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A) Consider the technological acumen of the average filling station worker. Is that the guy you want to be in charge of determining whether any given battery i

A) Consider the technological acumen of the average filling station worker. Is that the guy you want to be in charge of determining whether any given battery is fit for reuse? B) Consider the weight of an average automobile's starter battery. Not the sort of thing that a petite woman like my wife would be able to sling around on her own. If you hire battery jockeys to swap them in and out, that increases the cost. C) Now consider the fact that an electric car requires a LOT larger battery than a starter battery. After all, the starter battery only has to turn the starter motor for a few seconds; the EV battery has to turn the entire drivetrain for the entire time you're traveling between charging stations. If you broke the battery modules up into easily manageable pieces, it would take just as long to pull them all out and replace them with fresh ones as it would to just charge them up in place. D) Consider that because an EV battery is so large, they tend to be located in fairly inaccessible places--under the passenger compartment, molded into the frame... Thus, it is not a simple job to remove and replace. There are probably other obstacles to implementing a battery swap scheme that I'm not seeing off the top of my head. And none of these are truly insurmountable, but the solutions tend to involve the movement of pieces of green paper, or the big hand on the watch dial.

simias 13y ago
For all those points I imagined the process would've been automated, like those automatic car wash stations. Obviously manhandling the batteries seems difficult to achieve.
adrianpike 13y ago
You're slightly off on a few points. A is handled in an automated fashion, in a similar way to many other modern service intervals. You don't have your average BMW or Mercedes mechanic hooking up Siemens bits to jigs to verify traces in the same way that you wouldn't have your "average filling station worker" checking all the LiPo cells. Battery health checks are already built into the vehicle. B is handled by relatively simple tools for the purpose of moving around hundreds, if not thousands of pounds of battery components. C and D are trivial to solve. All of this has already been solved in the Model S. Deployment will take some time due to cost. [1] - http://www.teslamotors.com/batteryswap http://www.teslamotors.com/batteryswap
- R_Edward 13y ago
  My point is simply that swapping batteries is not a simple, do-it-yourself process. The batteries are heavy, bulky (at least for now), and inconveniently shaped and mounted, necessitating additional labor, tools, and time to swap. And a battery of unknown provenance may harbor damage that is invisible to the human eye--there needs to be a health checker at the point of swapping, because if you don't get that checkup until after it's mounted in your car, you risk having to waste your time doing a second swap. And that equipment is also going to drive up the cost. I suspect that convenience and cost will tip the scales away from swapping and toward recharging, especially if the recharge cycle can be sped up and the infrastructure build-out continues.

simias 13y ago

For all those points I imagined the process would've been automated, like those automatic car wash stations. Obviously manhandling the batteries seems difficult to achieve.

adrianpike 13y ago

You're slightly off on a few points. A is handled in an automated fashion, in a similar way to many other modern service intervals. You don't have your average BMW or Mercedes mechanic hooking up Siemens bits to jigs to verify traces in the same way that you wouldn't have your "average filling station worker" checking all the LiPo cells. Battery health checks are already built into the vehicle. B is handled by relatively simple tools for the purpose of moving around hundreds, if not thousands of pounds of battery components. C and D are trivial to solve. All of this has already been solved in the Model S. Deployment will take some time due to cost. [1] - http://www.teslamotors.com/batteryswap http://www.teslamotors.com/batteryswap

R_Edward 13y ago
My point is simply that swapping batteries is not a simple, do-it-yourself process. The batteries are heavy, bulky (at least for now), and inconveniently shaped and mounted, necessitating additional labor, tools, and time to swap. And a battery of unknown provenance may harbor damage that is invisible to the human eye--there needs to be a health checker at the point of swapping, because if you don't get that checkup until after it's mounted in your car, you risk having to waste your time doing a second swap. And that equipment is also going to drive up the cost. I suspect that convenience and cost will tip the scales away from swapping and toward recharging, especially if the recharge cycle can be sped up and the infrastructure build-out continues.