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Comment by jlebrech | Hacker News Reader

they had battery swapping stations, it would mean a "charge" in under a minute. but it needs a much greater infrastructure.

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A Tesla battery weighs 550KG. It's an insane amount of space, energy and equipment - and obviously can't be standardised between different shapes and sizes of car.

I remember in movies about old times, you would arrive with your horse-powered cart at a such station, they changed the horses, and off you go.

I guess this is similar. Make batteries standard shape and size, just the power may vary. After all, the gasoline/diesel is the same all over the world and is made after some international standards.

I think we are looking wrongly at the energy source of an electric car. If we assume electric power as raw oil, then the battery is a refinement of this electric power in form of an chemical power. Then in this case the unit of "power" is not the electricity but the battery holding the power to run the car.

If you look from this angle, then the battery is obviously the unit that you need to load/unload from the "gas" station.

and you'd rent batteries in watt/hr, whatever's available at the station.

A rental company could do this with full teslas. just hope into a fully charged one and leave the old one to charge.

Actually this sounds really interesting and could be a good business model.

Storing that many batteries in one place... Seems dangerous.

Now imagine they'd store thousands of gallons of a liquid that produces flammable vapor :)

It'd take flammable vapor over explosive pack of batteries :)

And the majority of cars have batteries as part of the chassis. Swapping it is nearly impossible.

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