

Nissan develops 10-minute electric car charger - tilt
http://www.nydailynews.com/autos/2011/10/10/2011-10-10_nissan_develops_10minute_electric_car_charger_.html

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bradfa
Cool, except I keep feeling like fast charging is solving the wrong problem
because it usually has such a dramatically bad impact on the life of a
battery.

Gasoline and diesel are currently "standard" fuels we put into a container
inside our cars. It takes 5 to 10 minutes to put fuel into said container when
we fill up. Why are we trying to put electrons into a battery like we put fuel
into fuel tanks? Why not just have a container in the car that holds a
battery?

If the battery was standard, or even had a range of standard sizes, it would
only take a few minutes for a robot to pull the discharged one out and put a
fully charged one in. Then you're still putting "fuel" into a container, not
pushing electrons into a chemistry.

There's all kinds of positives for this battery swapping: * You can still slow
charge at home. * Batteries can be slow charged at the "gas station." * We
don't need expensive charging stations to be developed. * No more getting out
of the car to "fuel up." * Electrical grid doesn't have to support pushing
outrageous currents to chargers (think of a "gas station" with 16 chargers all
running at the same time, that's serious current). * Slow charging can stagger
charging (or charge at off peak) and display what batteries are currently
available online. * We can do this with today's tech!

~~~
planb
I had the same idea a while ago and talked with someone working in the
automotive industry about this. The problem is that battery technology is an
important differentiator in the e-mobility market so there's no chance all car
markers would agree on one standard - at least not in the foreseeable future.

~~~
bradfa
What good are standards bodies (think SAE, ISO, DIN) in the automotive world
if they won't solve this? Also, what ever happened to driving down cost by
partnering with other automakers on expensive assemblies? Having a proprietary
battery is completely the opposite of what every automaker has been doing for
the past 2 decades.

It's insane and is delaying the mass acceptance of electric cars.

~~~
perokreco
It would not be beneficial to standardize such s young technology. It is
likely that the best car battery design hasn't been invented yet. Standards
bodies are there to codify best practices and not to decide things by
themselves.

~~~
bradfa
But you don't have to standardize the internal battery tech, just the form fit
and interaction. For example, the shape and electrical connectors the battery
will use. Then everyone is free to make their battery hold 2x as much as the
reference design and that's OK as long as it fits and talks the same language
to the car and charger. Same way I can buy AA batteries with lithium inside
that last 8x longer than the generic store brand.

There's no reason to dictate the battery chemistry or internal cell layout. As
long as a standard is set for slow-ish charging (i.e.: the battery tells the
charger, "give me X amps at Y volts"), we're good to go.

~~~
onemoreact
Except, you are not going to keep your hight tech battery's after the first
fill up. When things settle down it may be reasonable to have 3 or 4 grades of
battery's at every station, but good luck going to a random station and them
having an apropreatly aged 2013 honda civic battery in 2026.

------
ck2
_it could take a decade to commercialize the technology_

So it's mostly useless because everything else will change in a decade.

What we need is the $2 Billion spent each week in the Afghanistan war instead
poured into battery research.

We need exponentially more battery capacity at a fraction of the price.

Then let the government own the patents on the battery, open source it and
standardize it.

~~~
Shivetya
There is enough profit potential in this market for development to continue at
the break neck pace it has been. The explosion of portable devices had lead to
a large amount of research into battery technology that before was not needed.

[http://www.wallstreetdaily.com/2011/09/14/scientists-just-
re...](http://www.wallstreetdaily.com/2011/09/14/scientists-just-
revolutionized-the-battery-with-a-jelly-recipe/)

<http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/flow-batteries-0606.html>

Those were two new technologies I saw this year that interested me. I am sure
there are others.

Even when spending two billion a week in Afghanistan we still lose nearly the
same in fraud with government medical services. So basically there is no end
to the places we can get money from but the first realization is, even saving
a hundred billion here and a hundred here still leaves us a trillion in the
hole.

