10 ms·

Maybe the solution is to have better business practices around the technology that we do have. Why does the battery needs to be part of the car at all? It clear

by yholio 8y ago

Maybe the solution is to have better business practices around the technology that we do have. Why does the battery needs to be part of the car at all? It clearly depreciates and is technologically disrupted on a different time frame than the car itself. A Tesla Roadster is a fine car and will continue to be for decades, if you can only refresh it's battery pack every 10 years or so. I'm thinking of a modular battery that is hot swapable at the charge stations and where you only pay it's depreciation based on what you actually use. This would significantly lower ownership costs for light users and drastically increase efficiency and flexibility for heavy users who are no longer dependent on charge times. Since it's modular, you load the number of units you need, say one battery unit for a Leaf, two for a Model S or 10 units for a light truck, all in standardized format and with their own computing that tracks things like life span, charge cycles performed by the user himself for proper billing etc. I know Tesla experimented with and later abandoned battery swap, but that's predictable without the proper business structure in place, no one is going to leave the most expensive part of their car back at the charge station. If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics.

asdkhadsj 8y ago
> If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics. I wouldn't. Not to be a naysayer, just giving some context. The cars I buy are already in that price range, and I already pay "comparable gasoline prices" (via gas, hah), so in my area all I'd gain is a different type of gasoline when in city, and when I go camping/etc I'd be at risk due to being in slow adoption areas. Don't get me wrong, I want electric, but due to the areas I drive I've already settled to likely being stuck with Hybrids for the next X years. With that said, if the model you laid out still ended up cheaper than gasoline it would at least tip the balance towards its favor. I just can't handle a zero sum trade - and I imagine the same would be true for many around this large, slow to adapt land masses. Cities will become much, much nicer though. Air quality alone. I look forward to it
jdietrich 8y ago
Renault already offer battery leasing - you buy the car, but lease the battery based on your annual mileage. It has been reasonably popular, but it's far from a game changer. https://www.renault.co.uk/renault-finance/battery-hire.html https://www.renault.co.uk/renault-finance/battery-hire.html
- jsight 8y ago
  From what I remember, early Tesla models offered something similar as well. It was mostly just to reassure early buyers, though, from what I remember.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    From what I've heard (in Fully Charged videos), Renault did it for similar reasons and similarly expects the number of owners using battery leases instead of ownership to drop off soon as most buyers are now comfortable with the ownership model and prefer it.
  - prostoalex 8y ago
    They had a pilot running at Harris Ranch and shut it down eventually https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/harris-ranch-battery-swap.34794/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/harris-ranch-battery... For a quick recharge the current-generation 120 kW SuperChargers were deemed good enough. Now that they're growing their fleet of mobile service trucks, battery replacement might get re-introduced as an at-home service.
    - jsight 8y ago
      This was in reference to a program that sold an insurance program to effectively allow you to swap out a worn battery for no (or low) cost. It also was shut down as it was found not to really be necessary, though.
- devy 8y ago
  So does Nio. Battery leasing and swap programs too.. https://www.greencarcongress.com/2017/12/20171218-nio.html https://www.greencarcongress.com/2017/12/20171218-nio.html
Arnt 8y ago
Business practice seems to be shifting, at least that's what I see where I sit. DHL has started delivering parcels using electric vans and from what I've read today's batteries aren't a problem for that. Today's batteries aren't really good enough for driving on vacation, but private practice is moving too. The number of 25-year-olds with driving licenses is dropping, I've seen surveys that list the iphone above a BMW as a status symbol, and then there are phenomena like this: https://www.citymetric.com/transport/driving-london-has-been-falling-1990-has-city-passed-peak-car-1285 https://www.citymetric.com/transport/driving-london-has-been...
- greglindahl 8y ago
  I see plenty of people driving battery-electric cars on vacation; try hanging out at a Tesla supercharger and talk to the people there.
- figers 8y ago
  This summer will be my 3rd year driving our Tesla Model X from Boston to Hilton Head, SC. Superchargers are everywhere, it's an easy drive. We also drive from Boston 2+ hours into NH to go skiing all winter, also a breeze...
- AshleyGrant 8y ago
  > Today's batteries aren't really good enough for driving on vacation Picked up our Model 3 in September. We've already driven it to West Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, as well as multiple trips inside of Florida. Hit 10,000 miles yesterday. I would never argue that road tripping in a Tesla is as worry-free as it is in a ICE-powered vehicle, but with a modicum of forethought I'd say the Model 3 is plenty good enough for driving on vacation today. The hardest part is limiting yourself to hotels that offer Level 2 chargers, but pretty much all new construction hotels have EV charging of some sort.
voqv 8y ago
Won't be surprised that Tesla jumping on the chance to cancel the battery swap program when the reported popularity was low was due to something else. It could be that a quick hot swap is technologically complicated, especially given Tesla manufacturing tolerances. Also if the hot swap fails, you're stranded without a car.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Tesla’s hot swap demo was a compliance hack to garner as many ZEV credits as possible in California. There was no way it was going to be rolled out if you observed how rapidly they rolled out Supercharger stations instead.
- figers 8y ago
  I have a Tesla and don't think that kind of hot swap is necessary with the supercharger network and ease of charging in my garage, what I would like to see is public pricing on them swapping my battery with a new one after 10 years.
bitcurious 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) There was an Israeli battery/car tech startup that was built on that model, but it sadly went kaput. I still firmly believe that the hot-swap model is the winner long term.
- jessriedel 8y ago
  Yea, worth noting that the small-tank propane market also works like this. When you go to a supermakert or gas station, you just swap an empty tank for a full one. Refill is done after hours at scale.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    It works almost the same for bottled oxy/fuel/shielding gas used for cutting and welding operations across the country.
  - swish_bob 8y ago
    Notably, 10 years ago I could swap a butane or propane tank from one vendor with one of another vendor at any place that sold butane/propane. The last time I tried to do that (6 months ago) they rejected it. I had to go to the original supplier, as they were no longer refilling each others branded containers. In spite of standard fittings/sizes/etc. They've become significantly less fungible, and I can no longer just go to the nearest or cheapest supplier based on my needs. Even worse, I've just realised that I now effectively have two un-refillable tanks, as Homebase just shut down all my local branches. Which I paid deposits on when I bought them, obviously. Nice ...
    - triviatise 8y ago
      uhaul will generally fill propane tanks. When you swap tanks you get substantially less than what uhaul will fill to.
    - secabeen 8y ago
      Yep. They also over-charge for propane, sell the tanks not fully-filled, and don't compensate you for propane left in the tanks when you return them. All to increase convenience slightly (I can get the swap tanks at the supermarket or Home Depot, but I have to go to a specific gas station to fill the tanks I own). I strongly prefer the non-swap solution.
fipple 8y ago
This is an obvious idea hampered by the business model impossibilities of owning $20,000 battery packs which you can only improve in value by a few dollars every time you exchange them. The inventory / infrastructure / damage costs are too high to justify it.
- yholio 8y ago
  A battery pack has between 500 and 1000 charge cycles, so each swap on the $20K pack will recover you $20-40 in depreciation. It's the main cost of using an electric car. So then, the business challenge becomes to extract more value from a pack than a car owner can. There are many opportunities to do that: - much improved inventory management, buy in bulk, monitor and adjust charging parameters etc. to prolong battery life based on observed performance of the specific battery type. - this allows you to optimize battery purchase and chemistry to minimize overall cost even at the risk of a reduced lifetime - centralized recharge gives you economies of scale to purchase cheap electricity during the night and enter all sorts of contracts where you can earn money by acting as a last-resort supplier at peak times, without actually using significant charge cycles on your inventory. - the same economy of scale is passed down to customers who won't be bothered to install high power fast charge circuits, or are simply unable to. - differential pricing based on customer needs, for example, new, top performance packs for home users and degraded packs with lower peak current for less sensitive customers, taxis and commercial fleets etc. - batteries depreciate even when they sit charged; a modular system will allow customers to keep (and pay rent for) a single or low capacity unit on a regular basis for city use and opt for full capacity when they really need the extra range.
  - prostoalex 8y ago
    > each swap on the $20K pack will recover you $20-40 in depreciation Just the labor cost for the procedure is likely to greatly exceed the $20-40 estimate.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      What labor? https://youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY https://youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY
perkee 8y ago
Buying the car and hot swapping the batteries (with an automated machine similar to going through a car wash, no less) was the vision of A Better Place, a short lived Israeli startup. That company failed, but I wouldn't say it's impossible by a long shot. https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-place https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-pl...
- perkee 8y ago
  And here, for comparison, is the original Wired hype article I remember first reading which led me to wondering "hey what ever happened…" a few years ago. https://www.wired.com/2008/08/ff-agassi/ https://www.wired.com/2008/08/ff-agassi/
WorldMaker 8y ago
«Why does the battery needs to be part of the car at all? It clearly depreciates and is technologically disrupted on a different time frame than the car itself. A Tesla Roadster is a fine car and will continue to be for decades, if you can only refresh it's battery pack every 10 years or so.» Cars overall depreciate on the scale of 10/15 years or so. Right now the depreciation rates are the same. It's an interesting artifact of ICE vehicles that people don't expect any car's drive train to last more than ~15 years. It shouldn't be a surprise that car manufacturers were skeptical of battery tech right up until they hit about that same magic lifetime number. It also shouldn't be a surprise that car manufacturers won't have a lot of incentive to push it past that magic lifetime number, because that would affect car replacement rates and that would affect the bottom line. Mostly battery replacements look to keep the used car / secondary markets busy, and if we expect to see interesting innovations in battery replacements that's probably where we'll see them as more electric cars get resold to secondary and tertiary owners. (Just as we see the used car markets pushing innovations in after-market parts in general.) You are right in that maybe leaves room for a disruption that someone might be interested in a "car for life" model where electric cars might be built far more sustainably with an ideal towards larger reuse of the vehicle over the owner's lifetime and a larger depreciation scale on the order of multiple decades. That would be a huge game changer, and would potentially be great for the planet (less steel production alone, conceivably). It would also take a lot of work to make it happen, given the existing industry reliance on the current business model for most of a century now. It would also be one extremely huge disruption in so many downstream industries, secondary markets, etc, to the point where it may be more of a revolution (in the industrial sense, but also perhaps the war sense) than a "simple" disruption.
- opencl 8y ago
  I see lots of 15+ year old cars around, my car is over 20 years old and still works fine. About 25% of vehicles used in the US today are at least 15 years old. The drivetrains already very often outlast the body/frame falling apart from rust, at least in places that salt the roads during winter. https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicles https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicles
  - 8y ago
mrep 8y ago
Actually, Tesla's batteries don't degrade that much (10% average after 160,000 miles [0]). Turns out, with proper thermals and not charging/discharging fully vastly decreases their degradation according to other hacker news people on the topic [1]. [0]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-battery-degradation-data/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-ba... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15144315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15144315
ip26 8y ago
Same reason batteries in your phone or laptop are each a different shape and non-removable. They are an integral part of the design, a significant part of the weight & volume, with significant thermal concerns, etc... many electric cars today even use the battery as a "stressed member", aka the battery provides rigidity to the frame. How exactly will that be hotswappable in two minutes by John Doe? Basically, the point is a standardized, easily removable, hotswappable widget makes a lot of sense when it's a minor item. But when it's half the weight, value, volume, and engineering challenge, you have to sacrifice all of those attributes to use the hotswap widget. This originally made me think, if only we could pump fluid electrolyte in & out of the car, and let the battery take whatever form it likes. Then I realized that's called a flow battery, and then I realized that a hydrogen fuel cell is a type of flow battery.
- enraged_camel 8y ago
  >>Same reason batteries in your phone or laptop are each a different shape and non-removable. What? Most laptops on the market today have removable batteries, to the point where you can buy spare battery packs for them for long trips. Same with a lot of smartphones. Unless of course you mean Apple products.
  - jstarfish 8y ago
    User-serviceable and removable are not the same. There are few consumer laptops with removable (pops right out) batteries these days. I haven't seen one since the early 00s. At best there are still those which are user-serviceable (requires a screwdriver and some finesse at the least). And Apple products where you cannot do even that. Some business models still have the external removable battery, but have lower specs and higher price than consumer counterparts. Almost no modern smartphones have removable batteries. It's rare enough that the LG G5 tried to make it a selling point a few years ago.
  - nickspacek 8y ago
    A lot of smart phones? Maybe I'm not a discerning enough Android fanboy, but none of my phones have had removable batteries: * Nexus 4 * Nexus 5 * Nexus 6P * Samsung Galaxy S7 * Samsung Galaxy S9 The only recent phones I was aware of with removable batteries were the LG G*, but I don't think the latest model of those has a removable battery anymore either.
benj111 8y ago
What I would like to see is an ev with enough range to do the commute, with rentable batteries to increase the range as and when.
garyclarke27 8y ago
What about the opposite ie the car structure should be the battery! Carbon Fibre can be a very effective Anode at double the strength of steel - not v effective at it’s max strength of 10x Steel. Not as energy dense as curent Tesla batteries, but at the system level, should in theory save 50% of weight for same capacity, which is huge! Also lower energy density is naturaly safer, ie less likely to go up in flames. Just guessing, but this might partly explain how the Tesla Semi Truck is getting the claimed 500 mile range, that most commentators say is impossible?
- all2 8y ago
  They could double or triple that range by going to a diesel electric drive-train. Trains (in the USA, at least) use a diesel-electric drive-train to great effect.
amelius 8y ago
And how about a road that powers the car?
ams6110 8y ago
Battery technology, the management of charge/discharge/heat etc is the "secret sauce" that differentiates EVs. Anybody can stick an electric motor in a chassis. No carmaker is going to want to give that up for an industry standard one-size-fits-all generic battery.
ken 8y ago
This is already common practice in some other areas, e.g., renting gas cylinders and paying for refills.
cr0sh 8y ago
While your suggestion is good for the vast majority of driving situations, there is one kind of driving where it won't work: Off road driving Unless we get a battery that has - at a minimum - the same capabilities as a tank of gas, off roading is going to be relegated to strictly internal combustion, or maybe hybrid powered only. Right now, even the tech in a Tesla would not get a decent off road rig (up-armored, lifted, accessories, large MT tires, etc) out to the trail, over/thru it, and back to civilization. What we have right now will generally get you over a decent trail - but you'll probably have to trailer the rig in and out of the area. Even if solid-state batteries prove to be practical, it still might not be enough for any kind of serious off roading capability; that is, anything more than a "day trip", or where unplanned excursions off the route are involved. Because you won't have any easy ways to recharge the battery while on the trail. Right now, you can carry your own fuel with you, and refuel as needed or if there's an emergency or whatever. Other people when out with a group may also have fuel others can use - so the concept of universality comes into play. It's not possible to bring a generator (and fuel) or a solar panel with you to charge the battery of a hypothetical off road vehicle, unless this new battery tech allows for short charge times at lower voltages/currents as well (which probably isn't on the table). And you likely can't bring along spare battery packs - the size and weight would be prohibitive (then again, some people bring along replacement axles); unless the weight and size of such solid-state batteries are less. Yes, off roading is a small segment of the population, and so maybe it would be ok if that portion remained to use IC engines; presumably a battery swap system, or a solid-state battery pack might be the solution for the majority.
torpfactory 8y ago
There is a pretty significant systems engineeing effort to integrate the battery performance with the motor and power electronics. Tesla does a fantastic job in this regard and that is likely responsible for their high efficiency. You lose a lot of ability to do the integration in an optimized way if you have to design around different batteries. All that to say there is a lot to be gained by not doing a battery swap system.
tinco 8y ago
Tesla batteries are already highly modular and easily swappable. Having them be swapped every reload just doesn't make any sense. I bet in ten years having your battery swapped is about the same as having your belt and pump swapped. A couple hours mechanic fees plus the cost of a new battery minus the resale value of the old one. Done within a day, simple once every 250k kilometers to keep your car run as new. A model 3 without a battery would still be 30k, and that's with Tesla on razor margins and with the much cheaper supercharger infrastructure.

by yholio 8y ago

asdkhadsj 8y ago

> If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics. I wouldn't. Not to be a naysayer, just giving some context. The cars I buy are already in that price range, and I already pay "comparable gasoline prices" (via gas, hah), so in my area all I'd gain is a different type of gasoline when in city, and when I go camping/etc I'd be at risk due to being in slow adoption areas. Don't get me wrong, I want electric, but due to the areas I drive I've already settled to likely being stuck with Hybrids for the next X years. With that said, if the model you laid out still ended up cheaper than gasoline it would at least tip the balance towards its favor. I just can't handle a zero sum trade - and I imagine the same would be true for many around this large, slow to adapt land masses. Cities will become much, much nicer though. Air quality alone. I look forward to it

jdietrich 8y ago

Renault already offer battery leasing - you buy the car, but lease the battery based on your annual mileage. It has been reasonably popular, but it's far from a game changer. https://www.renault.co.uk/renault-finance/battery-hire.html https://www.renault.co.uk/renault-finance/battery-hire.html

jsight 8y ago
From what I remember, early Tesla models offered something similar as well. It was mostly just to reassure early buyers, though, from what I remember.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  From what I've heard (in Fully Charged videos), Renault did it for similar reasons and similarly expects the number of owners using battery leases instead of ownership to drop off soon as most buyers are now comfortable with the ownership model and prefer it.
- prostoalex 8y ago
  They had a pilot running at Harris Ranch and shut it down eventually https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/harris-ranch-battery-swap.34794/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/harris-ranch-battery... For a quick recharge the current-generation 120 kW SuperChargers were deemed good enough. Now that they're growing their fleet of mobile service trucks, battery replacement might get re-introduced as an at-home service.
  - jsight 8y ago
    This was in reference to a program that sold an insurance program to effectively allow you to swap out a worn battery for no (or low) cost. It also was shut down as it was found not to really be necessary, though.
devy 8y ago
So does Nio. Battery leasing and swap programs too.. https://www.greencarcongress.com/2017/12/20171218-nio.html https://www.greencarcongress.com/2017/12/20171218-nio.html

Arnt 8y ago

Business practice seems to be shifting, at least that's what I see where I sit. DHL has started delivering parcels using electric vans and from what I've read today's batteries aren't a problem for that. Today's batteries aren't really good enough for driving on vacation, but private practice is moving too. The number of 25-year-olds with driving licenses is dropping, I've seen surveys that list the iphone above a BMW as a status symbol, and then there are phenomena like this: https://www.citymetric.com/transport/driving-london-has-been-falling-1990-has-city-passed-peak-car-1285 https://www.citymetric.com/transport/driving-london-has-been...

greglindahl 8y ago
I see plenty of people driving battery-electric cars on vacation; try hanging out at a Tesla supercharger and talk to the people there.
figers 8y ago
This summer will be my 3rd year driving our Tesla Model X from Boston to Hilton Head, SC. Superchargers are everywhere, it's an easy drive. We also drive from Boston 2+ hours into NH to go skiing all winter, also a breeze...
AshleyGrant 8y ago
> Today's batteries aren't really good enough for driving on vacation Picked up our Model 3 in September. We've already driven it to West Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, as well as multiple trips inside of Florida. Hit 10,000 miles yesterday. I would never argue that road tripping in a Tesla is as worry-free as it is in a ICE-powered vehicle, but with a modicum of forethought I'd say the Model 3 is plenty good enough for driving on vacation today. The hardest part is limiting yourself to hotels that offer Level 2 chargers, but pretty much all new construction hotels have EV charging of some sort.

voqv 8y ago

Won't be surprised that Tesla jumping on the chance to cancel the battery swap program when the reported popularity was low was due to something else. It could be that a quick hot swap is technologically complicated, especially given Tesla manufacturing tolerances. Also if the hot swap fails, you're stranded without a car.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Tesla’s hot swap demo was a compliance hack to garner as many ZEV credits as possible in California. There was no way it was going to be rolled out if you observed how rapidly they rolled out Supercharger stations instead.
figers 8y ago
I have a Tesla and don't think that kind of hot swap is necessary with the supercharger network and ease of charging in my garage, what I would like to see is public pricing on them swapping my battery with a new one after 10 years.

bitcurious 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) There was an Israeli battery/car tech startup that was built on that model, but it sadly went kaput. I still firmly believe that the hot-swap model is the winner long term.

jessriedel 8y ago
Yea, worth noting that the small-tank propane market also works like this. When you go to a supermakert or gas station, you just swap an empty tank for a full one. Refill is done after hours at scale.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  It works almost the same for bottled oxy/fuel/shielding gas used for cutting and welding operations across the country.
- swish_bob 8y ago
  Notably, 10 years ago I could swap a butane or propane tank from one vendor with one of another vendor at any place that sold butane/propane. The last time I tried to do that (6 months ago) they rejected it. I had to go to the original supplier, as they were no longer refilling each others branded containers. In spite of standard fittings/sizes/etc. They've become significantly less fungible, and I can no longer just go to the nearest or cheapest supplier based on my needs. Even worse, I've just realised that I now effectively have two un-refillable tanks, as Homebase just shut down all my local branches. Which I paid deposits on when I bought them, obviously. Nice ...
  - triviatise 8y ago
    uhaul will generally fill propane tanks. When you swap tanks you get substantially less than what uhaul will fill to.
  - secabeen 8y ago
    Yep. They also over-charge for propane, sell the tanks not fully-filled, and don't compensate you for propane left in the tanks when you return them. All to increase convenience slightly (I can get the swap tanks at the supermarket or Home Depot, but I have to go to a specific gas station to fill the tanks I own). I strongly prefer the non-swap solution.

fipple 8y ago

This is an obvious idea hampered by the business model impossibilities of owning $20,000 battery packs which you can only improve in value by a few dollars every time you exchange them. The inventory / infrastructure / damage costs are too high to justify it.

yholio 8y ago
A battery pack has between 500 and 1000 charge cycles, so each swap on the $20K pack will recover you $20-40 in depreciation. It's the main cost of using an electric car. So then, the business challenge becomes to extract more value from a pack than a car owner can. There are many opportunities to do that: - much improved inventory management, buy in bulk, monitor and adjust charging parameters etc. to prolong battery life based on observed performance of the specific battery type. - this allows you to optimize battery purchase and chemistry to minimize overall cost even at the risk of a reduced lifetime - centralized recharge gives you economies of scale to purchase cheap electricity during the night and enter all sorts of contracts where you can earn money by acting as a last-resort supplier at peak times, without actually using significant charge cycles on your inventory. - the same economy of scale is passed down to customers who won't be bothered to install high power fast charge circuits, or are simply unable to. - differential pricing based on customer needs, for example, new, top performance packs for home users and degraded packs with lower peak current for less sensitive customers, taxis and commercial fleets etc. - batteries depreciate even when they sit charged; a modular system will allow customers to keep (and pay rent for) a single or low capacity unit on a regular basis for city use and opt for full capacity when they really need the extra range.
- prostoalex 8y ago
  > each swap on the $20K pack will recover you $20-40 in depreciation Just the labor cost for the procedure is likely to greatly exceed the $20-40 estimate.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    What labor? https://youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY https://youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY

perkee 8y ago

Buying the car and hot swapping the batteries (with an automated machine similar to going through a car wash, no less) was the vision of A Better Place, a short lived Israeli startup. That company failed, but I wouldn't say it's impossible by a long shot. https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-place https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-pl...

perkee 8y ago
And here, for comparison, is the original Wired hype article I remember first reading which led me to wondering "hey what ever happened…" a few years ago. https://www.wired.com/2008/08/ff-agassi/ https://www.wired.com/2008/08/ff-agassi/

WorldMaker 8y ago

«Why does the battery needs to be part of the car at all? It clearly depreciates and is technologically disrupted on a different time frame than the car itself. A Tesla Roadster is a fine car and will continue to be for decades, if you can only refresh it's battery pack every 10 years or so.» Cars overall depreciate on the scale of 10/15 years or so. Right now the depreciation rates are the same. It's an interesting artifact of ICE vehicles that people don't expect any car's drive train to last more than ~15 years. It shouldn't be a surprise that car manufacturers were skeptical of battery tech right up until they hit about that same magic lifetime number. It also shouldn't be a surprise that car manufacturers won't have a lot of incentive to push it past that magic lifetime number, because that would affect car replacement rates and that would affect the bottom line. Mostly battery replacements look to keep the used car / secondary markets busy, and if we expect to see interesting innovations in battery replacements that's probably where we'll see them as more electric cars get resold to secondary and tertiary owners. (Just as we see the used car markets pushing innovations in after-market parts in general.) You are right in that maybe leaves room for a disruption that someone might be interested in a "car for life" model where electric cars might be built far more sustainably with an ideal towards larger reuse of the vehicle over the owner's lifetime and a larger depreciation scale on the order of multiple decades. That would be a huge game changer, and would potentially be great for the planet (less steel production alone, conceivably). It would also take a lot of work to make it happen, given the existing industry reliance on the current business model for most of a century now. It would also be one extremely huge disruption in so many downstream industries, secondary markets, etc, to the point where it may be more of a revolution (in the industrial sense, but also perhaps the war sense) than a "simple" disruption.

opencl 8y ago
I see lots of 15+ year old cars around, my car is over 20 years old and still works fine. About 25% of vehicles used in the US today are at least 15 years old. The drivetrains already very often outlast the body/frame falling apart from rust, at least in places that salt the roads during winter. https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicles https://nhts.ornl.gov/vehicles
- 8y ago

mrep 8y ago

Actually, Tesla's batteries don't degrade that much (10% average after 160,000 miles [0]). Turns out, with proper thermals and not charging/discharging fully vastly decreases their degradation according to other hacker news people on the topic [1]. [0]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-battery-degradation-data/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-ba... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15144315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15144315

ip26 8y ago

Same reason batteries in your phone or laptop are each a different shape and non-removable. They are an integral part of the design, a significant part of the weight & volume, with significant thermal concerns, etc... many electric cars today even use the battery as a "stressed member", aka the battery provides rigidity to the frame. How exactly will that be hotswappable in two minutes by John Doe? Basically, the point is a standardized, easily removable, hotswappable widget makes a lot of sense when it's a minor item. But when it's half the weight, value, volume, and engineering challenge, you have to sacrifice all of those attributes to use the hotswap widget. This originally made me think, if only we could pump fluid electrolyte in & out of the car, and let the battery take whatever form it likes. Then I realized that's called a flow battery, and then I realized that a hydrogen fuel cell is a type of flow battery.

enraged_camel 8y ago
>>Same reason batteries in your phone or laptop are each a different shape and non-removable. What? Most laptops on the market today have removable batteries, to the point where you can buy spare battery packs for them for long trips. Same with a lot of smartphones. Unless of course you mean Apple products.
- jstarfish 8y ago
  User-serviceable and removable are not the same. There are few consumer laptops with removable (pops right out) batteries these days. I haven't seen one since the early 00s. At best there are still those which are user-serviceable (requires a screwdriver and some finesse at the least). And Apple products where you cannot do even that. Some business models still have the external removable battery, but have lower specs and higher price than consumer counterparts. Almost no modern smartphones have removable batteries. It's rare enough that the LG G5 tried to make it a selling point a few years ago.
- nickspacek 8y ago
  A lot of smart phones? Maybe I'm not a discerning enough Android fanboy, but none of my phones have had removable batteries: * Nexus 4 * Nexus 5 * Nexus 6P * Samsung Galaxy S7 * Samsung Galaxy S9 The only recent phones I was aware of with removable batteries were the LG G*, but I don't think the latest model of those has a removable battery anymore either.

benj111 8y ago

What I would like to see is an ev with enough range to do the commute, with rentable batteries to increase the range as and when.

garyclarke27 8y ago

What about the opposite ie the car structure should be the battery! Carbon Fibre can be a very effective Anode at double the strength of steel - not v effective at it’s max strength of 10x Steel. Not as energy dense as curent Tesla batteries, but at the system level, should in theory save 50% of weight for same capacity, which is huge! Also lower energy density is naturaly safer, ie less likely to go up in flames. Just guessing, but this might partly explain how the Tesla Semi Truck is getting the claimed 500 mile range, that most commentators say is impossible?

all2 8y ago
They could double or triple that range by going to a diesel electric drive-train. Trains (in the USA, at least) use a diesel-electric drive-train to great effect.

amelius 8y ago

And how about a road that powers the car?

ams6110 8y ago

Battery technology, the management of charge/discharge/heat etc is the "secret sauce" that differentiates EVs. Anybody can stick an electric motor in a chassis. No carmaker is going to want to give that up for an industry standard one-size-fits-all generic battery.

ken 8y ago

This is already common practice in some other areas, e.g., renting gas cylinders and paying for refills.

cr0sh 8y ago

While your suggestion is good for the vast majority of driving situations, there is one kind of driving where it won't work: Off road driving Unless we get a battery that has - at a minimum - the same capabilities as a tank of gas, off roading is going to be relegated to strictly internal combustion, or maybe hybrid powered only. Right now, even the tech in a Tesla would not get a decent off road rig (up-armored, lifted, accessories, large MT tires, etc) out to the trail, over/thru it, and back to civilization. What we have right now will generally get you over a decent trail - but you'll probably have to trailer the rig in and out of the area. Even if solid-state batteries prove to be practical, it still might not be enough for any kind of serious off roading capability; that is, anything more than a "day trip", or where unplanned excursions off the route are involved. Because you won't have any easy ways to recharge the battery while on the trail. Right now, you can carry your own fuel with you, and refuel as needed or if there's an emergency or whatever. Other people when out with a group may also have fuel others can use - so the concept of universality comes into play. It's not possible to bring a generator (and fuel) or a solar panel with you to charge the battery of a hypothetical off road vehicle, unless this new battery tech allows for short charge times at lower voltages/currents as well (which probably isn't on the table). And you likely can't bring along spare battery packs - the size and weight would be prohibitive (then again, some people bring along replacement axles); unless the weight and size of such solid-state batteries are less. Yes, off roading is a small segment of the population, and so maybe it would be ok if that portion remained to use IC engines; presumably a battery swap system, or a solid-state battery pack might be the solution for the majority.

torpfactory 8y ago

There is a pretty significant systems engineeing effort to integrate the battery performance with the motor and power electronics. Tesla does a fantastic job in this regard and that is likely responsible for their high efficiency. You lose a lot of ability to do the integration in an optimized way if you have to design around different batteries. All that to say there is a lot to be gained by not doing a battery swap system.

tinco 8y ago

Tesla batteries are already highly modular and easily swappable. Having them be swapped every reload just doesn't make any sense. I bet in ten years having your battery swapped is about the same as having your belt and pump swapped. A couple hours mechanic fees plus the cost of a new battery minus the resale value of the old one. Done within a day, simple once every 250k kilometers to keep your car run as new. A model 3 without a battery would still be 30k, and that's with Tesla on razor margins and with the much cheaper supercharger infrastructure.