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Forgot to mention that I am an electric car owner as well (Roadster). I don't really like the idea of battery swapping. It seems like a big hassle. The current
by jblow 14y ago
Forgot to mention that I am an electric car owner as well (Roadster).
I don't really like the idea of battery swapping. It seems like a big hassle. The current Supercharger seems totally fine. I guess it remains to be seen how well it works in practice, once a lot of people have the cars, but right now things look really good.
One of the most common pieces of anti-EV rhetoric is "the infrastructure doesn't exist". This is actually FUD. The infrastructure is everywhere: we have electricity pretty much everywhere. (Consider: all these gas stations have electricity, so the penetration of electricity is a superset of the penetration of gasoline). What we don't often have is the right plug, but that is a relatively small problem.
But if you start talking about installing a widespread battery swapping paradigm, then that is a huge infrastructure problem, because you need to have stocks of all these physical things all over the place.
On the other hand, with Supercharger, you don't need that. You just need some electricity. It is much simpler.
- fr0sty 14y ago"You just need some electricity." If you wave your hand enough anything is trivial. The "some" you are talking about is 250A @ 400V (100kW) which is a trifle more than a typical gas station can readily supply (especially if you want to charge more than one at a time).
- jblow 14y agoOkay, so what if a particular gas station can't supply 100kW, so what? You charge at 50kW? That is definitely less convenient, but still feasible for filling up your battery and getting you where you want to go. It's still infrastructure that works, so the anti-EV argument "there's no infrastructure and the infrastructure can never be built" is still obviously wrong. It's also still obviously wrong if you drop the charging to 25kW. etc, etc. Besides, do you know that a typical gas station can't readily supply 100kW? How do you know? Has anyone even thought about this seriously (except Tesla)? I am a little bit shocked by the amount of specious naysaying that is happening in this thread. This is supposed to be Hacker News, where people are motivated to really think about problems, to build solutions, etc, etc. I don't see any of that attitude in some of these replies.
- ryanwaggoner 14y agoI don't really understand why it matters whether gas stations have electricity and chargers...doesn't charging take hours? Who wants to sit at a gas station for hours waiting for their car to charge?
- ricardobeat 14y ago30 minutes for a 150 mile charge.