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Comment by Melatonic | Hacker News Reader

What would be really amazing is if we all leased the batteries but owned our vehicles (whether its scooters, cars, etc) AND there were super fast quickswap stations built into the road itself. Imagine if pulled up to a red stop light and the light knew it was going to be red for the next 30 seconds at least - your vehicle could communicate with some type of in-road underground battery swap station and then at the press of a button it could quickly reach up, remove your existing battery, and replace it with a fully charged one.

Larger vehicles could even have multiple batteries - one quick swap one on the bottom and then another one elsewhere in the vehicle that was a bit more work to swap - this way you could mainly use and stress the swap battery and ideally keep swapping it out as needed on a road trip but worst case you still have a large energy reserve to fall back to.

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Battery wear is a complex thing and it's not trivial to control or test. You could easily trade in an excellent battery and receive one that had 50% rated capacity. If you plan to wear them out very quickly, not to need the full capacity, and pay well above actual cost for the convenience of swapping, then it could work.

Otherwise, you will be ripped off by the better informed charging station that hands out only their worst batteries, and sells the best trade-ins as new.

What if we took batteries out of commission after X cycles?

There would need to be regulation on it. I wouldn't trust my manufacturer or charging network not to rip me off if they had the chance.

Yeah, I think it’s clear that you would have to buy the cars off the lot with no battery included.

That sounds like a huge amount of infrastructure work on something that even in the best case will be relatively prone to failure. Meanwhile, we already have grid connections all over the place and DC fast charging is quickly approaching fast enough. For those who even have to use it, the rest just charge at home and none of these contraptions would improve their experience.

Have you lived in a multifamily building in a city? Or even in a single-family home with only street parking? It’s not like we all have a garage at home to park and charge a vehicle. Some do, but I would estimate the vast majority in my city do not.

I’m not saying we need in-street contraptions like GP described, but “just charge at home” doesn’t cut it for a lot of people.

I like the kiosks mentioned in the article, those seem pretty convenient for city-dwellers.

The flip side of that is that the group you described is the one most likely to not need to charge every day. My experience was that 200 miles was a pretty reasonable amount for a full week. If I'm honest, most weeks I'm well under 100 miles.

With fast chargers a weekly grocery trip or a charger near the office would probably satisfy most needs. Tesla claims that 15 mins. yields a 200 mile range. My gas hog Pathfinder gets about 250 miles between fillups that last about 10 minutes (bathroom and snack breaks when I'm on a road trip). It seems that range anxiety is kind of overkill. To be honest I'm surprised that coffee shops, and fast service restaurants haven't been installing chargers.

Do you visit a grocery store or similar establishment for at least 30 minutes per week?

If so then there is potential for charging infrastructure to solve your use case without requiring every person to have home charging.

DC fast charge infrastructure is growing at a huge rate. We have tested designs that are being mass manufactured and are installable in basically any parking lot with enough nearby grid capacity.

New charger locations are being added literally daily across the US and the world.

Tesla: https://supercharge.info

Others (US): https://fastcharger.info

It's definitely going to be a different model than gas stations, but I think we can continue to install huge amounts of DC charging capacity at stores and along highways, combined with slower AC charging capacity at apartments, office buildings, etc, easier than we could install enough battery-swap capacity to handle the EV transition.

> Do you visit a grocery store or similar establishment for at least 30 minutes per week?

Not by car I don’t; there’s no need to.

Likewise my company’s office basically doesn’t have parking, so charging there isn’t an option even if I did drive there regularly (but I don’t).

Best option for me would be if my apartment building had EV chargers in the garage, but it doesn’t. (And my last place was more central and didn’t have a garage at all.)

When do you use the car then, just personal travel? Without a commute your weekly charging needs should be pretty low.

Charging definitely doesn't cover everyone yet but I think a lot can change in a decade, and running AC circuits off of the existing grid seems more feasible to me than mechanical battery swap stations that work across different brands and models of car.

Basically, yeah. I generally don’t need it when I’m in the city. It’s only when I visit friends and family outside the city that I use it; most of them live in the suburbs since that’s where I moved from, and you mostly need a car to get there.

Anyway, not suggesting that battery swap stations are particularly practical for electric cars? Those have huge batteries. But if stations for electric scooters as mentioned in the article get any traction, that’d be a win I think.

In the US, more than half of everyone lives in a single family detached house. So perhaps half the population doesn't have a major hurdle to at-home charging currently.

For the rest, a 300 mile EV with once-a-week fast charging while they grocery shop is entirely viable. Yes we need to continue building out the infrastructure, but since your comparison is with a battery swap solution that doesn't currently exist in any form, we're already way ahead on that.

> For the rest, a 300 mile EV with once-a-week fast charging while they grocery shop is entirely viable.

Assuming you’re driving to get your groceries. That’s also not necessarily a good assumption here.

>Imagine if pulled up to a red stop light and the light knew it was going to be red for the next 30 seconds at least - your vehicle could communicate with some type of in-road underground battery swap station and then at the press of a button it could quickly reach up, remove your existing battery, and replace it with a fully charged one.

If we had the technology and logistics to build an entire underground battery swapping facility at every major intersection, I'm sure we'd have moved past cars completely!

I remember watching a TED Talk in 2009 that had a pretty similar idea https://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_a_new_ecosystem_for_el...

Seems like they went bankrupt though in 2013

you live in a country without snow, right ?

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