> Consumers use batteries that are a specific voltage.
Consumers use batteries that are a specific form factor. They don't buy 1.5V batteries, they buy AA's. They don't know or care what voltage their computer battery is, they buy a Lenovo T14 battery. Et cetera. I can't think of a common single battery where you can buy the correct form factor but get the wrong voltage.
The only two pieces of information that matter are form factor and wattage. You can derive voltage from the form factor, but you can't derive form factor from voltage. You can derive amperage from wattage and voltage.
Edit: I finally thought of an exception. 6V tractor batteries are form factor compatible with 12V tractor batteries. But those are hardly common in 2023.
This is maybe getting tangential but one of my pet peeves is that the industry doesn't establish standards for large batteries, like lawnmowers and leafblowers. If they were serious about electric transition they would make batteries transferable like AA, AAA batteries etc.
I understand the issues involved and that there are nontrivial obstacles (see: IoT), but it is really frustrating to deal with manufacturer lock-in. I also think it adds to confusion of the sort in the linked piece because there isn't a discussion of standards per se along the lines you're mentioning.
I suppose safety issues are magnified a hundredfold compared to the problems that people have run into with USB product standard mismatch but that's probably another reason why people might actually buy brand-name OEM batteries even if there were standards.
I guess in general I wish there was some open industry discussion of this, even if it meant a white paper where they throw up their hands and decide it's too risky.
There is at least one company making adaptors for power tool batteries [1], so that you can do things like use your Black & Decker drill battery with your Milwaukee circular saw.
They seem to be mostly around $30, but might be worth it for someone with a lot of tools with different batteries who wants to minimize the number of different chargers they have to deal with.
> LiPo batteries vary a lot from voltage but all look the same and have the same connectors.
They don't. LiPo batteries are just lithium batteries with 3.7v average and 4.2v max. If the voltage "varies" as you say, it's because they are arranged that way to achieve a higher voltage for the specific application.
The base cells themselves are all the same voltage. And people who are into RC cars/drones, etc. are usually technically apt enough to understand this and make their own battery "packs".
Consumers use batteries that are a specific form factor. They don't buy 1.5V batteries, they buy AA's. They don't know or care what voltage their computer battery is, they buy a Lenovo T14 battery. Et cetera. I can't think of a common single battery where you can buy the correct form factor but get the wrong voltage.
The only two pieces of information that matter are form factor and wattage. You can derive voltage from the form factor, but you can't derive form factor from voltage. You can derive amperage from wattage and voltage.
Edit: I finally thought of an exception. 6V tractor batteries are form factor compatible with 12V tractor batteries. But those are hardly common in 2023.