I believe that Teslas were designed with this in mind to begin with (the batteries are in a large under-car ?tray? but the cost and logistics of swapping batteries, keeping enough charged up in readiness, the sheer volume of stored battery packs compared to petrol/diesel made it uneconomic.
If Tesla couldn?t make it work, I doubt anyone else can.
Tim
Where cost and difficulty are design considerations.
That is more likely the case. It would need a substantial investment and sufficient take up of EVs.
Did they actually try? I suspect they simply did the sums and gave up with current take up of EVs.
There was at least one "pilot" swap station open to the public. I've no idea if that was when launched a pilot for a still active programme or more in the nature of "we've sunk so much of the cost of the pilot we might as well...".
Every vehicle has a differently shaped battery pack so you are limited to swapping at your car makers franchise dealers or swap stations. They will have to open 24x7.
But Nio seem to making battery swaps work in China, they are attracting buyers that can't have home charging. Owners can rent a 84 kWh to replace 70 kWh pack for longer trips. 100kwh battery pack is same shape.
This can only work if ALL batteries are on lease as no one is going to be swapping their brand new battery for a 3 year old 1100 cycle battery. If you had a 5 year old car, swapped the battery and got a newish battery under 100 cycles, that was 50Kg lighter, you would never ever have a another battery swap. It would be a several £1000 upgrade for free.
Just look at the logistics. How many spare packs would each filling station have to keep to satisfy demand? At £10,000 quid each plus?
And you'd need to standardise battery packs across all makes. Good luck with that one.
And that's set against fast charge times, which are improving. It seems we can push charge into a battery rather quickly, so why do you need the complex logistics of battery swapping? This is the call Tesla made when abandoning swapping - fast charging got good enough to not need it.
If grid infrastructure is an issue for fast charging, I can see examples where a 'filling station' has its own generation infrastructure and a big battery to balance the comsumption. Drive in, DC fast-charge for 5/10/20 mins, drive out. Meanwhile the wind/solar/nuclear/etc replenishes the battery.
(and even if you don't have charging at home, you may do at work/shops/wherever you drive, so you can charge there, which reduces the demand for 'filling stations')
Theo
Which sort of endorses the point I made, thanks.
That goes to show how subsidies can actually distort and destroy markets. If California's gave a rebate for cars using standardised battery packs it would be a great move forward. I guess it's not in the big manufacturer's to lobby for such
I'm sure, in the same way we have different nozzles for different fuels packs can be standardised. As pack wear then perhaps a cost per kWhr you're likely to get from it.
That's my take; with a 250 mile range my daughter's EV has never been on a fast charger, only charged at home and a couple of top ups overnight on my 13A three pin extension. If she ever wanted to do a long journey she can borrow my car.
I certainly wouldn't hesitate to drive an ev over an ic engined car but it isn't going to happen in my remaining driving time simply from a capital cost point of view, unless the Kona is offered at a reasonable price by the leasing company in 3 years time. I think the battery will still have some warranty left then.
As EV subsystems become more ubiquitous models using the same drive train will feature them even if an IC engine and alternator is plonked in.
I can see the cost and complication of euro 6 diesels in commercial vehicles making hydrogen fuel cell commercials look more competitive over the next year or so.
The big concern is if China pulls out of the 3 (or 4) nuclear power plants because of cost escalation in the face of additional planned windpower what is going to provide our baseload?
Because she has access to home charging, that works.
Without offstreet parking, you need to do regular fillups, even fast chargers or at work/etc. However if you don't have parking at home you're already constrained, and maybe a future solution to that wouldn't be onstreet parking but parking at a multi-storey around the corner which can also charge. You might have to walk a few minutes to pick up your car (or summon it, if self-driving finally becomes a thing), but the streets stop being choked with parked cars.
Or you simply don't own a car but use one when needed. Pre-pandemic, the car-club model worked for some people.
I liken ICEs v EVs to hard drives v SSDs. Hard drives are amazing mechanical things that manage to fly a piece of metal nanometres above another piece of metal, and yet be robust against vibration, temperature, etc. But it's much easier to just have a solid-state chip that does the storage - no moving parts, no mechanical tolerances, just a standardised silicon production line. Simple wins.
I think we need to adjust from an 'Economy 7' world, where there's loads of cheap coal-fired and nuclear power available overnight, so one where more power comes in the middle of the day due to solar, and charging things is more opportunistic based on conditions. EVs are perhaps better suited to this than other consumers. The 'baseload' is then quick-response power stations for covering for the gaps where there isn't enough sun/wind/etc to meet demand. Today that's gas, maybe batteries or other storage will fill that gap.
Theo
Given the density of housing in many UK towns, which is preferable? Knocking down some houses to provide that multi-story (that most wouldn't want to live next door to). Or parking in the street?
Interesting fact in a flier from my local council, Wandsworth. They are boasting about the highest number of chargers anywhere. 112. With a population of over 1M.
Of course we could simply demolish our cities and start again. With plenty off street parking for all. Every one with a decent garden where you could grow your own. Wide enough main roads for all traffic including cycle and bus etc lanes. But then the distance from A to B would be a great deal bigger. And the cycling lobby would complain about that too.
On 05/09/2020 11:14, Dave Plowman (News) wrote: <snip>
1M what?
Rats or Pigeons, take your pick.
People.
2011 census was 306,995 mid 2016 estimate was 316,096 mid 2017 estimate was 323,257 mid 2018 326,474 of which 169905 are female and 104,600 are between 15 and 50 years old (ONS). mid 2019 estimate 329,677mid 2020 maybe 333,000?
They would have to be really fast breeders to have hit 1m starting from
1/3m in 2019. No time to bother about cars or charging points.About 1/3 of population are women of childbearing age. To have hit 1m today every woman would need to have had 6 kids since 2019. So that's 2 lots of triples for everyone.
Won't see the COVID-19 birthrate spike until Xmas.
As luck would have it, Wandsworth is a selectable place on ONS site.
Part of Wandsworth council that created that flyer doesn't know it's arse from it's elbow.
As of Dec 2019, 230 lamp post chargers had been installed.
So now the questions are: How many work? How long do they take to get fixed? Will they be maintained in future? Have there been any fights over a lamppost?
No surprise there. You should see what they've done with low traffic areas. Shifted the traffic from one residential area in the borough to another.
Dunno. A quick check shows about a dozen cars parked between lamp posts. And could the existing wiring cope with a charging point on every lamppost anyway?
Well, this area is known as nappy valley. ;-)
Sorry for getting the figure wrong. But in the scale of things, makes little difference. If everyone in the area thinking of buying a new or near new car chose an EV, it would be chaos.
Soul? Ha! Good choice of name for a vehicle with no soul whatsoever. Only ICE cars have soul.
Yeah, I bet the dinosaurs said the same thing about mammals, even as they watched the meteorite streaking through the sky overhead...
Tim
Very good question when you know please let us all know 'cos at this moment in time it looks like we'll be running short even on windy days;(...
What nuke plants are they, do tell?...
Theo..
We can some days hardly meet the existing grid demand as it is without getting some extra coal power in!....
I really think that come a cold winter we're be fooked as regards electricity supply and thing is we haven't had a hard winter for some time now...
Some UK cities don't have enough bloody lampposts or room for them!....
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