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To be a bit reductive here, it needs to work for everybody for it to be a viable fossil fuel car alternative. You can't have 1% of people for whom it doesn't wo
by _8j50 4y ago
To be a bit reductive here, it needs to work for everybody for it to be a viable fossil fuel car alternative. You can't have 1% of people for whom it doesn't work for because for 300M people that is 3M people. Often the people for whom it doesn't work for are the poorest and most vulnerable as well. Imagine taking off the cost of battery ownership and having battery leases subsidized, now you electric cars become even more affordable. Battery swapping from an infrastructure perspective is not mutually exclusive to charging either. You can charge cars with swappable batteries at charging stations. You just need the government to force standardization of both charging and swapping connections. Capitalism will take care of where you have swapping and charging stations. Of course you can force people to buy hybrids as well but they are not well liked due to difficulty of repairing them and that still means fossil fuels.
If fast charging car batteries in less than 5min can be done in 15 years and hybrids are acceptable maybe that is the way to go but even then as a consumer a 20second swap is better than a 5 minute charge. Ignoring what consumers want is always a critical mistake.
I have no doubt fossil fuel cars will go away, the question is do you want them to go away in 10 years, 20 years or 30 years. The sooner they go away the better it is for climate change right? If so, long term "holistic" engineering has no place here. Swappable+chargable battery designs are best imo.