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Two-minute battery changes push India’s delivery riders to switch to e-scooters

489 points by rustoo 5y ago

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unchocked 5y ago
Another reminder of how much less overhead human-scaled systems require. In this case, the battery swapping robot is you.
- jscott0918 5y ago
  I tried to reply to another comment that was since deleted. It said something along the lines of: >I don't get why Tesla would kill their battery-swapping while they are tackling other Hard Problems. The practicality of battery swapping decreases exponentially as size and weight scale. The cost of building a battery swapping network for western-car-sized battery systems, even once solving the engineering elements (which are manageable), are likely a non-starter. Especially if the other principle technology rival is fast-charging stations. How much added convenience is required to justify huge mechanical systems with many wear components and large maintenance costs over replacing a few charging cables every X months? Lots.
  - jonsen 5y ago
    The batteri should go in a trailer. Swap the trailer. The car itself could be smaller. Luggage could go on the trailer.
    - tppiotrowski 5y ago
      Would make swapping easy but reversing with a trailer is not easy.
      - jonsen 5y ago
        Self driving trailer shouldn't be difficult.
    - bduerst 5y ago
      Trailers are non-starters for most vehicles. Better to bring the batteries to charge the cars when they need it: https://www.sparkcharge.io/ https://www.sparkcharge.io/
  - toss1 5y ago
    I think the trick is not to swap the whole battery Instead design in a space for a secondary battery, maybe 40% the capacity of the main battery. Make those standard and swap-able. Now, you can use the car as ordinary in either the one-battery or two-battery mode, with the 1B config being more nimble handling with less range, and the 2B config more range. In any case, you can then enjoy rapid-swap of the standard 2nd battery, or maybe just rent one for a long trip. This also helps the automakers keep their proprietary designs on the main battery for differentiation. The 2nd battery could go in the extra trunk space or something...
    - stetrain 5y ago
      But if you are talking about faster partial-capacity refills during road trip stops, we already have that. Current batteries charge way faster from 0-50% than 50-100%. The curve really starts to fall off above 80%. I usually try to plan my stops so that I’m arriving with 5-10% and charging to 60-65%. With 250kW chargers that results in a ~15min charging stop. I don’t think the costs of development, impact to vehicle design, and infrastructure would make sense for swaps just to replace what is already a 15min charge.
      - toss1 5y ago
        True, the differential will reduce as we get even higher-amperage chargers and batteries w/higher C ratings. Yet still, being able to get 40% in 3 minutes is still better. I'd also see little reason that a properly configured trunk couldn't hold a pair of 40% battery units. Kind of like carrying jerry-cans on the back of a rover, except you can just plug them in...
        stetrain 5y ago
        Jerry-cans don't weight 400lb
  - nine_k 5y ago
    I suspect that battery hot-swapping will be practical for electric trucks. Charging them is really slow unless you use a dozen of cables. Parked time costs real money for them. Normal trucks unload, reload, and go back to the highway pretty soon, often with a different driver at the wheel. Truck yards usually already have equipment for heavy lifting, and the batteries need not be tailored to the car aesthetics and space constraints. Also, a narrower industry has a better chance to come up with a common standard.
    - tim333 5y ago
      Also it's normal with trucks to have a bunch of stuff kind of bolted on the bottom eg https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/fuel-tanker-truck-picture-id1081854182 https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/fuel-tanker-truck-pictu...
    - DerArzt 5y ago
      Tom Scott did a video[1] on this that tackles the problem of electric trucks in a different way. Instead of charging somewhere or swapping out a battery, what if we charged them while they were in a specific lane of a highway. [1] https://youtu.be/_3P_S7pL7Yg https://youtu.be/_3P_S7pL7Yg
      - everforward 5y ago
        I'm wondering how well that will scale if all/most of the trucks become electric. I would think the friction would create issues from both heat and mechanical wear.
  - dundarious 5y ago
    I suspect that Tesla battery swaps were never a serious endeavor meant to be rolled out, and were instead by design limited to one location merely to be used as a massively profitable tax credit scheme: https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2014/12/30/teslas-battery-swap-stations-will-help-it-requalify-for-zev-credits-in-california/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2014/12/30/te... Doing battery swaps on such vehicles would be incredibly difficult (least of all from an engineering perspective), and my suspicion that it was more subsidy scam than genuine attempt is based on other factors.
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mulmen 5y ago
When I was in Taiwan we saw Gogoro scooters in the wild. The battery is swapped at a kiosk in a couple of minutes. Riders pay a subscription for the scooter and access to the battery kiosk. Seems like a really great option. I would love to have that in my city. We have dockless bicycles and scooters but a more capable and personal option would be awesome. I'd sign up in a heartbeat. Sadly my city planners do not seem aware of motorcycles as a transportation option. We have no laws or infrastructure to encourage them or take advantage of the benefits. At a state level we at least get to cut ferry lines, but that seems to be the only perk.
- asdff 5y ago
  We have subscription escooters which seem tempting to me, but the costs never pencil out. They end up being as much as the scooter within a years time or so, plus you are on the hook if some major damage or theft happens. Whats the point of that then? Might as well look for someone who will let you finance an ebike and put it on your renters or homeowners insurance for protection at that rate.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    Access to credit is not as easy in India. This is just a straightforward capex to opex transformation that people can intuitively grasp. Combine that with no minimum commitment and it's transparent to them what expenses are, what income is, and what net income is. Indian users are very price-sensitive and there are extensive discussion networks running the numbers on these. They won't use these services unless it makes financial sense.
  - thebean11 5y ago
    - Quick battery swapping - No maintenance or upgrade cost - Low upfront cost - Low commitment
    - asdff 5y ago
      Still cheaper to own. Maintenance with ebikes is not going to be very much. Throw lube on the chain every once in a while and have the bike shop do tires and brakes once every two years. Honestly you could buy a brand new $1200 ebike a year for the prices the services around me ask for their most basic plans which have mileage limits, and require a deposit anyhow. You can also turn around and sell your new ebike anytime, not much lock in or commitment there whereas I'm putting my blind faith in the fact that this particular subscription service will be easy to cancel (history says otherwise).
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heavenlyblue 5y ago
> Some battery developers are also opposed to standardizing power packs anytime soon because the technology is evolving rapidly and India could switch to the more efficient and environmentally friendly sodium-ion batteries from the lithium-ion ones favored by e-rickshaw makers. I do not think that is true. This is what all of them say whenever standardisation comes into the argument. However obviously they use that to lock the customers in.
- myself248 5y ago
  That makes no sense. With new battery tech, it's typically the chargers that absorb the complexity, the load is just a load. So the scooters should be able to handle the new batteries just fine, and it would be on the network operator to upgrade the charging kiosks accordingly. It'd be much easier to rolling-upgrade batteries in a swappable fleet than to call fixed-battery scooters into the shop and swap each one out, as well.
  - L_Rahman 5y ago
    As the parent says, arguments like these are always a scheme to lock customers into proprietary standards. It's frustrating that companies still think they can get away with this.
  - manquer 5y ago
    Standardization is not in chemistry or the tech itself. It is in voltage/amps and the physical dimensions we already do this with AA and AAA batteries.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    > the load is just a load You will need a standard communication protocol for storing charge/discharge history with the battery and reporting temperature. Nobody wants to swap in a battery that is exhausted and won't maintain a charge. Vendors maintaining swap pools need to know when to cull old packs.
- manquer 5y ago
  That is where the government/standards bodies are important. It is in everyone's collective benefit to standardize as the whole market will expand. As quoted in the article this piece is what the finance minister highlighted in her budget speech last month as being important to get in place.
asdff 5y ago
This is the game changer that could turn cities into EV dominated spaces. Imagine if every convenience store had a rack of these out front. It would be even faster to get a charged EV than even to gas up an ICE car at the pump. These are the things that start becoming possible if we let our idea of an EV move beyond a 4000lb automobile to move your maybe 200lb self. You would have to use a technician to service a car sized EV and swap out the batteries even if they dropped right out easily, just due to the to weight of them. An entire infrastructure that would have to be built just to move around 3800 unnecessary lbs anytime you wanted to go anywhere at all. Meanwhile, if people were merely happy with something the size of an e scooter, converting the population to EVs starts getting a lot simpler just in terms of the physics of it all, and simple low hanging fruit innovations like this are possible.
- foolfoolz 5y ago
  this idea raised $850M and failed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company)
  - scythe 5y ago
    Those aren't scooters, they're cars -- and they showed up before Panasonic/Tesla attacked the battery-cost problem with roughly 100x as much capital.
    - nradov 5y ago
      Tesla also tried battery swapping several years ago but seems to have given up.
      - ryukafalz 5y ago
        Those are also cars.
      - bduerst 5y ago
        That's because Tesla owners have disposable income and tend to charge in suburban or rural homes. Swapping is aimed more at lower-income segments or delivery/maintenance services in urban areas.
amazd 5y ago
Why hasn't Tesla gotten into this sort of battery swap tech for their own cars yet?
- skolos 5y ago
  They did try it in 2013, but abandoned the idea: https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event
  - kevlened 5y ago
    According to "Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors", it may not have been abandoned. Instead, the feature may have never been planned: "In 2013, California revised its Zero Emissions Vehicle credit system so that long-range ZEVs that were able to charge 80% in under 15 minutes earned almost twice as many credits as those that didn’t. Overnight, Tesla’s 85 kWh Model S went from earning four credits per vehicle to seven. Moreover, to earn this dramatic increase in credits, Tesla needed to prove to CARB that such rapid refueling events were possible. By demonstrating battery swap on just one vehicle, Tesla nearly doubled the ZEV credits earned by its entire fleet even if none of them actually used the swap capability."
- cheeze 5y ago
  Because they would need to announce it first, spend 10 years talking about how it's right around the corner but never delivering, and then maybe they could deliver it. We'll see these battery swaps right after FSD actually becomes L3.
- asdff 5y ago
  The scale. Tesla batteries are like 900 pounds. You now have to make a machine that can move 900 pounds of electronic hardware at mass scale. Meanwhile, if your machine only needs maybe 20lbs of batteries, suddenly that machine can be your user, and the infrastructure problem got a lot simpler and cheaper to solve. I have no clue why tesla isn't considering a low cost, <$500 EV, be it scooter or bike. I think their brand name and a price point that makes it easy for people currently on the sidelines to buy in would easily be enough to dominate this market overnight. At this point is just these companies from china you get from sketchy amazon sellers. I don't see schwinn ebikes when I drive around, they are too costly, I just see these cheapo foldable amazon ones that go by 50 different names, which I think is telling where the latent demand really lies (not in the saturated luxury ebike/escooter market which doesn't seem to move much product).
aqme28 5y ago
You see this in New York a lot too. The most popular delivery bikes use a swappable battery.
- asdff 5y ago
  Can you swap them at the store like your empty propane tank though?
endisneigh 5y ago
I remember in 2013 electric skateboards were all of the rage. I felt like a pariah with an electric scooter. I told people they were the future because skateboards are just too dangerous imo. I’m glad to see this happen. What I want now is an electric assist scooter, where then battery is smaller and it simply makes your manual pushes far stronger. I’m no electric engineer, but I think there’s an opportunity here. If you can minimize the resistance added by adding an electric motor you might be able to really decrease the weight of the scooter if it only propels you on push.
- Johnny555 5y ago
  Are scooters significantly safer? (I'm assuming you mean the small 2 wheeled scooter that looks a bit like a skateboard with a steering post, not a vespa style "mini motorcycle" scooter which is the scooter referenced in this article). I don't know how to clearly differentiate between the two types of scooter when talking about them.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    I strongly believe the addition of the handlebars makes a scooter much safer to use for an average person compared to an electric skate or longboard. I say this as someone who has owned all three. Best example of this is braking. Most electric longboards accelerate and decelerate as fast or faster than a scooter. However the laws of motion still apply. Without something to hold onto you have to actually anticipate your deceleration and lean back when decelerating - very unintuitive. When I had an electric longboard I let several people use it and saw several people fall over (fortunately they fell on their feet)
    - Johnny555 5y ago
      It just seems that the narrow 3" wheels commonly seen on scooters are way too sensitive to road imperfections. I've seen some with oversized 6" or so wheels that are wider like a mountain bike tire, those seem safer. I miss eBikes, which seem to have been pretty much replaced by eScooters, at least in my community.
Melatonic 5y ago
What would be really amazing is if we all leased the batteries but owned our vehicles (whether its scooters, cars, etc) AND there were super fast quickswap stations built into the road itself. Imagine if pulled up to a red stop light and the light knew it was going to be red for the next 30 seconds at least - your vehicle could communicate with some type of in-road underground battery swap station and then at the press of a button it could quickly reach up, remove your existing battery, and replace it with a fully charged one. Larger vehicles could even have multiple batteries - one quick swap one on the bottom and then another one elsewhere in the vehicle that was a bit more work to swap - this way you could mainly use and stress the swap battery and ideally keep swapping it out as needed on a road trip but worst case you still have a large energy reserve to fall back to.
- kurthr 5y ago
  Battery wear is a complex thing and it's not trivial to control or test. You could easily trade in an excellent battery and receive one that had 50% rated capacity. If you plan to wear them out very quickly, not to need the full capacity, and pay well above actual cost for the convenience of swapping, then it could work. Otherwise, you will be ripped off by the better informed charging station that hands out only their worst batteries, and sells the best trade-ins as new.
  - 2fast4you 5y ago
    What if we took batteries out of commission after X cycles? There would need to be regulation on it. I wouldn't trust my manufacturer or charging network not to rip me off if they had the chance.
  - jcims 5y ago
    Yeah, I think it’s clear that you would have to buy the cars off the lot with no battery included.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  That sounds like a huge amount of infrastructure work on something that even in the best case will be relatively prone to failure. Meanwhile, we already have grid connections all over the place and DC fast charging is quickly approaching fast enough. For those who even have to use it, the rest just charge at home and none of these contraptions would improve their experience.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
Back when electric vehicles were the most popular automobile, battery changes were used to keep electric trucks and taxis on the road longer. Some companies were around 20 years just doing electric vehicle battery changes and service. This was called Power-as-a-Service, or PaaS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle#Power_as_a_service_and_General_Vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...
- ydant 5y ago
  I love how this reads like a future history of now and/or alternate timeline parody, and yet it's actually talking about the early 1900s. Fascinating, and thank you for linking.
russellbeattie 5y ago
Every single person who's ever put batteries in the back of some consumer electronics device immediately thinks, "Why don't they just make it so you can swap batteries in EVs?" I was definitely no different. I now own a few eBikes including a DIY conversion, a Sur Ron dirt bike and an Onyx emoto. The batteries are just so insanely compact and heavy, it's surreal. The Onyx has a removable 72v/48ah extended range battery which weighs 37lbs (17kg) [1], similar to the weight of the swappable batteries in the article. Let me tell you, that may not seem like a lot of weight, but it really is and it's *just so dense!* It's the equivalent of over 4 gallons of milk contained in two shoe boxes. Seriously, every time I have to move - or should I say "manhandle" - the batteries in any of the bikes, I audibly groan and make sure to lift with my legs. The batteries are all different shapes, sizes and in various boxes and all shockingly heavy for their size. The sharp edges of the Onyx battery box is a true hazard as its momentum will give your thigh a nice bruise should you swing it, or your car a nice dent. Anyways, I'm sharing all this to say: Batteries are heavy af. Really. As good as a solution this is for scooters, don't expect it to go much more beyond that. There won't be swappable batteries on your big Zero or Livewire any time soon. 1. https://www.onyxmotorbikes.com/collections/parts/products/rcr-72v-battery-41ah https://www.onyxmotorbikes.com/collections/parts/products/rc...
- sickygnar 5y ago
  Each scooter has 2 smaller batteries, presumably because of this problem. I own a Sur Ron too, and I don't find the stock battery weight to be an issue. ~30 lbs isn't unreasonable for the average person to lift. It's amazing they packed a dirt bike into 125 lbs. I'm able to lift it over barriers and load/unload it from my sedan, and it doesn't ride far off from a mountain bike. It's only twice the weight of a top of the line e-mountain bike, but has 7x the power output and goes further. Easy decision. It's the most fun machine I've ever owned. Zero uses 3.6 kwh modular batteries. I'm guessing they are 40-50 lbs or so which is probably around the upper limit the average person would be comfortable lifting and loading regularly. I'm sure they could be engineered to sell them in smaller sized units, but I don't think they're actually hot swappable. Keeping my eye on this one: https://starkfuture.com/en-us-US/products/stark-varg https://starkfuture.com/en-us-US/products/stark-varg
sebastianconcpt 5y ago
Bureaucrats of countries that basically depend only in selling gas, are watching in panic or?
- supernova87a 5y ago
  Given that it will still take 30-40 years for the bulk of gasoline consuming fleets to expire/turnover, this is ironically a problem that I bet such oil plutocrats are thinking they'll shift the burden to their children to deal with.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    Also I doubt they’re actually worried. They have enormous cash reserves. Nearly half the initial money in the Softbank Vision Fund was Saudi Arabian and that gave us Uber and many other new unicorns. If anything we should be worried about the effects of all those cash reserves starting to throw around their weight.
  - sebastianconcpt 5y ago
    In any case, there are two million applications for petroleum other than gas for gas based internal combustion engines.
lkxijlewlf 5y ago
I recall, oh maybe 15 or so years ago, there was an, I believe, Israeli inventor who proposed doing this for cars. Not sure what happened to it, but I think that's something that should be looked into more. I know, most auto OEMs like to build the car around the battery (for structural soundness), but if I could just pull in and have my battery swapped while on a road trip, that would be amazing.
- ihumanable 5y ago
  I believe you are remembering the same thing I'm remembering, it was called BetterPlace Here's a TED Talk about it from 2009 https://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_a_new_ecosystem_for_electric_cars?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_a_new_ecosystem_for_el... They went bankrupt in 2013
kingkawn 5y ago
Now for cars/trucks and we’re in good shape
kujin88 5y ago
Not just delivery drivers, this is essential for everyone in India that uses a two-wheeler. India has always been known for its notorious costs of Petroleum and its unaffordability to anyone other than the rich. We need the EV transformation to make sure people are more economically sustainable. A handsome side-effect of it would be the dramatic drop in air pollution given the population density in India
- jjude 5y ago
  > India has always been known for its notorious costs of Petroleum Wouldn't the same factors like state tax, central tax, political interference affect battery charges too? Or none of them matter?
  - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
    India taxes petroleum that much not to generate more revenue -- for they can always raise the sales tax rates -- but to reduce consumption and keep the balance of payments in check.
Waterluvian 5y ago
A very ignorant question: in order to charge faster, why can’t we just charge 200 little batteries in parallel and then operate them in series?
- itake 5y ago
  AFAIK, that is basically how batteries work. A battery is comprised of "cells".
  - NathanielK 5y ago
    Some batteries like deWalts's flexvolt system do allow rearranging the cells. They go full series so you can run efficient 60V tools off them, but swith to partly parallel to charge on a standard 20V charger.
- hgomersall 5y ago
  From my limited understanding, the rate you can get charge into a battery is proportional to its capacity. You see this in the size normalised charge rating that batteries have, like 1C means it takes 1 hour to charge and 4C means it takes 15 minutes. Adding more batteries in parallel is much the same.
- NathanielK 5y ago
  Batteries have "C" rating which is how many times you can charge or discharge them in an hour. This magic number is closely linked to battery chemistry. A "6C" battery can be charged in 10 minutes as long as you have the power, while a 10C battery can charge in 6 minutes. You're right that sometimes charging speed is limited by the available power. Don't expect to fast charge a 130kWh Tesla at a 45kW charger or charge a 100Wh laptop on a 18W cellphone charger. In the case of these scooter batteries, you are mostly limited by the batteries C rating. Even if you watercooled them to stay at a happy temperature, you can only push the chemistry so much. Maybe if they switched to a different chemistry like Lithium Titanate they could chaemrge quicker. For now it is easier to use LiFePo batteries and just swap them out.
- nine_k 5y ago
more_corn 5y ago
Do you like how that little thing in the bottom corner flips constantly? You don’t find it distracting at all do you? The person who did that should be shot.
rdxm 5y ago
pengaru 5y ago
This is the way, but I have serious concerns when it comes to abuse as surveillance tools. I'd want such vehicles to incorporate something of a Faraday cage around the battery module. The thing is inherently always powered and could easily become a mechanism for tracking locations and travel speeds real-time.
- caymanjim 5y ago
  This isn't going to happen because almost no one would be worried about it and there would be a cost that only benefitted a microscopic fraction of concerned people. It also feels completely arbitrary; for all you know, there are tracking devices in everything you own. It's not like you can really tell. There could be passive tracking devices in every consumer device.
  - pengaru 5y ago
    Except consumer devices you own you're free to open and scrutinize if you're concerned there's such fuckery going on, nor do all consumer devices inherently accompany your travels. When it's a battery swap situation, you don't own the thing, and you bet your ass they're going to have anti-tampering measures for obvious good reasons. It's especially problematic for vehicle batteries since they're so large in terms of both physical volume and power capacity. There's plenty of margin to slide in a smartphone equivalent payload. If it's not something we can defend against it's a significant downside to the battery swapping arrangement IMNSHO.
    - alexb_ 5y ago
      I think you have to accept that privacy is dead. Period. There is absolutely no tinkering, no open source software, nothing that will prevent you from being tracked. Realize you cannot change this, and accept what you cannot change.
      - pengaru 5y ago
        Never.
yodelshady 5y ago
More practical zero-emission scooters in India could be, as I understand it, quite something. I complain enough about exhaust fumes in Western cities.
scalablenotions 5y ago
I've thought for a long time that battery swapping is the only way to go for all electric vehicles. A subscription or pay-as-you-go service for battery changing is practical and would make battery replacements costing tens of thousands of dollars a non-thing. I know some batteries are heavy, but if stations can provide petroleum pumps, then they can provide mechanized battery exchange infrastructure, right? Bring on the ISO standards for vehicle batteries! Does anyone have any reason why this wouldn't work? Perhaps parts being stolen from the rental batteries before they're returned or some such?
- stetrain 5y ago
  You add more weight by making the pack easily removable, and you need battery standardization. If every brand or every model has a different pack size, then swap stations aren’t very scalable. If you standardize pack sizes, then some cars will have less range than they could, given that they could fit a larger pack. It makes a lot of sense for the relatively small, light, and inexpensive scooters. The packs can be hand carried, and different vehicles can just have slots one, two, or three packs as needed. You aren’t trying to squeeze 300-400 miles out of a scooter by packing every inch of the frame with batteries. “Good enough” is perfectly fine for urban scooters. And I think the reality is that it just won’t be economically viable for large cars. We are quickly reaching the point where the battery packs will last the lifetime of the car, and roadtrip charging stops are falling under 20 minutes.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    > We are quickly reaching the point where the battery packs will last the lifetime of the car, Are we helping that along by lowering the lifespan of cars?
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  Having worked around propane cylinders a standardized battery pack sure seems like a no-brainer to me. It adds value to the EV because the useful lifetime is no coupled less closely to the lifetime of the battery pack. Advances in battery chemistry and charging could be rolled-out across "legacy" fleets of EVs by upgrading the charging stations and batteries in circulation. The EVs themselves remain unchanged. I feel like planned obsolescence is a "feature" of current EV's, in part by integrating the battery pack so deeply into the design. There would weight/efficiency trade-offs in standardizing on a battery pack but it's not like there isn't value returned by way of faster "recharges", increased service lifetime of the EV, and the potential to take advantage of new battery/charging technology. It also seems like rapid battery change stations would be a great "pivot" for existing gas stations and truck stops, and something they could move into slowly (convert a portion of their dispensers over to battery change rigs as the Customer base shifts from ICE to EV).
exabrial 5y ago
This is why hydrogen, while being less efficient that battery-electric, stands a chance. Convenience of 'filling up' in a minute is the killer feature of hydrogen, regardless if it's 50% as efficient as battery-electric. When said power is coming from a nuclear reactor, who cares?
- TillE 5y ago
  I remember hydrogen fuel cells getting major hype over 20 years ago, quite specifically in the year 2001. It probably started earlier than that. Since then, there's been approximately zilch in terms of commercial applications, despite numerous drawbacks inherent to lithium ion batteries. I'd bet on some novel alternative battery technology over hydrogen.
animal_spirits 5y ago
That's a genius idea, and could probably work for any mode of transportation. Scooters, bicycles, cars, trucks.
jefurii 5y ago
> A lot of drivers in China, the world’s biggest EV market, live in apartment blocks and so don’t necessarily have personal charging outlets. As an apartment dweller this makes so much sense.
tehlike 5y ago
Shameless plug - here is something we did about 10 years ago with custom drones we built at the time (when drones were not commercially available as much as they are today) We basically implemented a battery swapping station and kept a lab-scale surveillance mission running for 3+ hours for UAVs. Ground vehicles were too small to be battery swapped (and we didn't care about them enough as they wre doing more or less random moves). https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0tCZKAh4H5cdm9nRkJfTFFsTG8/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-OJ7xCwvrarnFgr8cUG-o4A https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0tCZKAh4H5cdm9nRkJfTFFsTG8...
_Adam 5y ago
If anyone is curious about how this started, Asianometry (a favorite channel of mine) has a video about how Gogoro built their network in Taiwan https://youtu.be/xZigLuaijsI https://youtu.be/xZigLuaijsI
efitz 5y ago
I wonder if the electric car market (i.e. Tesla) is ripe for disruption. I read the article and thought back to the demo [1] Tesla did years ago of automated battery swap. Tesla did it as a stunt; they publicly stated that they didn't plan to market that. As a Tesla owner, I don't want battery swap as long as I am paying for the battery as part of the price of the car. I'd be worried that my brand new max-range battery would be swapped with old worn-out batteries, and I would feel like I lost value. However, on road trips, I would much prefer a 5-10 minute battery swap over supercharging (which they no longer give me for free). The electric car experience would essentially be the same as the IC experience. If Tesla (or someone) sold me a car without a battery, and I had to buy a battery "subscription", I might go for that. I'd get a huge discount off the base price of the car, and now I wouldn't be concerned about swapping since it's not my battery. I'd do my normal day-to-day as usual, and on road trips or unexpected usage, I could swap out in minutes. I could get on board with that. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY ed: added video link
- pacetherace 5y ago
  The gas grill + propane tank model
- stetrain 5y ago
  This is happening at a pretty large scale in China with NIO brand vehicles. For it to work, as you said it is a subscription model for the battery. It requires a very large fleet of vehicles that all use a standardized battery size. That means not offering lower priced vehicles with smaller battery packs, since you're just able to swap it anyway. And it means not having higher-end larger vehicles with larger packs, since now they aren't standardized. That also means you are using more battery cells than needed for some customers, and you need more total battery packs in circulation as well. So it can work, but there are definitely tradeoffs to vehicle design, and I doubt the US market could come together to create a standard used by a large enough percentage of the fleet to be worthwhile. We have some brand segmentation in DC fast chargers, but imagine if Chevy and Ford and Honda all had different battery swap stations. And within brands, can an F-150 use the same battery pack as a Ford Escape?
danans 5y ago
With nearly limitless solar potential, and widespread use of 2 wheelers (75% and steady), switching to electric could dramatically reduce air pollution in Indian cities, which is caused in no small part by ICE 2 wheelers. https://www.statista.com/statistics/664691/share-of-two-wheelers-india/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/664691/share-of-two-whee...
ggm 5y ago
Kerning. Changes != Charges
robertwt7 5y ago
This would actually solve huge pollution problem in south east asian countries such as Indonesia. I think the ratio between motorcycles and cars are 20:1 which is insane. Hopefully this can be adopted soon
philliphaydon 5y ago
Does anyone know who pioneered battery swap scooters? I thought it started with gogoro which is everywhere in Taiwan. But the article just states it was prioneered in China and nothing more.
Mikeb85 5y ago
> Battery swapping, a relatively new technology XBox players remember... It's laughable to call it 'new' technology but it's nice that an infrastructure to make it happen for e-scooters is a thing.
Proven 5y ago
DeathArrow 5y ago
" She has to recharge three lithium-ion batteries — which give a combined range of 80 kilometers (50 miles) — in her auto rickshaw twice every five-hour shift." So you have to use three sets of batteries for 80kms. Sorry, but I would still use gas.
- plibither8 5y ago
  > Sorry, but I would still use gas. Of course, but this is very privileged stance, and you're not the target customer base either. The overall cost of those three batteries is significantly lesser than gas so as to merit their choice for batteries.
- someonenice 5y ago
  - The batteries discussed here are small and comparatively light weight (a person can remove). So consider it more as "Cells". If you want more range, replace more cells or have heavier pack. If you need the range of Tesla, then you need more battery packs in the vehicle (And increases the weight of the vehicle and its cost). - Also the vehicles mentioned here (Auto rickshaw) generally carry max 3 customers for shorter distances. Majority of the travel will be in the range of less than 10 Kms. So for less cost, she is able to serve the same customers, increasing her earning.
jawngee 5y ago
We have a similar thing in Vietnam with Vinfast scooters. However, in practice, it doesn't work very well. You rent batteries from Vinfast for your scooter and then, supposedly, can swap them out at a variety of Vinmart convenience stores or Vinfast dealers. The problem is that very few Vinmarts participate and the number of them seems to be shrinking. I've also been in a situation where they are simply out of batteries to swap. And then on top of all of that, the types/shapes of batteries differ between scooter models. That said, I love my scooter but I definitely don't bank on the battery swap stuff.
JamesAdir 5y ago
I would love to see a unified model for batteries for e-scooters. It will save so much battery waste for everyone.
- bagels 5y ago
  There are standard battery sizes/specs for small devices, it makes sense here too.
thoewriu234 5y ago
For reference India's petrol prices are at around $6/ga. The taxation on Petrol is quite high, and this is not a new phenomenon. Ergo, the switch to electric makes a lot of sense, but I'm not sure how India's grid will handle this. The grid-losses were reported to be ~30%, and India provides electricity (albeit bad quality, intermittent) for free to all Indian farmers. Unclear how this can be scaled TBH (ignoring issues with battery sourcing etc.).
- deleted 5y ago
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known 5y ago
rkagerer 5y ago
Cool! My dad who knows nothing about tech had the same idea for cars decades ago. Nice to see someone finally do it.
stemc43 5y ago
janandonly 5y ago
In my city we have electric "GO scooters" [1] and I know other towns have electric "GO Bikes" [2] as well. It's a wonderful system: If there is a bike available, you can make a 15-minute reservation for it, which givers you the time to walk to it, so it will not be snatched by someone else just before you get there. Then, after your ride you park it and the app will give you an overview of the route you made, and it will tell you the costs €. During the day, special cargo bikes ride around to swap out empty batteries for full ones. [1] https://nl.go-sharing.com/en/how-it-works/ https://nl.go-sharing.com/en/how-it-works/ [2] https://nl.go-sharing.com/en/bikesharing/ https://nl.go-sharing.com/en/bikesharing/
dmurray 5y ago
JC Decaux in Dublin has user-swappable batteries for its city bike scheme. You rent the battery, charge it at home, and use it in one of their electric-capable bikes. The battery weighs 500g and has a range of about 8km, which is more than the distance between the two furthest stations. Users who don't pay for the battery can use the electric bikes too, interchangeably with their non-electric push bikes. I thought this was a brilliant idea and implementation, but it hasn't been all that popular and there was a safety recall of the batteries at one point.
lbriner 5y ago
"Battery swapping, a relatively new technology pioneered in China" I assume they mean for EVs, since I have been swapping them in my portable devices for decades. Also, I bemoan the use of the word "technology" just to make something sound more impressive. What technology is involved in swapping batteries?

489 points by rustoo 5y ago

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unchocked 5y ago

Another reminder of how much less overhead human-scaled systems require. In this case, the battery swapping robot is you.

jscott0918 5y ago
I tried to reply to another comment that was since deleted. It said something along the lines of: >I don't get why Tesla would kill their battery-swapping while they are tackling other Hard Problems. The practicality of battery swapping decreases exponentially as size and weight scale. The cost of building a battery swapping network for western-car-sized battery systems, even once solving the engineering elements (which are manageable), are likely a non-starter. Especially if the other principle technology rival is fast-charging stations. How much added convenience is required to justify huge mechanical systems with many wear components and large maintenance costs over replacing a few charging cables every X months? Lots.
- jonsen 5y ago
  The batteri should go in a trailer. Swap the trailer. The car itself could be smaller. Luggage could go on the trailer.
  - tppiotrowski 5y ago
    Would make swapping easy but reversing with a trailer is not easy.
    - jonsen 5y ago
      Self driving trailer shouldn't be difficult.
  - bduerst 5y ago
    Trailers are non-starters for most vehicles. Better to bring the batteries to charge the cars when they need it: https://www.sparkcharge.io/ https://www.sparkcharge.io/
- toss1 5y ago
  I think the trick is not to swap the whole battery Instead design in a space for a secondary battery, maybe 40% the capacity of the main battery. Make those standard and swap-able. Now, you can use the car as ordinary in either the one-battery or two-battery mode, with the 1B config being more nimble handling with less range, and the 2B config more range. In any case, you can then enjoy rapid-swap of the standard 2nd battery, or maybe just rent one for a long trip. This also helps the automakers keep their proprietary designs on the main battery for differentiation. The 2nd battery could go in the extra trunk space or something...
  - stetrain 5y ago
    But if you are talking about faster partial-capacity refills during road trip stops, we already have that. Current batteries charge way faster from 0-50% than 50-100%. The curve really starts to fall off above 80%. I usually try to plan my stops so that I’m arriving with 5-10% and charging to 60-65%. With 250kW chargers that results in a ~15min charging stop. I don’t think the costs of development, impact to vehicle design, and infrastructure would make sense for swaps just to replace what is already a 15min charge.
    - toss1 5y ago
      True, the differential will reduce as we get even higher-amperage chargers and batteries w/higher C ratings. Yet still, being able to get 40% in 3 minutes is still better. I'd also see little reason that a properly configured trunk couldn't hold a pair of 40% battery units. Kind of like carrying jerry-cans on the back of a rover, except you can just plug them in...
      - stetrain 5y ago
        Jerry-cans don't weight 400lb
- nine_k 5y ago
  I suspect that battery hot-swapping will be practical for electric trucks. Charging them is really slow unless you use a dozen of cables. Parked time costs real money for them. Normal trucks unload, reload, and go back to the highway pretty soon, often with a different driver at the wheel. Truck yards usually already have equipment for heavy lifting, and the batteries need not be tailored to the car aesthetics and space constraints. Also, a narrower industry has a better chance to come up with a common standard.
  - tim333 5y ago
    Also it's normal with trucks to have a bunch of stuff kind of bolted on the bottom eg https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/fuel-tanker-truck-picture-id1081854182 https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/fuel-tanker-truck-pictu...
  - DerArzt 5y ago
    Tom Scott did a video[1] on this that tackles the problem of electric trucks in a different way. Instead of charging somewhere or swapping out a battery, what if we charged them while they were in a specific lane of a highway. [1] https://youtu.be/_3P_S7pL7Yg https://youtu.be/_3P_S7pL7Yg
    - everforward 5y ago
      I'm wondering how well that will scale if all/most of the trucks become electric. I would think the friction would create issues from both heat and mechanical wear.
- dundarious 5y ago
  I suspect that Tesla battery swaps were never a serious endeavor meant to be rolled out, and were instead by design limited to one location merely to be used as a massively profitable tax credit scheme: https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2014/12/30/teslas-battery-swap-stations-will-help-it-requalify-for-zev-credits-in-california/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2014/12/30/te... Doing battery swaps on such vehicles would be incredibly difficult (least of all from an engineering perspective), and my suspicion that it was more subsidy scam than genuine attempt is based on other factors.
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mulmen 5y ago

When I was in Taiwan we saw Gogoro scooters in the wild. The battery is swapped at a kiosk in a couple of minutes. Riders pay a subscription for the scooter and access to the battery kiosk. Seems like a really great option. I would love to have that in my city. We have dockless bicycles and scooters but a more capable and personal option would be awesome. I'd sign up in a heartbeat. Sadly my city planners do not seem aware of motorcycles as a transportation option. We have no laws or infrastructure to encourage them or take advantage of the benefits. At a state level we at least get to cut ferry lines, but that seems to be the only perk.

asdff 5y ago
We have subscription escooters which seem tempting to me, but the costs never pencil out. They end up being as much as the scooter within a years time or so, plus you are on the hook if some major damage or theft happens. Whats the point of that then? Might as well look for someone who will let you finance an ebike and put it on your renters or homeowners insurance for protection at that rate.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Access to credit is not as easy in India. This is just a straightforward capex to opex transformation that people can intuitively grasp. Combine that with no minimum commitment and it's transparent to them what expenses are, what income is, and what net income is. Indian users are very price-sensitive and there are extensive discussion networks running the numbers on these. They won't use these services unless it makes financial sense.
- thebean11 5y ago
  - Quick battery swapping - No maintenance or upgrade cost - Low upfront cost - Low commitment
  - asdff 5y ago
    Still cheaper to own. Maintenance with ebikes is not going to be very much. Throw lube on the chain every once in a while and have the bike shop do tires and brakes once every two years. Honestly you could buy a brand new $1200 ebike a year for the prices the services around me ask for their most basic plans which have mileage limits, and require a deposit anyhow. You can also turn around and sell your new ebike anytime, not much lock in or commitment there whereas I'm putting my blind faith in the fact that this particular subscription service will be easy to cancel (history says otherwise).

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heavenlyblue 5y ago

> Some battery developers are also opposed to standardizing power packs anytime soon because the technology is evolving rapidly and India could switch to the more efficient and environmentally friendly sodium-ion batteries from the lithium-ion ones favored by e-rickshaw makers. I do not think that is true. This is what all of them say whenever standardisation comes into the argument. However obviously they use that to lock the customers in.

myself248 5y ago
That makes no sense. With new battery tech, it's typically the chargers that absorb the complexity, the load is just a load. So the scooters should be able to handle the new batteries just fine, and it would be on the network operator to upgrade the charging kiosks accordingly. It'd be much easier to rolling-upgrade batteries in a swappable fleet than to call fixed-battery scooters into the shop and swap each one out, as well.
- L_Rahman 5y ago
  As the parent says, arguments like these are always a scheme to lock customers into proprietary standards. It's frustrating that companies still think they can get away with this.
- manquer 5y ago
  Standardization is not in chemistry or the tech itself. It is in voltage/amps and the physical dimensions we already do this with AA and AAA batteries.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  > the load is just a load You will need a standard communication protocol for storing charge/discharge history with the battery and reporting temperature. Nobody wants to swap in a battery that is exhausted and won't maintain a charge. Vendors maintaining swap pools need to know when to cull old packs.
manquer 5y ago
That is where the government/standards bodies are important. It is in everyone's collective benefit to standardize as the whole market will expand. As quoted in the article this piece is what the finance minister highlighted in her budget speech last month as being important to get in place.

asdff 5y ago

This is the game changer that could turn cities into EV dominated spaces. Imagine if every convenience store had a rack of these out front. It would be even faster to get a charged EV than even to gas up an ICE car at the pump. These are the things that start becoming possible if we let our idea of an EV move beyond a 4000lb automobile to move your maybe 200lb self. You would have to use a technician to service a car sized EV and swap out the batteries even if they dropped right out easily, just due to the to weight of them. An entire infrastructure that would have to be built just to move around 3800 unnecessary lbs anytime you wanted to go anywhere at all. Meanwhile, if people were merely happy with something the size of an e scooter, converting the population to EVs starts getting a lot simpler just in terms of the physics of it all, and simple low hanging fruit innovations like this are possible.

foolfoolz 5y ago
this idea raised $850M and failed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company)
- scythe 5y ago
  Those aren't scooters, they're cars -- and they showed up before Panasonic/Tesla attacked the battery-cost problem with roughly 100x as much capital.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Tesla also tried battery swapping several years ago but seems to have given up.
    - ryukafalz 5y ago
      Those are also cars.
    - bduerst 5y ago
      That's because Tesla owners have disposable income and tend to charge in suburban or rural homes. Swapping is aimed more at lower-income segments or delivery/maintenance services in urban areas.

amazd 5y ago

Why hasn't Tesla gotten into this sort of battery swap tech for their own cars yet?

skolos 5y ago
They did try it in 2013, but abandoned the idea: https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event
- kevlened 5y ago
  According to "Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors", it may not have been abandoned. Instead, the feature may have never been planned: "In 2013, California revised its Zero Emissions Vehicle credit system so that long-range ZEVs that were able to charge 80% in under 15 minutes earned almost twice as many credits as those that didn’t. Overnight, Tesla’s 85 kWh Model S went from earning four credits per vehicle to seven. Moreover, to earn this dramatic increase in credits, Tesla needed to prove to CARB that such rapid refueling events were possible. By demonstrating battery swap on just one vehicle, Tesla nearly doubled the ZEV credits earned by its entire fleet even if none of them actually used the swap capability."
cheeze 5y ago
Because they would need to announce it first, spend 10 years talking about how it's right around the corner but never delivering, and then maybe they could deliver it. We'll see these battery swaps right after FSD actually becomes L3.
asdff 5y ago
The scale. Tesla batteries are like 900 pounds. You now have to make a machine that can move 900 pounds of electronic hardware at mass scale. Meanwhile, if your machine only needs maybe 20lbs of batteries, suddenly that machine can be your user, and the infrastructure problem got a lot simpler and cheaper to solve. I have no clue why tesla isn't considering a low cost, <$500 EV, be it scooter or bike. I think their brand name and a price point that makes it easy for people currently on the sidelines to buy in would easily be enough to dominate this market overnight. At this point is just these companies from china you get from sketchy amazon sellers. I don't see schwinn ebikes when I drive around, they are too costly, I just see these cheapo foldable amazon ones that go by 50 different names, which I think is telling where the latent demand really lies (not in the saturated luxury ebike/escooter market which doesn't seem to move much product).

aqme28 5y ago

You see this in New York a lot too. The most popular delivery bikes use a swappable battery.

asdff 5y ago
Can you swap them at the store like your empty propane tank though?

endisneigh 5y ago

I remember in 2013 electric skateboards were all of the rage. I felt like a pariah with an electric scooter. I told people they were the future because skateboards are just too dangerous imo. I’m glad to see this happen. What I want now is an electric assist scooter, where then battery is smaller and it simply makes your manual pushes far stronger. I’m no electric engineer, but I think there’s an opportunity here. If you can minimize the resistance added by adding an electric motor you might be able to really decrease the weight of the scooter if it only propels you on push.

Johnny555 5y ago
Are scooters significantly safer? (I'm assuming you mean the small 2 wheeled scooter that looks a bit like a skateboard with a steering post, not a vespa style "mini motorcycle" scooter which is the scooter referenced in this article). I don't know how to clearly differentiate between the two types of scooter when talking about them.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  I strongly believe the addition of the handlebars makes a scooter much safer to use for an average person compared to an electric skate or longboard. I say this as someone who has owned all three. Best example of this is braking. Most electric longboards accelerate and decelerate as fast or faster than a scooter. However the laws of motion still apply. Without something to hold onto you have to actually anticipate your deceleration and lean back when decelerating - very unintuitive. When I had an electric longboard I let several people use it and saw several people fall over (fortunately they fell on their feet)
  - Johnny555 5y ago
    It just seems that the narrow 3" wheels commonly seen on scooters are way too sensitive to road imperfections. I've seen some with oversized 6" or so wheels that are wider like a mountain bike tire, those seem safer. I miss eBikes, which seem to have been pretty much replaced by eScooters, at least in my community.

Melatonic 5y ago

What would be really amazing is if we all leased the batteries but owned our vehicles (whether its scooters, cars, etc) AND there were super fast quickswap stations built into the road itself. Imagine if pulled up to a red stop light and the light knew it was going to be red for the next 30 seconds at least - your vehicle could communicate with some type of in-road underground battery swap station and then at the press of a button it could quickly reach up, remove your existing battery, and replace it with a fully charged one. Larger vehicles could even have multiple batteries - one quick swap one on the bottom and then another one elsewhere in the vehicle that was a bit more work to swap - this way you could mainly use and stress the swap battery and ideally keep swapping it out as needed on a road trip but worst case you still have a large energy reserve to fall back to.

kurthr 5y ago
Battery wear is a complex thing and it's not trivial to control or test. You could easily trade in an excellent battery and receive one that had 50% rated capacity. If you plan to wear them out very quickly, not to need the full capacity, and pay well above actual cost for the convenience of swapping, then it could work. Otherwise, you will be ripped off by the better informed charging station that hands out only their worst batteries, and sells the best trade-ins as new.
- 2fast4you 5y ago
  What if we took batteries out of commission after X cycles? There would need to be regulation on it. I wouldn't trust my manufacturer or charging network not to rip me off if they had the chance.
- jcims 5y ago
  Yeah, I think it’s clear that you would have to buy the cars off the lot with no battery included.
rootusrootus 5y ago
That sounds like a huge amount of infrastructure work on something that even in the best case will be relatively prone to failure. Meanwhile, we already have grid connections all over the place and DC fast charging is quickly approaching fast enough. For those who even have to use it, the rest just charge at home and none of these contraptions would improve their experience.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

Back when electric vehicles were the most popular automobile, battery changes were used to keep electric trucks and taxis on the road longer. Some companies were around 20 years just doing electric vehicle battery changes and service. This was called Power-as-a-Service, or PaaS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle#Power_as_a_service_and_General_Vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...

ydant 5y ago
I love how this reads like a future history of now and/or alternate timeline parody, and yet it's actually talking about the early 1900s. Fascinating, and thank you for linking.

russellbeattie 5y ago

Every single person who's ever put batteries in the back of some consumer electronics device immediately thinks, "Why don't they just make it so you can swap batteries in EVs?" I was definitely no different. I now own a few eBikes including a DIY conversion, a Sur Ron dirt bike and an Onyx emoto. The batteries are just so insanely compact and heavy, it's surreal. The Onyx has a removable 72v/48ah extended range battery which weighs 37lbs (17kg) [1], similar to the weight of the swappable batteries in the article. Let me tell you, that may not seem like a lot of weight, but it really is and it's *just so dense!* It's the equivalent of over 4 gallons of milk contained in two shoe boxes. Seriously, every time I have to move - or should I say "manhandle" - the batteries in any of the bikes, I audibly groan and make sure to lift with my legs. The batteries are all different shapes, sizes and in various boxes and all shockingly heavy for their size. The sharp edges of the Onyx battery box is a true hazard as its momentum will give your thigh a nice bruise should you swing it, or your car a nice dent. Anyways, I'm sharing all this to say: Batteries are heavy af. Really. As good as a solution this is for scooters, don't expect it to go much more beyond that. There won't be swappable batteries on your big Zero or Livewire any time soon. 1. https://www.onyxmotorbikes.com/collections/parts/products/rcr-72v-battery-41ah https://www.onyxmotorbikes.com/collections/parts/products/rc...

sickygnar 5y ago
Each scooter has 2 smaller batteries, presumably because of this problem. I own a Sur Ron too, and I don't find the stock battery weight to be an issue. ~30 lbs isn't unreasonable for the average person to lift. It's amazing they packed a dirt bike into 125 lbs. I'm able to lift it over barriers and load/unload it from my sedan, and it doesn't ride far off from a mountain bike. It's only twice the weight of a top of the line e-mountain bike, but has 7x the power output and goes further. Easy decision. It's the most fun machine I've ever owned. Zero uses 3.6 kwh modular batteries. I'm guessing they are 40-50 lbs or so which is probably around the upper limit the average person would be comfortable lifting and loading regularly. I'm sure they could be engineered to sell them in smaller sized units, but I don't think they're actually hot swappable. Keeping my eye on this one: https://starkfuture.com/en-us-US/products/stark-varg https://starkfuture.com/en-us-US/products/stark-varg

sebastianconcpt 5y ago

Bureaucrats of countries that basically depend only in selling gas, are watching in panic or?

supernova87a 5y ago
Given that it will still take 30-40 years for the bulk of gasoline consuming fleets to expire/turnover, this is ironically a problem that I bet such oil plutocrats are thinking they'll shift the burden to their children to deal with.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  Also I doubt they’re actually worried. They have enormous cash reserves. Nearly half the initial money in the Softbank Vision Fund was Saudi Arabian and that gave us Uber and many other new unicorns. If anything we should be worried about the effects of all those cash reserves starting to throw around their weight.
- sebastianconcpt 5y ago
  In any case, there are two million applications for petroleum other than gas for gas based internal combustion engines.

lkxijlewlf 5y ago

I recall, oh maybe 15 or so years ago, there was an, I believe, Israeli inventor who proposed doing this for cars. Not sure what happened to it, but I think that's something that should be looked into more. I know, most auto OEMs like to build the car around the battery (for structural soundness), but if I could just pull in and have my battery swapped while on a road trip, that would be amazing.

ihumanable 5y ago
I believe you are remembering the same thing I'm remembering, it was called BetterPlace Here's a TED Talk about it from 2009 https://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_a_new_ecosystem_for_electric_cars?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_a_new_ecosystem_for_el... They went bankrupt in 2013

kingkawn 5y ago

Now for cars/trucks and we’re in good shape

kujin88 5y ago

Not just delivery drivers, this is essential for everyone in India that uses a two-wheeler. India has always been known for its notorious costs of Petroleum and its unaffordability to anyone other than the rich. We need the EV transformation to make sure people are more economically sustainable. A handsome side-effect of it would be the dramatic drop in air pollution given the population density in India

jjude 5y ago
> India has always been known for its notorious costs of Petroleum Wouldn't the same factors like state tax, central tax, political interference affect battery charges too? Or none of them matter?
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  India taxes petroleum that much not to generate more revenue -- for they can always raise the sales tax rates -- but to reduce consumption and keep the balance of payments in check.

Waterluvian 5y ago

A very ignorant question: in order to charge faster, why can’t we just charge 200 little batteries in parallel and then operate them in series?

itake 5y ago
AFAIK, that is basically how batteries work. A battery is comprised of "cells".
- NathanielK 5y ago
  Some batteries like deWalts's flexvolt system do allow rearranging the cells. They go full series so you can run efficient 60V tools off them, but swith to partly parallel to charge on a standard 20V charger.
hgomersall 5y ago
From my limited understanding, the rate you can get charge into a battery is proportional to its capacity. You see this in the size normalised charge rating that batteries have, like 1C means it takes 1 hour to charge and 4C means it takes 15 minutes. Adding more batteries in parallel is much the same.
NathanielK 5y ago
Batteries have "C" rating which is how many times you can charge or discharge them in an hour. This magic number is closely linked to battery chemistry. A "6C" battery can be charged in 10 minutes as long as you have the power, while a 10C battery can charge in 6 minutes. You're right that sometimes charging speed is limited by the available power. Don't expect to fast charge a 130kWh Tesla at a 45kW charger or charge a 100Wh laptop on a 18W cellphone charger. In the case of these scooter batteries, you are mostly limited by the batteries C rating. Even if you watercooled them to stay at a happy temperature, you can only push the chemistry so much. Maybe if they switched to a different chemistry like Lithium Titanate they could chaemrge quicker. For now it is easier to use LiFePo batteries and just swap them out.
nine_k 5y ago

more_corn 5y ago

Do you like how that little thing in the bottom corner flips constantly? You don’t find it distracting at all do you? The person who did that should be shot.

rdxm 5y ago

pengaru 5y ago

This is the way, but I have serious concerns when it comes to abuse as surveillance tools. I'd want such vehicles to incorporate something of a Faraday cage around the battery module. The thing is inherently always powered and could easily become a mechanism for tracking locations and travel speeds real-time.

caymanjim 5y ago
This isn't going to happen because almost no one would be worried about it and there would be a cost that only benefitted a microscopic fraction of concerned people. It also feels completely arbitrary; for all you know, there are tracking devices in everything you own. It's not like you can really tell. There could be passive tracking devices in every consumer device.
- pengaru 5y ago
  Except consumer devices you own you're free to open and scrutinize if you're concerned there's such fuckery going on, nor do all consumer devices inherently accompany your travels. When it's a battery swap situation, you don't own the thing, and you bet your ass they're going to have anti-tampering measures for obvious good reasons. It's especially problematic for vehicle batteries since they're so large in terms of both physical volume and power capacity. There's plenty of margin to slide in a smartphone equivalent payload. If it's not something we can defend against it's a significant downside to the battery swapping arrangement IMNSHO.
  - alexb_ 5y ago
    I think you have to accept that privacy is dead. Period. There is absolutely no tinkering, no open source software, nothing that will prevent you from being tracked. Realize you cannot change this, and accept what you cannot change.
    - pengaru 5y ago
      Never.

yodelshady 5y ago

More practical zero-emission scooters in India could be, as I understand it, quite something. I complain enough about exhaust fumes in Western cities.

scalablenotions 5y ago

I've thought for a long time that battery swapping is the only way to go for all electric vehicles. A subscription or pay-as-you-go service for battery changing is practical and would make battery replacements costing tens of thousands of dollars a non-thing. I know some batteries are heavy, but if stations can provide petroleum pumps, then they can provide mechanized battery exchange infrastructure, right? Bring on the ISO standards for vehicle batteries! Does anyone have any reason why this wouldn't work? Perhaps parts being stolen from the rental batteries before they're returned or some such?

stetrain 5y ago
You add more weight by making the pack easily removable, and you need battery standardization. If every brand or every model has a different pack size, then swap stations aren’t very scalable. If you standardize pack sizes, then some cars will have less range than they could, given that they could fit a larger pack. It makes a lot of sense for the relatively small, light, and inexpensive scooters. The packs can be hand carried, and different vehicles can just have slots one, two, or three packs as needed. You aren’t trying to squeeze 300-400 miles out of a scooter by packing every inch of the frame with batteries. “Good enough” is perfectly fine for urban scooters. And I think the reality is that it just won’t be economically viable for large cars. We are quickly reaching the point where the battery packs will last the lifetime of the car, and roadtrip charging stops are falling under 20 minutes.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > We are quickly reaching the point where the battery packs will last the lifetime of the car, Are we helping that along by lowering the lifespan of cars?
EvanAnderson 5y ago
Having worked around propane cylinders a standardized battery pack sure seems like a no-brainer to me. It adds value to the EV because the useful lifetime is no coupled less closely to the lifetime of the battery pack. Advances in battery chemistry and charging could be rolled-out across "legacy" fleets of EVs by upgrading the charging stations and batteries in circulation. The EVs themselves remain unchanged. I feel like planned obsolescence is a "feature" of current EV's, in part by integrating the battery pack so deeply into the design. There would weight/efficiency trade-offs in standardizing on a battery pack but it's not like there isn't value returned by way of faster "recharges", increased service lifetime of the EV, and the potential to take advantage of new battery/charging technology. It also seems like rapid battery change stations would be a great "pivot" for existing gas stations and truck stops, and something they could move into slowly (convert a portion of their dispensers over to battery change rigs as the Customer base shifts from ICE to EV).

exabrial 5y ago

This is why hydrogen, while being less efficient that battery-electric, stands a chance. Convenience of 'filling up' in a minute is the killer feature of hydrogen, regardless if it's 50% as efficient as battery-electric. When said power is coming from a nuclear reactor, who cares?

TillE 5y ago
I remember hydrogen fuel cells getting major hype over 20 years ago, quite specifically in the year 2001. It probably started earlier than that. Since then, there's been approximately zilch in terms of commercial applications, despite numerous drawbacks inherent to lithium ion batteries. I'd bet on some novel alternative battery technology over hydrogen.

animal_spirits 5y ago

That's a genius idea, and could probably work for any mode of transportation. Scooters, bicycles, cars, trucks.

jefurii 5y ago

> A lot of drivers in China, the world’s biggest EV market, live in apartment blocks and so don’t necessarily have personal charging outlets. As an apartment dweller this makes so much sense.

tehlike 5y ago

Shameless plug - here is something we did about 10 years ago with custom drones we built at the time (when drones were not commercially available as much as they are today) We basically implemented a battery swapping station and kept a lab-scale surveillance mission running for 3+ hours for UAVs. Ground vehicles were too small to be battery swapped (and we didn't care about them enough as they wre doing more or less random moves). https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0tCZKAh4H5cdm9nRkJfTFFsTG8/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-OJ7xCwvrarnFgr8cUG-o4A https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0tCZKAh4H5cdm9nRkJfTFFsTG8...

_Adam 5y ago

If anyone is curious about how this started, Asianometry (a favorite channel of mine) has a video about how Gogoro built their network in Taiwan https://youtu.be/xZigLuaijsI https://youtu.be/xZigLuaijsI

efitz 5y ago

I wonder if the electric car market (i.e. Tesla) is ripe for disruption. I read the article and thought back to the demo [1] Tesla did years ago of automated battery swap. Tesla did it as a stunt; they publicly stated that they didn't plan to market that. As a Tesla owner, I don't want battery swap as long as I am paying for the battery as part of the price of the car. I'd be worried that my brand new max-range battery would be swapped with old worn-out batteries, and I would feel like I lost value. However, on road trips, I would much prefer a 5-10 minute battery swap over supercharging (which they no longer give me for free). The electric car experience would essentially be the same as the IC experience. If Tesla (or someone) sold me a car without a battery, and I had to buy a battery "subscription", I might go for that. I'd get a huge discount off the base price of the car, and now I wouldn't be concerned about swapping since it's not my battery. I'd do my normal day-to-day as usual, and on road trips or unexpected usage, I could swap out in minutes. I could get on board with that. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY ed: added video link

pacetherace 5y ago
The gas grill + propane tank model
stetrain 5y ago
This is happening at a pretty large scale in China with NIO brand vehicles. For it to work, as you said it is a subscription model for the battery. It requires a very large fleet of vehicles that all use a standardized battery size. That means not offering lower priced vehicles with smaller battery packs, since you're just able to swap it anyway. And it means not having higher-end larger vehicles with larger packs, since now they aren't standardized. That also means you are using more battery cells than needed for some customers, and you need more total battery packs in circulation as well. So it can work, but there are definitely tradeoffs to vehicle design, and I doubt the US market could come together to create a standard used by a large enough percentage of the fleet to be worthwhile. We have some brand segmentation in DC fast chargers, but imagine if Chevy and Ford and Honda all had different battery swap stations. And within brands, can an F-150 use the same battery pack as a Ford Escape?

danans 5y ago

With nearly limitless solar potential, and widespread use of 2 wheelers (75% and steady), switching to electric could dramatically reduce air pollution in Indian cities, which is caused in no small part by ICE 2 wheelers. https://www.statista.com/statistics/664691/share-of-two-wheelers-india/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/664691/share-of-two-whee...

ggm 5y ago

Kerning. Changes != Charges

robertwt7 5y ago

This would actually solve huge pollution problem in south east asian countries such as Indonesia. I think the ratio between motorcycles and cars are 20:1 which is insane. Hopefully this can be adopted soon

philliphaydon 5y ago

Does anyone know who pioneered battery swap scooters? I thought it started with gogoro which is everywhere in Taiwan. But the article just states it was prioneered in China and nothing more.

Mikeb85 5y ago

> Battery swapping, a relatively new technology XBox players remember... It's laughable to call it 'new' technology but it's nice that an infrastructure to make it happen for e-scooters is a thing.

Proven 5y ago

DeathArrow 5y ago

" She has to recharge three lithium-ion batteries — which give a combined range of 80 kilometers (50 miles) — in her auto rickshaw twice every five-hour shift." So you have to use three sets of batteries for 80kms. Sorry, but I would still use gas.

plibither8 5y ago
> Sorry, but I would still use gas. Of course, but this is very privileged stance, and you're not the target customer base either. The overall cost of those three batteries is significantly lesser than gas so as to merit their choice for batteries.
someonenice 5y ago
- The batteries discussed here are small and comparatively light weight (a person can remove). So consider it more as "Cells". If you want more range, replace more cells or have heavier pack. If you need the range of Tesla, then you need more battery packs in the vehicle (And increases the weight of the vehicle and its cost). - Also the vehicles mentioned here (Auto rickshaw) generally carry max 3 customers for shorter distances. Majority of the travel will be in the range of less than 10 Kms. So for less cost, she is able to serve the same customers, increasing her earning.

jawngee 5y ago

We have a similar thing in Vietnam with Vinfast scooters. However, in practice, it doesn't work very well. You rent batteries from Vinfast for your scooter and then, supposedly, can swap them out at a variety of Vinmart convenience stores or Vinfast dealers. The problem is that very few Vinmarts participate and the number of them seems to be shrinking. I've also been in a situation where they are simply out of batteries to swap. And then on top of all of that, the types/shapes of batteries differ between scooter models. That said, I love my scooter but I definitely don't bank on the battery swap stuff.

JamesAdir 5y ago

I would love to see a unified model for batteries for e-scooters. It will save so much battery waste for everyone.

bagels 5y ago
There are standard battery sizes/specs for small devices, it makes sense here too.

thoewriu234 5y ago

For reference India's petrol prices are at around $6/ga. The taxation on Petrol is quite high, and this is not a new phenomenon. Ergo, the switch to electric makes a lot of sense, but I'm not sure how India's grid will handle this. The grid-losses were reported to be ~30%, and India provides electricity (albeit bad quality, intermittent) for free to all Indian farmers. Unclear how this can be scaled TBH (ignoring issues with battery sourcing etc.).

deleted 5y ago
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known 5y ago

rkagerer 5y ago

Cool! My dad who knows nothing about tech had the same idea for cars decades ago. Nice to see someone finally do it.

stemc43 5y ago

janandonly 5y ago

In my city we have electric "GO scooters" [1] and I know other towns have electric "GO Bikes" [2] as well. It's a wonderful system: If there is a bike available, you can make a 15-minute reservation for it, which givers you the time to walk to it, so it will not be snatched by someone else just before you get there. Then, after your ride you park it and the app will give you an overview of the route you made, and it will tell you the costs €. During the day, special cargo bikes ride around to swap out empty batteries for full ones. [1] https://nl.go-sharing.com/en/how-it-works/ https://nl.go-sharing.com/en/how-it-works/ [2] https://nl.go-sharing.com/en/bikesharing/ https://nl.go-sharing.com/en/bikesharing/

dmurray 5y ago

JC Decaux in Dublin has user-swappable batteries for its city bike scheme. You rent the battery, charge it at home, and use it in one of their electric-capable bikes. The battery weighs 500g and has a range of about 8km, which is more than the distance between the two furthest stations. Users who don't pay for the battery can use the electric bikes too, interchangeably with their non-electric push bikes. I thought this was a brilliant idea and implementation, but it hasn't been all that popular and there was a safety recall of the batteries at one point.

lbriner 5y ago

"Battery swapping, a relatively new technology pioneered in China" I assume they mean for EVs, since I have been swapping them in my portable devices for decades. Also, I bemoan the use of the word "technology" just to make something sound more impressive. What technology is involved in swapping batteries?