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Comment by lapetitejort | Hacker News Reader

Sure you can power off your device! Just take out the batt-- oh...

Swappable battery is a trend that should return- to both phones and electric vehicles.

As long as the timeframe scales with the size of the battery. A phone battery should be swappable in a few minutes. A car battery should be swappable in a day or two. They have to be heavily shielded in case of an accident.

Nonsense, a complete engine in an internal-combustion vehicle - which is vastly more complicated than a battery in an electric vehicle, and which often requires removing various structural members in the front of the vehicle - can be swapped in under two days. A battery should be a few electrical and coolant connectors and maybe a dozen bolts, rolling out from under the vehicle with little else to fuss with. Engineering it such that you have to replace and bleed the brake lines or remove suspension components is basically the same as designing for non-replacement, as if you were gluing in a battery.

You word it like you specifically want bigger batteries to take longer. Why is that?

All else equal I'd expect a laptop battery to be easier than a phone battery, and it's definitely possible to design a car battery to swap in minutes even with shielding.

> A car battery should be swappable in a day or two

Nio currently swaps out their car batteries in about 3 minutes, much like you'd get an oil change at Jiffy Lube or something. It's completely automated except someone pulls the car in/out of the bay for you. I imagine that human step will be relatively short lived.

> they have to be heavily shielded in case of an accident.

Yes, it's just a simple matter of purposefully designing it to be removed easily.

This is cued up to where he gets to the battery swap station: https://youtu.be/hTsrDpsYHrw?t=358

And how many people drive more than 300km per day AND don't have the time to wait 50 minutes, but only got 5? The replaceable car batteries is technically possible (heck, everything is possible with engineering), but totally useless.

So it's possible and you reply to a person telling you about a legitimate usecase but you continue to go on about how it is totally useless?

How many such stations will be built and how many different shapes, sizes, battery chemistry, and capacity batteries will each station have to have in stock?

It sounds like it isn't even possible except in the trivial sense that if one has a fully charged battery of exactly the right type on hand, then it can be swapped in five minutes. Sounds like each station would either have to have a large store of batteries or it would have to only serve one model of car. The first is a large capital cost, the second generates very little revenue.

To compete with, say Tesla, Nio would have to build hundreds of battery swap stations in Europe. Tesla has 601 sites in 27 countries. When I drive from Norway to the UK I am rarely more than 50 km from a supercharger.

Dream on.

Won't happen w/o legislation.

Non removable battery and minimum percentage of phones sold with gps were promoted by governments (from old HN posts if I recall correctly). Actually there is no technical need for most phones not to have non removable batteries.

Isn't the argument that non removable batteries enable water resistance? Or am I missing something?

That's been an argument for non-removable batteries, getting rid of the 3.5mm jack.

I find that argument strange: I've never needed my phone while showering or swimming. Some rain has never broken any of my devices. But I've had pain from non-standard audio cables (Sony Ericsson from the early 2000s and their expensive proprietary cables) and non-removable batteries (Huawei batteries losing like half the capacity after a little more than a year).

This is where a tin foil hat really comes in handy!

You don't need a tin foil hat.

But a multilayered tin foil iPhone case would probably do the job.

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