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This is assuming that electrical cars are "filled up" the same way as gas cars are. This is very far away from being as fast and convenient as filling up a gas

This is assuming that electrical cars are "filled up" the same way as gas cars are. This is very far away from being as fast and convenient as filling up a gas tank in 1-2 minutes. I like the model that you swap your low charge battery with a fully charged one. That would require some new technology.

sgt 2y ago
In Norway, people charge at home. EV stations are mainly for roadtrips. The gas station comparison does not make sense.
- xenospn 2y ago
  I’m actually confused about Norway, you see a lot of electric cars parked down the street but no one has a garage in Norway (in the city, at least), and I haven’t seen many cars actually plugged in. Where does everyone charge?
  - pornel 2y ago
    In the UK supermarkets have fast chargers. You park, plug in, go shopping, return to a fully charged car (similarly at pubs, cafes, gyms, etc.) BEVs don't have to be plugged in like cellphones. In city driving one full charge can suffice for a whole week of commuting and errands.
    - t0mas88 2y ago
      How is the price for fast chargers in the UK? In the Netherlands it's crazy, something like 3-4x the price of home charging and close to 10x what you would "loose" on using your own solar power instead of selling it to the grid. For most hybrids using a fast charger is over 2x more expensive per mile than using petrol.
  - sgt 2y ago
    Most people live outside the cities, so the more common scenario is having a house and a garage. If you live in an apartment building, there might be charging points. People parked on the street in the city streets have fewer options.
- ein0p 2y ago
  In the US as well. I have to admit however that I didn’t think of this as that much of a big deal before we bought a Tesla. The FUD about charging that’s out there is really effective. But then it turned out I can even charge it out of a common household outlet and there’s really no problem at all until you need to drive 300+ miles
watt 2y ago
Forget it. Folks have been thinking about this battery swap thing for years and years, and it is not going to happen. However what I like about NIO model is that you might be able to swap out a smaller, lighter city-driving oriented battery to a large 100kWh+ one when you go on a road trip. And then swap it back when you're back home.
- rob74 2y ago
  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_%28company%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_%28company%29 What I however still don't understand is why this isn't at least offered in niches where it would make even more sense, like electric buses. If you have a fleet of these buses, minimizing the charging downtime should be a priority, right? Plus, in a bus it should be easier to find a suitable place for the battery pack where it can be accessed easily.
  - doctor_eval 2y ago
    I happen to work in the bus industry and the way we work, at least, is the buses are all out working by day and in the depot at night - there’s a lot less demand for bus ops during the night. For a variety of reasons, you don’t really want to have to fill up on either diesel or electrons while away from the depot, if you can avoid it. So what you really want from electrification is a battery that lasts all day. So battery swapping doesn’t make a lot of sense in this regard since it would require multiple returns to depot during the day, or new swapping depots being built, or relying on someone else’s infrastructure. Of course all of this is possible but not ideal. Tangentially, the overnight charging model introduces other problems - a large depot might have 100+ buses, all of which are charging simultaneously in one place. That’s a lot of electrons, and it is causing us a lot of trouble planning for it. And since the buses are charging at night, we can’t use solar to offset battery storage and in any case it’s not reliable enough - the buses have to run regardless of weather - setting aside the obvious commercial issues, in many cases it’s a safety issue too (eg school buses). This is why H2 fuel cells have been viewed as potentially a better solution to BEVs in our industry, but H2 has its own (plentiful) problems and we appear to be shifting focus back to BEVs now and using H2 for energy storage and transport… that’s another story.
vel0city 2y ago
You know what's really convenient? Never having to stop to fuel up for something like 90% of the miles I drive. I spend way more time fueling my ICE than my EV. It's a pain to have to go out of my way to a fueling station. It's far less convenient than just plugging in every few days at home or at the office.
audunw 2y ago
> and convenient as filling up a gas tank in 1-2 minutes. But you can’t just walk away from a gasoline car when it’s filling. And gas stations aren’t very attractive destination to do much of anything. Where I’m from almost every roadside McDonalds has fast charging. And almost every road trip I’ve taken where I’ve had to fast charge we’ve taken the kids to a McDonalds for a short break and finished charging long before we were finished eating and doing bathroom breaks. I haven’t really owned an ICE. (Used my parents cars quite a lot though). Our first car was EV 9 years ago. But I’m fairly sure ICE would be significantly less convenient for us than EV. Especially with the newer one we recently got that has a more reasonable battery size, which we’ve never even had to fast charge once. Even on road trips. We never go anywhere we don’t need/want to go anyway. So having to go to a gas station just to fill the car with gas would be a significant inconvenience. You wouldn’t want a phone that you’d have to take to a phone station to fill with phone juice would you? Even if it lasted longer on a fill-up (say two weeks)
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  Of course you can walk away from a gas car while it's filling. Where'd you get that idea?
  - ghaff 2y ago
    The signs at pretty much every gas pump in America? Plus it just seems like a stupid idea given that I have far less than 100% confidence in automatic cutoffs especially given the potentially serious consequences of a failure.
    - jjav 2y ago
      > The signs at pretty much every gas pump in America? I have to say I've never seen such a sign. Admittedly I don't read every sign on the pump so who knows. I nearly always walk inside to the store while the tank fills.
  - orev 2y ago
    There are number of states in the US where this isn’t allowed, and the latch that holds the fill trigger open has been removed from the handle. Sure you can walk away, but the tank won’t keep filling.
rootusrootus 2y ago
> filling up a gas tank in 1-2 minutes It doesn't help the comparison to lie about the time. If you have a smaller gas tank and the pump can fill at it's maximum speed, you can fill in 1-2 minutes from the moment you put the nozzle in. As a practical matter, you're rarely getting in and out of a gas station in under 5 minutes, and only then if it's completely empty when you arrive. When I'm filling up our pickup, it takes a good bit of time -- the pump rarely runs at full speed or the vapor pressure sensor trips, the tank is pretty big, and there's usually a few cars in line in front of me. 15-20 minutes is a lot closer to realistic. Most EVs only need a "fill up" on a road trip, and AAA puts the average road trip refueling stop at 15 minutes. The technology in place today is adequate to do the same with EVs, and it only gets better every year. Battery swapping was a cute idea for a while but kinda pointless now. Of course, all of this talk about time completely ignores that an EV driver spends quite a lot less time every year refueling their vehicle. 10 seconds to plug in when you arrive home, full every morning. Imagine trying to sell someone on the idea of going the other direction "Hey, buy this fancy car, it's great, but you have to take it to a dedicated location periodically just to keep it fueled up."
- ItsBob 2y ago
  > 15-20 minutes is a lot closer to realistic. Blimey! Lord only knows where you live that it can take that long. I can count on one hand the number of times it's taken anything like 10 minutes over the years and they were during crises! In reality, even if I have to wait for a free pump, my car is at 100% range in 5 mins when I pay at the pump by using my credit card. I want my car filled to the brim any time I go to the petrol station (gas station to our friends over in the colonies :D). That's just how I roll. And I know many others who are the same. I also know some that just put in £10-£15 at a time, mainly due to finance constraints tbh. To "fill" an electric car to 100% isn't feasible in 2 hours, let alone 5 mins. Even if it took just 20 minutes to "fill" it is still shit compared to my current diesel. As a consumer, if I have to join a queue for hours [0] then to hell with that! However, with my diesel, it's literally 5 minutes once a week and I'm full up. In addition, I run my car until 50 - 100 miles left in the tank and I don't get bent out of shape when the light comes on at < 50 miles. In an EV I'd shit bricks if that happened. I'd have to change my behaviour to many smaller topups. The simple fact is that we have a chicken and egg scenario with EV's vs charging points/charging time at this time and I don't see it changing any time soon. Anecdote: I just remember something I saw 3 weeks ago. I was in a town near where I live. I parked up to walk to a shop about 2 mins away and I walked past a girl at a charging station staring at the big charger thingy while on her phone. I couldn't hear what she was saying but I could see that the charging flap on her car was open. I was in the shop for about 10 minutes and came back the same way and she was still there, this time poking away at her phone and the cable still wasn't in her car but the charging flap was still open. No idea what the problem was but it caught my attention. Anyway, just thought I'd share. Edit: Something else to mention - Many people round where I live are in Victorian flats with almost no parking nearby. It's not umcommon to park streets away from where you actually live... they'll not buy electric for the most part. [0] - https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/video-massive-line-of-electric-vehicles-wait-to-charge-after-11-pm/ar-AA1jEvfR https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/video-massive-line-of-e...
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
Yeah, my first thought on seeing the title question was "well, they charge slower than you can refill gas, so obviously you need more chargers than existing gas stations, though of course most people don't have gas stations at home so it's a kind of messy comparison".
grecy 2y ago
> as fast and convenient as filling up a gas tank in 1-2 minutes. I recently drove to the airport in a bit of a rush in a small 4-cylinder car. Drove straight up to pump that was basically touching the road I was on, tapped credit card, authorized for $100 and opened cap at same time. Stuffed the pump in and held it at max flow. 45l of gas later, cap back on, pump away and moving again. I don’t think it would be possible to be faster. Total time stopped: 7 minutes. I'd love to know how much range you're adding to your ICE vehicle after pumping gas for 1-2 minutes.
- pornel 2y ago
  Fast DC chargers add 7 to 13 miles of range per minute (charging is fastest when the battery is almost empty). Competent charging networks also accept contactless cards or even automatically bill your account when you plug in.
- vel0city 2y ago
  All these people saying it takes a minute or two to get gas haven't paid attention to how long they actually spend entering the gas station, driving to the pump, getting out, negotiating payment, choosing fuel type, opening your tank, pumping, putting the handle back, hitting no on the receipt option, getting back in the car, leaving the pump, and entering traffic. Sometimes it'll take a minute just waiting for traffic to clear to pull out! And then it's also assuming there is a gas station on your current route, and that it's one with a decent price and not more expensive than other stations around. A lot of the trips I take don't go past a decently priced gas station, the few I routinely do pass are often 5-6¢/gal more than others. At 22 gallons that's over a dollar more. And also assuming you never get gas at a place like Sam's Club or Costco, which offer some big discounts but often have lines.
dymk 2y ago
I can tell you from experience that leaving my EV to charge in my driveway overnight is way, way more convenient than stopping for gas (and paying a lot more for it). I drive a lot, and I’ve ran into a situation only once where I had to find a charging station away from home. It just doesn’t happen nearly as often as people worry.
- bluedino 2y ago
  If you forget to charge overnight you're stuck waiting. If you forget to get gas, you can just go get gas and be on your way in a few minutes
  - pornel 2y ago
    • BEVs need to be plugged in about once a week (for a median US commute). If you forget one day, you can plug in another day, or day after. • DC fast chargers can add 100 miles of range in 10 minutes.
- t0mas88 2y ago
  > and paying a lot more for it Do you have a low electricity rate? A petrol car would use around 0.03 gallons per mile (33 mpg). At $ 4 per gallon that's $ 0.12 per mile. A Tesla model S does around 0.3 kWh per mile. So to get to the same cost per mile your electricity price would have to be below $ 0.40 per kwh. In a lot of places electricity isn't (much) below $ 0.40 per kwh.
  - Thrymr 2y ago
    Nearly everywhere in the US is below $0.40/kWh. The average nationwide is $0.17/kWh. Only a handful of cities in California and Hawaii are over $0.40 (those places have the highest gas prices too). Most people will pay less than half as much to charge at home. ref: https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices_selectedareas_table.htm https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
  - newZWhoDis 2y ago
    My overnight rate is $0.02/kwh $0.40/kwh is an absurd embarrassment for the local government. Move or vote them out.
MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
I've heard that the issues with the "swap the battery" model are: 1. The battery is one of the most expensive parts of the car. People won't want to swap it for some random battery, and you risk an illicit market for swapped out "good" batteries. Sure, if swapping is very common, then batteries are fungible and maybe it all evens out. I doubt it, though. 2. Batteries are large, heavy, and not necessarily centrally placed. You'd need some sort of winch/harness/crane system, which is dangerous and expensive to automate. Even if you figure it out, swappable batteries might be a negative design constraint for electric cars (e.g. "what if we want to put battery cells throughout the body of the car?"). I also like the model, but how could it be made to work well?
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  This assumes the car has one big battery. What if it has a number of smaller ones that can easily be swapped out by one person? Or maybe one big unswappable battery, and 1-3 smaller swappable ones?
- eichin 2y ago
  NIO just did the expensive-to-automate part, it's not just theory... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w (Tom Scott demo/walkthrough.) Press release from April says https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/05/chinas-nio-to-expand-battery-swap-services-to-gain-ev-infra-edge-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/05/chinas-nio-to-expand-battery... "it completed 40 million battery swaps" across 2300 stations. It still has to scale up from there and get traction from other car vendors beyond paper-only "partnerships"... but they've gotten vastly farther than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) did before it failed 10 years ago.
- jopsen 2y ago
  > 1. The battery is one of the most expensive parts of the car. Obviously, a swappable battery is something you rent. Car manufacturers would love to charge us a monthly fee. They are currently trying all sorts of schemes to do it. But a swappable battery might justify a monthly fee.

sgt 2y ago

In Norway, people charge at home. EV stations are mainly for roadtrips. The gas station comparison does not make sense.

xenospn 2y ago
I’m actually confused about Norway, you see a lot of electric cars parked down the street but no one has a garage in Norway (in the city, at least), and I haven’t seen many cars actually plugged in. Where does everyone charge?
- pornel 2y ago
  In the UK supermarkets have fast chargers. You park, plug in, go shopping, return to a fully charged car (similarly at pubs, cafes, gyms, etc.) BEVs don't have to be plugged in like cellphones. In city driving one full charge can suffice for a whole week of commuting and errands.
  - t0mas88 2y ago
    How is the price for fast chargers in the UK? In the Netherlands it's crazy, something like 3-4x the price of home charging and close to 10x what you would "loose" on using your own solar power instead of selling it to the grid. For most hybrids using a fast charger is over 2x more expensive per mile than using petrol.
- sgt 2y ago
  Most people live outside the cities, so the more common scenario is having a house and a garage. If you live in an apartment building, there might be charging points. People parked on the street in the city streets have fewer options.
ein0p 2y ago
In the US as well. I have to admit however that I didn’t think of this as that much of a big deal before we bought a Tesla. The FUD about charging that’s out there is really effective. But then it turned out I can even charge it out of a common household outlet and there’s really no problem at all until you need to drive 300+ miles

watt 2y ago

Forget it. Folks have been thinking about this battery swap thing for years and years, and it is not going to happen. However what I like about NIO model is that you might be able to swap out a smaller, lighter city-driving oriented battery to a large 100kWh+ one when you go on a road trip. And then swap it back when you're back home.

rob74 2y ago
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_%28company%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_%28company%29 What I however still don't understand is why this isn't at least offered in niches where it would make even more sense, like electric buses. If you have a fleet of these buses, minimizing the charging downtime should be a priority, right? Plus, in a bus it should be easier to find a suitable place for the battery pack where it can be accessed easily.
- doctor_eval 2y ago
  I happen to work in the bus industry and the way we work, at least, is the buses are all out working by day and in the depot at night - there’s a lot less demand for bus ops during the night. For a variety of reasons, you don’t really want to have to fill up on either diesel or electrons while away from the depot, if you can avoid it. So what you really want from electrification is a battery that lasts all day. So battery swapping doesn’t make a lot of sense in this regard since it would require multiple returns to depot during the day, or new swapping depots being built, or relying on someone else’s infrastructure. Of course all of this is possible but not ideal. Tangentially, the overnight charging model introduces other problems - a large depot might have 100+ buses, all of which are charging simultaneously in one place. That’s a lot of electrons, and it is causing us a lot of trouble planning for it. And since the buses are charging at night, we can’t use solar to offset battery storage and in any case it’s not reliable enough - the buses have to run regardless of weather - setting aside the obvious commercial issues, in many cases it’s a safety issue too (eg school buses). This is why H2 fuel cells have been viewed as potentially a better solution to BEVs in our industry, but H2 has its own (plentiful) problems and we appear to be shifting focus back to BEVs now and using H2 for energy storage and transport… that’s another story.

vel0city 2y ago

You know what's really convenient? Never having to stop to fuel up for something like 90% of the miles I drive. I spend way more time fueling my ICE than my EV. It's a pain to have to go out of my way to a fueling station. It's far less convenient than just plugging in every few days at home or at the office.

audunw 2y ago

> and convenient as filling up a gas tank in 1-2 minutes. But you can’t just walk away from a gasoline car when it’s filling. And gas stations aren’t very attractive destination to do much of anything. Where I’m from almost every roadside McDonalds has fast charging. And almost every road trip I’ve taken where I’ve had to fast charge we’ve taken the kids to a McDonalds for a short break and finished charging long before we were finished eating and doing bathroom breaks. I haven’t really owned an ICE. (Used my parents cars quite a lot though). Our first car was EV 9 years ago. But I’m fairly sure ICE would be significantly less convenient for us than EV. Especially with the newer one we recently got that has a more reasonable battery size, which we’ve never even had to fast charge once. Even on road trips. We never go anywhere we don’t need/want to go anyway. So having to go to a gas station just to fill the car with gas would be a significant inconvenience. You wouldn’t want a phone that you’d have to take to a phone station to fill with phone juice would you? Even if it lasted longer on a fill-up (say two weeks)

CamperBob2 2y ago
Of course you can walk away from a gas car while it's filling. Where'd you get that idea?
- ghaff 2y ago
  The signs at pretty much every gas pump in America? Plus it just seems like a stupid idea given that I have far less than 100% confidence in automatic cutoffs especially given the potentially serious consequences of a failure.
  - jjav 2y ago
    > The signs at pretty much every gas pump in America? I have to say I've never seen such a sign. Admittedly I don't read every sign on the pump so who knows. I nearly always walk inside to the store while the tank fills.
- orev 2y ago
  There are number of states in the US where this isn’t allowed, and the latch that holds the fill trigger open has been removed from the handle. Sure you can walk away, but the tank won’t keep filling.

rootusrootus 2y ago

> filling up a gas tank in 1-2 minutes It doesn't help the comparison to lie about the time. If you have a smaller gas tank and the pump can fill at it's maximum speed, you can fill in 1-2 minutes from the moment you put the nozzle in. As a practical matter, you're rarely getting in and out of a gas station in under 5 minutes, and only then if it's completely empty when you arrive. When I'm filling up our pickup, it takes a good bit of time -- the pump rarely runs at full speed or the vapor pressure sensor trips, the tank is pretty big, and there's usually a few cars in line in front of me. 15-20 minutes is a lot closer to realistic. Most EVs only need a "fill up" on a road trip, and AAA puts the average road trip refueling stop at 15 minutes. The technology in place today is adequate to do the same with EVs, and it only gets better every year. Battery swapping was a cute idea for a while but kinda pointless now. Of course, all of this talk about time completely ignores that an EV driver spends quite a lot less time every year refueling their vehicle. 10 seconds to plug in when you arrive home, full every morning. Imagine trying to sell someone on the idea of going the other direction "Hey, buy this fancy car, it's great, but you have to take it to a dedicated location periodically just to keep it fueled up."

ItsBob 2y ago
> 15-20 minutes is a lot closer to realistic. Blimey! Lord only knows where you live that it can take that long. I can count on one hand the number of times it's taken anything like 10 minutes over the years and they were during crises! In reality, even if I have to wait for a free pump, my car is at 100% range in 5 mins when I pay at the pump by using my credit card. I want my car filled to the brim any time I go to the petrol station (gas station to our friends over in the colonies :D). That's just how I roll. And I know many others who are the same. I also know some that just put in £10-£15 at a time, mainly due to finance constraints tbh. To "fill" an electric car to 100% isn't feasible in 2 hours, let alone 5 mins. Even if it took just 20 minutes to "fill" it is still shit compared to my current diesel. As a consumer, if I have to join a queue for hours [0] then to hell with that! However, with my diesel, it's literally 5 minutes once a week and I'm full up. In addition, I run my car until 50 - 100 miles left in the tank and I don't get bent out of shape when the light comes on at < 50 miles. In an EV I'd shit bricks if that happened. I'd have to change my behaviour to many smaller topups. The simple fact is that we have a chicken and egg scenario with EV's vs charging points/charging time at this time and I don't see it changing any time soon. Anecdote: I just remember something I saw 3 weeks ago. I was in a town near where I live. I parked up to walk to a shop about 2 mins away and I walked past a girl at a charging station staring at the big charger thingy while on her phone. I couldn't hear what she was saying but I could see that the charging flap on her car was open. I was in the shop for about 10 minutes and came back the same way and she was still there, this time poking away at her phone and the cable still wasn't in her car but the charging flap was still open. No idea what the problem was but it caught my attention. Anyway, just thought I'd share. Edit: Something else to mention - Many people round where I live are in Victorian flats with almost no parking nearby. It's not umcommon to park streets away from where you actually live... they'll not buy electric for the most part. [0] - https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/video-massive-line-of-electric-vehicles-wait-to-charge-after-11-pm/ar-AA1jEvfR https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/video-massive-line-of-e...

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago

Yeah, my first thought on seeing the title question was "well, they charge slower than you can refill gas, so obviously you need more chargers than existing gas stations, though of course most people don't have gas stations at home so it's a kind of messy comparison".

grecy 2y ago

> as fast and convenient as filling up a gas tank in 1-2 minutes. I recently drove to the airport in a bit of a rush in a small 4-cylinder car. Drove straight up to pump that was basically touching the road I was on, tapped credit card, authorized for $100 and opened cap at same time. Stuffed the pump in and held it at max flow. 45l of gas later, cap back on, pump away and moving again. I don’t think it would be possible to be faster. Total time stopped: 7 minutes. I'd love to know how much range you're adding to your ICE vehicle after pumping gas for 1-2 minutes.

pornel 2y ago
Fast DC chargers add 7 to 13 miles of range per minute (charging is fastest when the battery is almost empty). Competent charging networks also accept contactless cards or even automatically bill your account when you plug in.
vel0city 2y ago
All these people saying it takes a minute or two to get gas haven't paid attention to how long they actually spend entering the gas station, driving to the pump, getting out, negotiating payment, choosing fuel type, opening your tank, pumping, putting the handle back, hitting no on the receipt option, getting back in the car, leaving the pump, and entering traffic. Sometimes it'll take a minute just waiting for traffic to clear to pull out! And then it's also assuming there is a gas station on your current route, and that it's one with a decent price and not more expensive than other stations around. A lot of the trips I take don't go past a decently priced gas station, the few I routinely do pass are often 5-6¢/gal more than others. At 22 gallons that's over a dollar more. And also assuming you never get gas at a place like Sam's Club or Costco, which offer some big discounts but often have lines.

dymk 2y ago

I can tell you from experience that leaving my EV to charge in my driveway overnight is way, way more convenient than stopping for gas (and paying a lot more for it). I drive a lot, and I’ve ran into a situation only once where I had to find a charging station away from home. It just doesn’t happen nearly as often as people worry.

bluedino 2y ago
If you forget to charge overnight you're stuck waiting. If you forget to get gas, you can just go get gas and be on your way in a few minutes
- pornel 2y ago
  • BEVs need to be plugged in about once a week (for a median US commute). If you forget one day, you can plug in another day, or day after. • DC fast chargers can add 100 miles of range in 10 minutes.
t0mas88 2y ago
> and paying a lot more for it Do you have a low electricity rate? A petrol car would use around 0.03 gallons per mile (33 mpg). At $ 4 per gallon that's $ 0.12 per mile. A Tesla model S does around 0.3 kWh per mile. So to get to the same cost per mile your electricity price would have to be below $ 0.40 per kwh. In a lot of places electricity isn't (much) below $ 0.40 per kwh.
- Thrymr 2y ago
  Nearly everywhere in the US is below $0.40/kWh. The average nationwide is $0.17/kWh. Only a handful of cities in California and Hawaii are over $0.40 (those places have the highest gas prices too). Most people will pay less than half as much to charge at home. ref: https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices_selectedareas_table.htm https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
- newZWhoDis 2y ago
  My overnight rate is $0.02/kwh $0.40/kwh is an absurd embarrassment for the local government. Move or vote them out.

MathMonkeyMan 2y ago

I've heard that the issues with the "swap the battery" model are: 1. The battery is one of the most expensive parts of the car. People won't want to swap it for some random battery, and you risk an illicit market for swapped out "good" batteries. Sure, if swapping is very common, then batteries are fungible and maybe it all evens out. I doubt it, though. 2. Batteries are large, heavy, and not necessarily centrally placed. You'd need some sort of winch/harness/crane system, which is dangerous and expensive to automate. Even if you figure it out, swappable batteries might be a negative design constraint for electric cars (e.g. "what if we want to put battery cells throughout the body of the car?"). I also like the model, but how could it be made to work well?

BurningFrog 2y ago
This assumes the car has one big battery. What if it has a number of smaller ones that can easily be swapped out by one person? Or maybe one big unswappable battery, and 1-3 smaller swappable ones?
eichin 2y ago
NIO just did the expensive-to-automate part, it's not just theory... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w (Tom Scott demo/walkthrough.) Press release from April says https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/05/chinas-nio-to-expand-battery-swap-services-to-gain-ev-infra-edge-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/05/chinas-nio-to-expand-battery... "it completed 40 million battery swaps" across 2300 stations. It still has to scale up from there and get traction from other car vendors beyond paper-only "partnerships"... but they've gotten vastly farther than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) did before it failed 10 years ago.
jopsen 2y ago
> 1. The battery is one of the most expensive parts of the car. Obviously, a swappable battery is something you rent. Car manufacturers would love to charge us a monthly fee. They are currently trying all sorts of schemes to do it. But a swappable battery might justify a monthly fee.