4 ms·

Will swapping out electric car batteries catch on?

5 points by RickJWagner 4y ago

mwint 4y ago
> “There's no battery degradation. You always get a healthy battery. Simple economics says that’s probably not (going to be) true. But at a broader level, I don’t think the tradeoffs are going to be worth it to most people: 1. For most people, most driving is well inside the (range/2)-radius circle, where home charging is sufficient 2. High speed charging is already very competitive with gas cars, and only getting better. Yes, ICE cars can make a trip faster, but in real life you’ve gotta eat and pee sometime and supercharging 10-80% is pretty quick. 3. There are necessary tradeoffs to making a large component of a car replaceable, doubly so autonomously replaceable. Now your connectors have to be hot-swappable, with all the safety hardware that goes with that. Fasteners have to be rated for hundreds of cycles rather than dozens. Battery and car frames must be structurally sound without eachother. All of these increase weight, decrease energy density, and decrease that circle of everyday-driving range. It may make sense if you’re doing long trips regularly. Even so, I think I’d rather plug a car in and walk away for a few minutes than have a robot tinkering with structural parts every few hundred miles.
- ggm 4y ago
  I think your economic analysis is faulty. This isn't gresham's law because the intermediary exists to remove duff batteries. The corollary here is that the battery exchanger has to be audited to remove the risk of keeping crap batteries in circulation. Actually, the bank always existed to remove the bad tokens, the problem was bad oversight of the bank and the temptation to deliberately debase the coinage. Where is the motivation for battery lease models to debase the battery coinage (strength/longevity/health)? You'd do it, if you needed more batteries and could accept shorter life, but normally, you'd wind up segmenting into "old" and "new" batteries, two pricepoints, expose the situation surely? Gresham was about fully substitutable tokens where the cost to repurpose the gold, was trivial to zero, and the disconnect between face value and metal value went bananas. Do you think the face value of a battery will disconnect with the deposit value? Battery hoarding is going to be a wierd niche. Batteries are highly complex things. Cracking them open to extract the valuables? Somehow re-purposing the high-charge ones? Maybe in Venezuela, but in the west, I think the primary role of a battery remains to be in a machine, ready to put into a hotswap vehicle. Plus, they have an ID and you have stake at play in the system: A battery is $10k class deposit to be in the game. You want to play with the marginal increase in value of THIS battery over THAT battery to risk $10k? Basically, I take exactly the opposite view: The most likely outcome is better, fairer access to good batteries and a drive to make batteries last longer. Battery Hoarders will be identified rapidly. The more I read what I wrote, the more I think I'm being naïve and you're right, but I'll leave the accusatory element and stand the correction.
- clouddrover 4y ago
  > For most people, most driving is well inside the (range/2)-radius circle, where home charging is sufficient Cars that swap their batteries can also charge the battery. It's not exclusively swapping or charging, it's both swapping and charging. This gives you the option to right size the battery for your driving. If in the normal case you're not driving very far then you can swap in a small battery and charge that at home. If you're going on a road trip then you can swap in a larger battery and get the benefit of that. NIO supports multiple battery sizes: https://insideevs.com/news/537644/nio-4-million-battery-swaps/ https://insideevs.com/news/537644/nio-4-million-battery-swap... And maybe a 150 kWh battery in future: https://insideevs.com/news/465188/nio-150-kwh-solid-state-batteries-2022/ https://insideevs.com/news/465188/nio-150-kwh-solid-state-ba...
rektide 4y ago
Cars? No. Faster charging: yes. We just heard of a 360kW charger[1]. For a 100kWh pack that would be a 3.6C charge rate: if sustained that would be a 16m charge. Right now no cars can charge at that rate. For cars it just doesnt make sense. I'd love to see a like 30-60kW expansion bay pack standardized, something supplemental-ish to an integrated pack. But I doubt it. Packs are an interesting mix of skateboard flat packs & better integrated packs that fill in the space, that contour in to available space. Trying to imagine making a common interoperable swappable sognificantly sized standard is hard hard hard, but perhaps some subset could be standardized to good effect. But pverall, I think there's a huge vast & colossal innovation target, it's just way smaller. Scooters bikes & otger devices- I fully believe a 1-6kWh standard for swappable systems makes hella hella sense. Gogoro plus. There's been a couple other notable battery alliances (Yamaha and...) that have hella promise. That every lawn tool, power tool & other device also defines it's own proprietary system is fallen & shit: again there should be standards, for general consumer sake, if less for ability to interchangably charge (under half a kWh who cares, atm). But scaling up, finding common means: it's to the short term disadvantage of companies, but the long term advantage of end users. And i think, longer term, a less controlled & more open market is a huge win. For far smaer.batyery sizes than cars, as discussed & focused upon here. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31405169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31405169
webmobdev 4y ago
Yes. Since you don't buy the battery the car is a lot cheaper to own (by around $9000, according to the article!) and it reduces the total cost of ownership as that's one less (very expensive) part that you needn't worry about. You don't have to wait for more than 5 - 10 minutes for the battery to be swapped, compared to waiting for 30-40 minutes with "fast" charging. And your battery tech will be automatically updated in the future. In effect, it's like filling petrol / diesel and takes about the same time.

5 points by RickJWagner 4y ago

> “There's no battery degradation. You always get a healthy battery. Simple economics says that’s probably not (going to be) true. But at a broader level, I don’t think the tradeoffs are going to be worth it to most people: 1. For most people, most driving is well inside the (range/2)-radius circle, where home charging is sufficient 2. High speed charging is already very competitive with gas cars, and only getting better. Yes, ICE cars can make a trip faster, but in real life you’ve gotta eat and pee sometime and supercharging 10-80% is pretty quick. 3. There are necessary tradeoffs to making a large component of a car replaceable, doubly so autonomously replaceable. Now your connectors have to be hot-swappable, with all the safety hardware that goes with that. Fasteners have to be rated for hundreds of cycles rather than dozens. Battery and car frames must be structurally sound without eachother. All of these increase weight, decrease energy density, and decrease that circle of everyday-driving range. It may make sense if you’re doing long trips regularly. Even so, I think I’d rather plug a car in and walk away for a few minutes than have a robot tinkering with structural parts every few hundred miles.

ggm 4y ago
I think your economic analysis is faulty. This isn't gresham's law because the intermediary exists to remove duff batteries. The corollary here is that the battery exchanger has to be audited to remove the risk of keeping crap batteries in circulation. Actually, the bank always existed to remove the bad tokens, the problem was bad oversight of the bank and the temptation to deliberately debase the coinage. Where is the motivation for battery lease models to debase the battery coinage (strength/longevity/health)? You'd do it, if you needed more batteries and could accept shorter life, but normally, you'd wind up segmenting into "old" and "new" batteries, two pricepoints, expose the situation surely? Gresham was about fully substitutable tokens where the cost to repurpose the gold, was trivial to zero, and the disconnect between face value and metal value went bananas. Do you think the face value of a battery will disconnect with the deposit value? Battery hoarding is going to be a wierd niche. Batteries are highly complex things. Cracking them open to extract the valuables? Somehow re-purposing the high-charge ones? Maybe in Venezuela, but in the west, I think the primary role of a battery remains to be in a machine, ready to put into a hotswap vehicle. Plus, they have an ID and you have stake at play in the system: A battery is $10k class deposit to be in the game. You want to play with the marginal increase in value of THIS battery over THAT battery to risk $10k? Basically, I take exactly the opposite view: The most likely outcome is better, fairer access to good batteries and a drive to make batteries last longer. Battery Hoarders will be identified rapidly. The more I read what I wrote, the more I think I'm being naïve and you're right, but I'll leave the accusatory element and stand the correction.
clouddrover 4y ago
> For most people, most driving is well inside the (range/2)-radius circle, where home charging is sufficient Cars that swap their batteries can also charge the battery. It's not exclusively swapping or charging, it's both swapping and charging. This gives you the option to right size the battery for your driving. If in the normal case you're not driving very far then you can swap in a small battery and charge that at home. If you're going on a road trip then you can swap in a larger battery and get the benefit of that. NIO supports multiple battery sizes: https://insideevs.com/news/537644/nio-4-million-battery-swaps/ https://insideevs.com/news/537644/nio-4-million-battery-swap... And maybe a 150 kWh battery in future: https://insideevs.com/news/465188/nio-150-kwh-solid-state-batteries-2022/ https://insideevs.com/news/465188/nio-150-kwh-solid-state-ba...

rektide 4y ago

Cars? No. Faster charging: yes. We just heard of a 360kW charger[1]. For a 100kWh pack that would be a 3.6C charge rate: if sustained that would be a 16m charge. Right now no cars can charge at that rate. For cars it just doesnt make sense. I'd love to see a like 30-60kW expansion bay pack standardized, something supplemental-ish to an integrated pack. But I doubt it. Packs are an interesting mix of skateboard flat packs & better integrated packs that fill in the space, that contour in to available space. Trying to imagine making a common interoperable swappable sognificantly sized standard is hard hard hard, but perhaps some subset could be standardized to good effect. But pverall, I think there's a huge vast & colossal innovation target, it's just way smaller. Scooters bikes & otger devices- I fully believe a 1-6kWh standard for swappable systems makes hella hella sense. Gogoro plus. There's been a couple other notable battery alliances (Yamaha and...) that have hella promise. That every lawn tool, power tool & other device also defines it's own proprietary system is fallen & shit: again there should be standards, for general consumer sake, if less for ability to interchangably charge (under half a kWh who cares, atm). But scaling up, finding common means: it's to the short term disadvantage of companies, but the long term advantage of end users. And i think, longer term, a less controlled & more open market is a huge win. For far smaer.batyery sizes than cars, as discussed & focused upon here. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31405169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31405169

webmobdev 4y ago

Yes. Since you don't buy the battery the car is a lot cheaper to own (by around $9000, according to the article!) and it reduces the total cost of ownership as that's one less (very expensive) part that you needn't worry about. You don't have to wait for more than 5 - 10 minutes for the battery to be swapped, compared to waiting for 30-40 minutes with "fast" charging. And your battery tech will be automatically updated in the future. In effect, it's like filling petrol / diesel and takes about the same time.