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Comment by calgoo | Hacker News Reader

What about making the battery packs "hot swappable". You pull into the station, the current pack is unloaded and a new one is loaded. I It can also have interesting effects on the battery upgrade you need to do every X amount of years. The packs could be owned by the gas station chain, so you can stop at any of their establishments and get a new one refiled.

These battery pack charging stations could then also be used as power offloading for local power generation.

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One of the founders of HTC is doing this for mopeds. With a much smaller battery, you just pull it out and carry it with you to the swapping station. Seems quite interesting:

https://www.wired.com/2016/01/electric-scooter-maker-gogoro-...

Shai Agassi tried that with Better Place. It raised about $850M and filed for bankruptcy after 6 years. Less than 1400 cars were using the 38 deployed swapping stations in Israel and Denmark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place

There have been many demos of hot swappable battery packs. However as long as every car maker has their own battery packs and swapping methods it means you'll need a half dozen different swapping stations at each location making the whole concept very financially inefficient.

The french car maker Renault tried this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Fluence_Z.E. (<- the point is in the link)

It didn't work.

Sounds like it wasn't profitable, at least in 2013: "The company's financial difficulties were caused by the high investment required to develop the charging and swapping infrastructure, about US$850 million in private capital, and a market penetration significantly lower than originally predicted..."

Just escape the .: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Fluence_Z%2EE%2E

Tesla designed that, built one, then dropped it last year as nobody was using it. It could be more useful in vehicles which don't charge as fast, perhaps?

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