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Battery-swapping as a thing for the general public's use of electric vehicles always struck me as just stupid. It works against an important advantage of EVs (n
by nknighthb 13y ago
Battery-swapping as a thing for the general public's use of electric vehicles always struck me as just stupid. It works against an important advantage of EVs (no more detours to gas stations), requires standardization of a nascent product space (does that ever work?), adds costs (at the very least, that machinery must be maintained), and confers no advantage at all for the vast majority of car use cases.
The general public simply does not take long road trips frequently enough for a full network of battery-swap stations to be viable.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoI guess standardization worked pretty good for automobiles, trains, planes, telephone, electric power, radio, heck even the internet. For instance an industry charging standard could take off easily. I think Better Place just guessed wrong.
- nknighthb 13y agoI think you fundamentally misunderstood my comment. Either that, or you fundamentally misunderstand every single product space you mention. Standardization of nascent product spaces doesn't work at all. Most of the products you mention still aren't really standardized decades or even centuries after their invention, and/or have competing standards.
- chiph 13y agoI thought it was a bad plan on Better Place's part, because it depended on the car manufacturers designing their vehicles with fast swapping in mind. And so far, none of them have done that. Mainly, IMO, because of crash performance -- batteries are heavy and so they need to be bolted into the structure of the car quite well, lest they become missiles in a crash. So, planning your business around someone else doing something that thus far they haven't given any hints that they would -- not good.