargers will charge the current LEAF from flat to 100% in 7 to 8 hours. That will normally be done over night and you would not need to plug in at all to make a 60 mile round trip.

"Not impressed."

I think you mean "Not informed."

Re:Still not good enough.

[Eric Damron]

" I could just about drive all the way across town and back on a charge."

Not just about. You could easily do it. The range you get in a LEAF depends on the speed at which you travel. Just like a gas car.

At 35 mph (city speed) the LEAF's range is around 130 miles. At 60 mph (freeway speed) the LEAF's range drops to about 78 miles. It drops to about 65 if you travel at 70 mph. So as you can see it's a perfect city car and not a bad car to go medium distances. It will be awesome when the network is in place to recharge these vehicles.

Re:"and new ones are coming online daily"

[pnewhook]

Until electrical vehicles have range they will not be popular, and before you say rapid charging increases the potential range, then you don't understand consumers. Nobody wants to stop at a gas station every 50 miles. Consumers demand the range, pure & simple, the sales show it.

Actually I see electric vehicles as a solution to never having to visit a gas station ever again. Imaging driving to work and back, then having the car fill up while parked overnight on house current for extremely cheap time of use rates (or alternatively, partially recharge while sitting in the parking lot under the sun using solar panels).

It's too early

[fyngyrz]

Odds are decent that batteries are on the way out -- ultracapacitors are the candidate for replacing them. Currently (pun intended) UC's don't have sufficient capacity, but the capacity curve has been steadily rising over time, and as the stored power required for a vehicle to go a certain distance is slowly dropping, they're likely to meet sooner or later. At that time, batteries become buggy whips in search of (missing) horses.

Aside from the present position on the total energy curve, UC's offer wider temperature ranges, less toxicity, much faster charging, essentially unlimited charge/discharge cycles, have such a long lifetime compared to a battery that they reduce the disposal/recycle problem to basically irrelevant (you could probably will your UC's a few generations down the road), and present less of a fire/explosive hazard and are easily fused in array form in safe fashion. Constant voltage output is easily obtained with off the shelf electronics, and as UCs don't age the way batteries do, determining the actual charge, as opposed to an estimate, for UCs is far more easily accomplished. Current in, self-discharge rate out, current out.

This applies from small loads to large ones; In fact, as small devices become more and more efficient, as has been the trend for some time, they are walking down the curve towards practical use of UCs even faster than vehicles are.

Speaking for myself, I wouldn't invest in a Lithium Ion startup today; it looks to me like the world's worst bet. And as for connectors and standards... it's just too early. A connector designed for the relatively anemic charge rates of a Li battery would probably go up in a flash if subjected to the current inrush that an equivalent capacity array of Uc's could demand -- and limiting the charge rate to Li rates is silly. It'll take quite a connector to provide a fast, efficient charge to an UC array, but it'll *so* be worth it. Electronics that monitor the voltage drop across the connector while aware of the available contact area could maintain a safe charge rate, pushing current at prodigious rates, potentially (hah) charging the vehicle in seconds -- far faster than either fueling up with gasoline *or* charging a battery. And contrariwise, a (relative) trickle from a could also charge the UCs overnight, leading to relatively simple and inexpensive home charging stations. Bucket-brigade techniques, where the home charger trickles itself while you're off elsewhere, then is able to quickly charge the vehicle require equivalent storage in the charger itself and so are more expensive, but again, would be so worth it.

The thing is, until all this settles out -- and it is very much in flux (hah) right now -- it doesn't make much sense to standardize on anything, unless it's a trivially replaceable connector system at the charging station.

Re:It's too early

[Joce640k]

Ultracapacitors currently only have about a tenth of the energy density of a battery and whether they can be improved more than two or three times while maintaining reasonable costs is far from certain.

Other than that, they're all good. Their efficiency is impressive (about 95% of electricity will end up in the motor, unlike batteries which can convert as much as 50% of it to heat during charging/discharging) and their working life makes them very attractive - current batteries aren't going to last more than a few years (much less if you're continually quick-charging them) and the e-waste millions of car batteries could produce down the line is huge.

Maybe we'll just have to get used to the idea of having a big chunk of the car space dedicated to the capacitor.

Re:It's too early

[DriedClexler]

Wow, that sounds awesome! I guess the only drawback would be the whole non-existence thing.

Re:It's too early

[scharkalvin]

In his River World novels, Farmer envisioned a Battery-Capacitor hybrid (he called it a bacapacitor) that combined the advantages of both. Samuel Clemen's riverboat was powered by the electric discharge from the grailstones and stored in the bacapicitor. It would seem that he was on the right track.

From the article "To match the convenience of a conventional car on the highway will require a combination of much greater electrical range with an even faster charging time, neither of which is around the corner." This about sums up the problem. Until a battery (supercap or something inbetween) can hold enough power to give an electric car at least 200 miles of highway range, and recharge in under ten minutes (time enough to combine a bathroom stop with refueling) the electric car will be limited to short city trips. Tesla motors claims such a range right now, but NOT the recharge time.

Re:It's too early

[hedwards]

Ultracapacitors aren't the solution in the way that you're suggesting. My guess is that we'll be switching them in and out the way that we do batteries. Probably using a couple sets for most cars.

The reason being that the amount of amperage and voltage necessary to charge a car in a reasonable amount of time is a lot more than what you want in a house. Granted, you'd probably give it its own circuit which carries more juice, but you really don't want to provide the possibility of somebody trying to fix their house DIY style and accidentally coming into contact with more juice than expected.

Re:It's too early

[Joce640k]

The reason being that the amount of amperage and voltage necessary to charge a car in a reasonable amount of time is a lot more than what you want in a house

If you've got a few hours to charge them then you don't need special amperages/voltages. Standard houshold power is plenty.

Re:It's too early

[Rob the Bold]

Wow, that sounds awesome! I guess the only drawback would be the whole non-existence thing.

OK, they don't exist in the same way a single charger standard doesn't exist. But they do exist. In fact, you can buy a UC right now: There are 522 different models available at DigiKey.

Re:It's too early

[Spoke]

unlike batteries which can convert as much as 50% of it to heat during charging/discharging) and their working life makes them very attractive - current batteries aren't going to last more than a few years (much less if you're continually quick-charging them)

Modern lithium batteries are well over 90% efficient during charge/discharge.

Quick charging is not a problem for their battery life as long as you avoid quick charging all the way to 100% full capacity - this is why the Nissan LEAF and Mitsubishi iMiev quick charge to 80%. Charge rate is automatically tapered off as the battery fills up to avoid generating excess heat.

Re:It's too early

[Twinbee]

Yum. It's almost like comparing HD to SSD, or LCD to OLED/QLED. Any decent articles on the web about using ultra-capacitors in cars, and do you know of the best company to invest in for this?

Re:It's too early

[cdrguru]

One minor little point is that batteries are rather difficult to get to discharge in a huge blinding flash, whereas a capacitor will easily do so.

Yes, you can overload a notebook battery and have it catch fire, but even at fire-causing discharge rates it will discharge for minutes if not tens of minutes. A capacitor, on the other hand, has far less internal resistance and will certainly discharge in a fraction of a second.

Can you say "Pinto"?

Imagine a car with 10Kw of ultracapacitor storage discharging through a section of metal frame of the car after an accident. Yes, just like with gasoline tanks, there are ways to make that unlikely but we have ample examples of cars being manufactured in ways where it was not unlikely enough.

The advantage of an ultracapacitor is the reduced internal resistance and ability to charge it to capacity at extremely high currents. This also leads to the ability of it to discharge at extremely high currents, probably far higher than the highest possible charging current.

Re:It's too early

[eth1]

Or maybe use UCs in inner-city commuter type cars? If they charge fast enough, and you can deliver enough grunt, you could top them off every time they stop at a light. Or have a lane that has contacts that let you charge while moving, even. You'd have to work out some safety issues, obviously, but a 20 mile range would be more than enough in that sort of situation.

Re:It's too early

[fyngyrz]

One minor little point is that batteries are rather difficult to get to discharge in a huge blinding flash, whereas a capacitor will easily do so.

Come on,. That's so silly. Batteries can explode, spraying acid and fast moving chunks everywhere. Just hook up a car backwards for a jump. Yet we use em anyway. Gasoline, when misted, is highly explosive. Yet we use it anyway. It burns like crazy, mist or no. Yet we use it anyway. Horses can kick and stomp you to death. Yet we used em anyway. The AC voltages and current capacities in US wall outlets can electrocute you / start fires, etc. In Europe, it's even worse. UCs, with even offhand care in design, shouldn't offer "blinding flash" exposure to the user under any but the most extreme circumstances -- this is no reason not to use them.

Bottom line is that vehicles require lots and lots of energy. Right now, there are very few ways to compactly store lots of energy in a way that you can both get at it, and not get at it. So we have to pick something reasonable. UCs are reasonable, given an engineered design, rather than just gluing them all into an array and praying to $DIETY it'll not bite you in the posterior.

Re:It's too early

[fyngyrz]

They can charge basically as fast as you can supply current.

Re:It's too early

[fyngyrz]

So, what you're saying... there's no drawback, then.

Or did you simply miss my point about the power curve?

Re:It's too early

[modmans2ndcoming]

And the explosive power of one cylinder of gas/air mix is equal to a stick of dynamite... what is your point?

Re:It's too early

[fyngyrz]

The reason being that the amount of amperage and voltage necessary to charge a car in a reasonable amount of time is a lot more than what you want in a house.

No, that's a poor argument. It's not like these potentials will be lying around for babies to put in their mouths. You know how many people own a microwave? Do you have any idea of the currents and voltages used in one of those? Another good example was the tube-style color television... again, really, really dangerous potentials, and again, very low risk. That takes care of the safety issue.

As far as charge *rates* go, you can charge an ultracap at any rate you like. So if you're charging off the mains directly, you can limit it to under 20 amps and use a standard circuit; it'll just take a while to fully charge an empty array. That'll still be ok for most people, because they're not going to be driving that far on a normal day anyway. Then there are bucket brigade techniques, where the charger itself contains UCs, and is charging itself all the time (or perhaps during the cheap hours), and when you go to "fill" your vehicle, you get the current from the charger's UC array, rather than from the wall. Or you can go whole-hog and put in a high current circuit. We do that all the time now -- take a look at what feeds a typical electric stove, arc welder, or the electrical service for a commercial enterprise. It's all off the shelf tech, nothing magic here at all.

Re:It's too early

[fyngyrz]

Maxwell has been making slow and steady progress for a while; out on a limb types have been hoping EEStor will finally produce something -- anything -- but that looks like they were either naive about the challenges they were facing, or outright deceptive about it. There are quite a few technologies in the lab, a quick search on Google turns up all manner of intriguing information.

Re:It's too early

[Gothmolly]

It's not "e-waste", it's just "waste".

Don't be an e-douche.

Re:Swap the battery?

[CastrTroy]

Probably because a used, empty propane tank is probably worth about $5, where as a load of EV grade batteries is probably somewhere in the thousands. There'd probably be too much of a problem with people swapping good batteries for bad ones. Or people would have to have a really good credit rating simply to "fill up" their car.

Electric cars are a pipe-dream

[scottbomb]

The same people wanting us driving electric cars also don't want us building new power plants that would be required to support the additional load. The power grids can barely handle the loads they're under now.

Re:Electric cars are a pipe-dream

[currently_awake]

Our grid is only at/near peak capacity during parts of the day. At night it's well below half capacity. If we charge at night we're fine.

Re:Electric cars are a pipe-dream

[GameboyRMH]

I hope overrated & underrated mods are no longer immune to oversight since the metamod system was overhauled.

Re:Electric cars are a pipe-dream

[Overzeetop]

And with the correct time-of-use incentives (i.e. lower rates) this will happen. Sure, I'd gladly let the power co choose when to charge my car for $0.04/kWh, provided I get 4 hours of charge sometime during the day. If I really need a charge in the peak heat time, well, maybe it's worth $0.30/kWh.

Re:Electric cars are a pipe-dream

[Locutus]

so it should have us wondering why such a big deal about fast charging. Isn't there already the research to show a majority of the commuting population does less than 40 miles round trip? Fast charging during the day is a fix for long distance commuting and because that is typically going to be day-time charging it will add loads to the peak demand.

Makes me wonder if this isn't all a stunt by the utilities to show their PUC orgs they need money to fund these and upgrades and therefore raise rates.

LoB

Re:Electric cars are a pipe-dream

[Eric Damron]

"The same people wanting us driving electric cars also don't want us building new power plants that would be required to support the additional load. "

Really?? Are you sure you're not just pulling that out of your @$$? Why yes, I thnk you are.

Re:Electric cars are a pipe-dream

[Rumeal]

The same people wanting us driving electric cars also don't want us building new coal-fired power plants that would be required to support the additional load. The power grids can barely handle the loads they're under now.

Fixed that for you. Renewable-energy plants are rarely opposed by individuals supporting the use of electric cars.

Re:Electric cars are a pipe-dream

[Spoke]

And with the correct time-of-use incentives (i.e. lower rates) this will happen.

Anecdotally, my TOU rates here in southern California are $0.14 / kWh off-peak and $0.27 / kWh on-peak (12pm-8pm). The LEAF has a handy charge timer which makes it trivial to charge the car during off-peak hours. In 3 months of driving I have probably charged on-peak for about 1-2% of my total usage - a couple hours.

Because it's so easy to charge at off-peak rates, I would probably keep the same behavior even if the spread was minimal. Considering that it's beneficial for the battery's life to avoid spending time fully charged, it's a good idea to postpone charging regardless of on/off peak rates.

Re:Electric cars are a pipe-dream

[hrvatska]

So, because some groups that support EVs oppose some types of electrical generation in some situations, you think that most people who support EVs don't want any new power plants? That's quite the broad brush you paint with.

Re:Standards?

[compro01]

Why not have a steering committee or standards body form for electric vehicles with an eye to minimizing the connector styles, and to define charging staytions that account for slow charge, fast charge, and even a couple of capacities of each.

We've got that, just the standard (IEC 62196) has 3 versions, one from the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers), another from the VDE (Verband der Elektrotechnik, a German Electrical/Electronics standards association), and a 3rd from EV Plug Alliance (a coalition of French and Italian electrical companies)

Re:Swap the battery?

[SuricouRaven]

Propane is propane. A battery is not just a battery.
1. Buy Cheapest piece of junk knock-off second-hand battery you can find.
2. Go to out-of-town battery station.
3. Change.
4. eBay.
5. Profit.

It would also be awkward. Robotics could do the changeover, but doing so safely would require a lot of expensive safeguards to protect against idiots trying to stick their hand in the grippers. So you'd need an attendant to man the batteries, using a mini-forklift to get the old ones out and put new ones in. He'll want paying, and it takes longer to change a battery than to refill a tank. Gas-station attendants were largely eliminated as a cost-cutting measure, so I doubt companies will be willing to bring them back. Espicially ones trained in the operation of heavy life machinery.

Let me see if I understand this right

[WindBourne]

You have multiple companies that can not even agree on a plug and voltage, however, you think that they will now agree with batteries?

Re:Let me see if I understand this right

[LordNacho]

Aren't ordinary batteries for devices made by various manufacturers, both on the device and the battery side?

Re:Let me see if I understand this right

[WindBourne]

Yes. And they all agreed to formats. But, when you can not get agreement on something as simple as plug/voltage, then I would give little to no chance of batteries. Keep in mind that every car has a different type battery and different form of storage. Some put it between the seats. Others in front, while others do it in the back.

Integrate the charger and use plug adapters.

[couchslug]

The solution to vehicle-specific chargers is to integrate them with the vehicle then plug 'em in to standard 220 single-phase outlets fed from appropriate breakers.

Re:Integrate the charger and use plug adapters.

[Sockatume]

Two hundred and twenty outlets?! I'm not sure I have enough extension cords.

Re:Integrate the charger and use plug adapters.

[PPH]

220, 221. Whatever it takes.

Re:Integrate the charger and use plug adapters.

[Spoke]

That's essentially what the J1772 charging standard does (with a few modifications).

The UL/NEC doesn't want people regularly plugging in to your typical 240V plugs - they aren't designed for that and are lacking important safety features (like GFCI circuits) which makes it too easy for people to electrocute themselves when handling the plug.

That said, one can send off the standard 120V Nissan LEAF charge cord to be modified (for about $240 + adapters) to run off 120-240V at 12-16A. Then with the right adapters you can plug into nearly any power source around.

Tesla sells you a handy kit to do this as well for the Roadster - but it costs quite a bit more ($1,500)

Wrong order

[Ancil]

the lack of an agreement among automakers on a universal method for fast charging — or even on a single electrical connector

If they can't agree on the method for fast charging, it's good that they don't agree on the connector either.

Oh cool

[WindBourne]

So, the manufacturers can not agree on a plug and voltage, and now, your great idea is to be able to swap batteries?
Are you daft or something?

Re:"and new ones are coming online daily"

[Mashiki]

That's great. But some of us drive more than 30mi round trip every day.

Wrong problem

[currently_awake]

The battery charging issue is the wrong problem, you want power rails in/overhead the roadway so you draw from the grid while driving. Once you have that you only need a small battery to drive into/out of your driveway or parking lot, and it recharges while you drive.

Re:Standards?

[kiwimate]

And in the U.S., the charge (sorry...) of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel is exactly this. Note that the SGIP is not an SDO. They are there to

coordinate standards development for the Smart Grid

The SGIP is a partnership between NIST and industry, academia, etc. Rick Scholer of Chrysler is on the governing board (as is Vint Cerf, incidentally).

Re:Swap the battery?

[vlm]

I wonder why they don't just have "Gas" stations with a load of charged batteries for the customers, who then drop off their old batts. Just like when you go and get propane for the BBQ.

The failure mode is kaboom, and all the infants in the car seats fry in their seats. Everyone knows and tolerates the probably much higher failure rate of gas stations, but would never tolerate any failure whatsoever of electric stations. Fire accident in a gas station = blame the victim, fire accident in an electric station = blame the station owner. This has a remarkable impact on insurance costs.

Its theoretically possible to look at the gas out of a pump to see how much water is in it (unless its ethanol E-gas) but there is no way to know if the 'electric' station is giving you a battery that is about to explode. Gas in a "poor area" is about the same as gas in a wealthy area. However battery swaps are not, and I'd expect the "poor area" to be given junk batteries by their corporate overlords. Rich areas might decide to not even accept batteries from poor area stations, or perhaps tack on an expensive pure profit "safety inspection fee".

Its well defined that the poor car owner is SOL and the gas station gets away with it if the station pumps water, sand, and salt into a car owners tank. The reason why successful prosecutions get in the paper, is its so noteworthy that it was successful, instead of the usual little guy gets screwed over scenario. The car owner is out the towing and repair costs. It is not so well defined for the electric swap station. If ANYTHING happens to a car that used an electric station, hungry lawyers will be all over the stations owners. Unlimited liability and/or the insurance to cover it is very expensive compared to a "buyer beware" gas station.

I don't really care if the local walgreens gives me a bum propane tank that is leaky or otherwise faulty because my maximum liability is something between the delta of new vs swap price, and at worst about the price of a new tank, and at the unimaginable level, the price of a new grill, which frankly as a middle aged childraising homeowner is pocket change. In summary, the risk of a bad propane tank is extremely low to me. On the other hand, I guarantee if the "loaner" battery breaks down, I'll be liable for the full retail purchase price of a brand new battery, lets say $20K. I'm not so cool with that level of liability being completely outside of my control. I'm sure someone will suggest a use/wear and tear fee. Much like cellphones and other services that would rapidly devolve into a confuseopoly or screwopoly also designed to rip off the user, which I have no interest in participating in.

Really the swap idea is so horribly bad, you'd think Exxon and BP pay astroturfers to suggest it.

Re:Swap the battery?

[Joce640k]

This problem will sort itself out if all batteries are barcoded and tracked.

Re:Swap the battery?

[vlm]

Probably because a used, empty propane tank is probably worth about $5, where as a load of EV grade batteries is probably somewhere in the thousands. There'd probably be too much of a problem with people swapping good batteries for bad ones. Or people would have to have a really good credit rating simply to "fill up" their car.

Even the meth heads don't steal propane tanks around here... Just too bulky and heavy for what little cash they get as scrap. Scrapyards don't particularly like sealed pressure vessels, anyway.

Now an enterprising meth head could steal a removable $10K battery pack, sell it to a slightly crooked yard for $2K, and who gets to pay the $15K security deposit for the pack? I would assume, the car owner's insurance.

Re:Wrong model: Rent not buy

[Joce640k]

Having to find a charging station every 50 miles will still be a bummer...

Re:Swap the battery?

[Osgeld]

the battery in our forklift weighs as much as a compact car, It takes a chain harness 4 people and a forklift just to lift it out and a replacement cost around 6 grand. How do you propose such a feat at a gas station?

Re:Swap the battery?

[stabiesoft]

Agreed, here they steal outdoor condenser A/C units for the copper. I'm thinking you could make a whole lot more money on battery packs. Remember when people used to steal gas from a car. Whoa, 40-50 bucks for gas vs a very removable 10K battery pack. Electric's will be commuter cars unless they have the small gen like a volt. Recharging is just too slow. From the article and this is the fast charger... "

Still, the experience will have its shortcomings. Consider a Nissan Leaf that can go about 70 miles at highway speeds on a full charge. At the 80 percent charge delivered by a fast chargers, that drops to 56 miles, which youâ(TM)d cover in 48 minutes at 70 m.p.h. That means travelers would spend as much time charging as they would driving." "

Treat batteries as consumables, not owned property

[NoahsMyBro]

For years I've thought (and posted) that chasing down a faster recharge method is the wrong approach.

Vehicles should have standard, interchangeable batteries, just as they have standard inlets for fuel nozzles. Standardize the batteries, and design them so they can be quickly and automatically removed from the vehicle. Have some sort of small, supplemental battery remain installed to maintain computer settings, radio presets, etc... Let the fuel companies or auto manufacturers own the batteries.

If I'm low on juice, I pull in to a service station, a machine automatically removes my battery and attaches a fresh one within 5 minutes, and I'm on my way. The service station then takes the used battery and places it in a charging rack. Once it's been charged, it is used in another car.

Standard already exists

[chainsaw1]

It's called the shore power adapter. These go up to 430V at 400A which should be enough for anyone...

If you're looking for something home-friendly, there are 230V shore power plug types as well..

Re:Standard already exists

[Romberg]

But I don't live anywhere near shore power!

Re:"and new ones are coming online daily"

[pnewhook]

Even the Leaf shows it will get between 50mi and 100mi per charge depending on the battery pack you choose. That with the average commute being 25 minutes, allows the majority of commuters to fit within the range of even todays vehicles. If you need something longer then for now you will have to buy something a little more suited to your requirements, but that's no reason to stop electric deployment with the existing capabilities.

Re:"and new ones are coming online daily"

[flink]

Also some of us live in the city and don't have a garage. Charging with wall current for me would involve a 500' extension cord.

the old school auto makers and utilities banned

[Locutus]

they should be banned from involvement in the standard because in many ways they have already shown they are against a change to EV transportation systems. Yet when you look at who's involved you see both of these front and center. Because of this we will not see an optimal standard emerge. IMO there should be an IEEE committee with the Utilities and old school auto makers only input allowed being as technical advisers.

LoB

There already is a standard

[Eric Damron]

There already is a DC quick charge standard that is used on the Nissan LEAF and other EVs. It's called CHAdeMO. There are some stations already installed that use this standard.

This standard is widely adopted in Japan and the UK but the US auto makers don't want it. They are working on a single plug monstrosity. It is believed by many, myself included, that the people fighting the adoption of the existing standard would like to delay or kill the adoption EVs.

One problem not addressed

[PPH]

Taxes.

Whatever charging method is agreed upon, keep one thing in mind: The revenuers are going to need some sort of meter to read in order to charge you your fuel tax.

Right now, the state of vehicular charging is such that any old 120, 240, or in some cases 480 Volt outlet will do. And that means people can plug in anywhere and bypass the tax man. While standardization of vehicular charging equipment is a good thing, I wouldn't be surprised if some gov't officials are quietly vetoing anything that looks like it might fit into a standard outlet.

battery cells.

[spage]

Everyone but Tesla already uses such rectangular cells, take a look at e.g. SBLiMotive's. It's got over 100 of them. But every design put the cells in a special enclosure for thermal management, and some like the Volt are water-cooled. So now the robot has to lower the pack or move the groceries out of the way, lift the lid off, disconnect the thermal system, open a particular "sheet", unscrew 60+ batteries and insert new ones. Nice clever robot!

Maybe in 20 years your car will have an expansion cage that can hold 0-20 standardized 15-pound battery sheets that each store 1 kWh and yet don't require sophisticated thermal management, and we've somehow been able to solve the safety and mechanical and electrical issues so that it's realistic for a volt-monkey to hump a fresh set over to your car and drop them in. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Meanwhile Better Place is about to roll out entire battery-pack swap in Denmark and Israel for exactly one car model that's adopted their standardized QuickDrop design. Their biggest problem isn't technical but financial: the money for spare batteries and their swap stations has to come from somewhere, and you pay them a lot for the added convenience.

two big niches

[spage]

It's not just cities, it's any multi-vehicle household with a garage where someone's regular commute is less than ~70 miles. That describes millions and millions of suburban drivers.

Re:two big niches

[Mongoose Disciple]

I considered that angle, but I didn't think "this works great, if you can use a gasoline-fueled traditional vehicle instead whenever you need to" was a very compelling argument for electric vehicles.

battery swap in the real world

[spage]

It's fun to see a bunch of armchair engineers designing battery swap while seemingly ignorant of the real world.

Better Place sells you electric miles. They own the battery packs, so there's no issue with getting a tired one. You charge at home, you charge at one of their public chargers, and the sexy part is the robotic battery swap station. They are rolling it out in Denmark and Israel, so we can see the problems with their model: swap stations and spare batteries cost a fortune so blanket coverage is only practical in compact countries (like Denmark and Israel), only one manufacturer has committed to using their standardized QuickDrop battery on only one model (Renault Fluence Z.E.) , and to make it profitable BP has to charge you a lot more than it would cost to lease a battery as part of your car and cheaply recharge it yourself. We'll see how many EV drivers in those two countries value the BP approach, meanwhile beware BP's happy PR talk spin mode.

Tesla's upcoming Model S has a swappable battery pack. Pull into a Tesla store and they could swap your pack with a charged one for a long trip. It's sort of like a dealer putting snow tires on your car for a winter journey. They haven't figured out the details.

The seductive idea of replacing individual standardized battery sheets doesn't work in the real world where each weighs 20+ pounds (and an electric car has 10-40 of them), is mounted in a special enclosure with thermal management, has massive thick connectors carrying large voltages, etc.

why not plug adapters, charging standards

[spage]

That doesn't work because the car doesn't know how much current it can pull from the outlet. Is it a NEMA-6 or NEMA-14 outlet, is it on a 15A or 50A circuit? The SAE J1772 standard describes how the Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment uses additional pins in the connector to signal how much current it can deliver, and when the electrician sets up the EVSE she makes sure it's on an appropriately powerful circuit. But SAE J1772 240V AC doesn't give you fast charging. The spec goes to 80A, but even at 19.2 kW you're looking at well over an hour to charge a 25 kWh battery pack. The next problem is an onboard charger that can handle that much AC power gets hot and is expensive. Of all EV cars on the road, only the Tesla Roadster handles more than 10 kW AC.

Since EVs are already handling huge DC voltages flowing from the brake regen to the batteries, it's cheaper to provide them high-voltage high-current DC for fast charging, though it makes the charging station much more expensive. When it comes to DC fast charging, CHAdeMO is already big in Japan with their standard (up to 62 kW) and is available as an option on the Leaf, but SAE J1772 committee decided not to adopt it and instead added two chunky DC pins to their connector (up to 90 kW)

What you propose is sort of what's happened in Europe. Domestic supply is already 240V and standardized at about 13A, so regardless of what receptacle is on your vehicle, you drive around with a connecting cable that fits it and plug the other end into whatever your country's uses for "domestic wall outlet in a waterproof box" and get ~3 kW. The SAE J1772 240V AC spec isn't very interesting to Europe, so some German companies (that have yet to make EVs in volume) instead promote another standard, IEC 62196 VDE-AR-E 2623-2-2, the "Mennekes" connector. It bridges the European domestic 240V supply for up to 400 V three-phase AC and 63A for a maximum of 44 kW, but that still has the problem of EVs including that powerful an on-board AC charger.

more why not fuel cell

[spage]

Because fuel cells:

1. Cost a fortune.

2. Run off fuels so explosive they make gasoline look like water.

3. Run off an energy storage medium that has to be produced. If you make the hydrogen from steam reformation of natural gas, it's still fossil fuel and only slightly better carbon footprint than burning the natural gas directly in the engine. If you make the H2 from electrolysis of water powered by renewable energy, it's hugely expensive and with 1/3 as many batteries or windmills you could just feed the electricity directly into batteries.

4. Rely on a hugely expensive non-existent infrastructure. Right now there are billions of EV charging points, also called "wall sockets", millions of more powerful 240V points ready to be wired up (called "oven and electric dryer circuits"), and thousands of level 2 240V public charging stations. As the standard battle described in the RTFA settles, fast DC charging stations can be built along highways for ~$40,000 each. Meanwhile there are a handful of $500,000 hydrogen refueling stations in the entire USA, Gropinator Ahhnold's Hydrogen Highway in California is dead, and the oil companies and car companies are stalled on the chicken-and-egg of "WHEN you build your cars in volume, maybe we'll build some stations" while hoping for government handouts to break the impasse.

H2 may still have a role as a better range-extender than a combustion engine powered by gasoline/bioethanol/whatever, but it's got to show up first. It's likely to start with fleet vehicles run from a central depot. (Go to http://www.afdc.energy.gov/afdc/locator/stations/ and look for electric and H2 stations in your area, though ignore the private H2 refueling stations.)

I've got an EV

[said_captain_said_wo]

A fast-charge port was included in my car, and it has a 110V converter, but I always use the 220V converter in my garage. Very handy. The great majority of my driving is well within its range, so not having a level 3 charging stations did not stop me from getting an EV.