I'm a big Tesla fan, but I disagree. The only way electric cars can possibly make sense is if the batteries are swappable. The electric cars being built now are evolutionary dead ends, IMHO.
As an electric car owner, I haven't found a need for swapping batteries. Consider this: if a refueling station offered battery swapping they would also need to exhaustively test your batteries to determine that they were not abused and to determine how much credit to offer for their current capacity. How does that save much time from just using a quick-charge station?
Today, I have plenty of range to get to and from work and most activities driving a car with 1/3rd the EPA range of a Tesla Model S. Consider that you can still do long road trips simply by stopping at a quick charge station for a meal and a fillup or you can use some small part of the money you're saving on fuel to rent a car. Given how few road trips I take, I could probably take a limo every time if I wanted.
As an electric car owner, I haven't found a need for swapping batteries. Consider this: if a refueling station offered battery swapping they would also need to exhaustively test your batteries to determine that they were not abused and to determine how much credit to offer for their current capacity. How does that save much time from just using a quick-charge station?
Because the batteries wouldn't have to be tested while you wait. Like laptop batteries, they could have their own embedded controllers that would keep track of each individual unit's charge state and condition. (Actually it's almost certain that they already do.)
The analogy I like to use is swapping out propane cylinders for a gas grill. It should take less time to refuel an EV than a gasoline-powered vehicle, not more.
This is also important for power management, if Musk's prediction comes true and half of all cars sold by 2025 are indeed electric. Swappable batteries can be charged when/where the power is available, using industrial rates and infrastructure. Instead of seeing gasoline tankers driving around, you would see trucks delivering and picking up batteries from service stations.
People will understand why hardwired batteries are a bad idea as soon as half their neighborhood tries to charge their EVs every night the way we currently charge our smartphones.
Forgot to mention that I am an electric car owner as well (Roadster).
I don't really like the idea of battery swapping. It seems like a big hassle. The current Supercharger seems totally fine. I guess it remains to be seen how well it works in practice, once a lot of people have the cars, but right now things look really good.
One of the most common pieces of anti-EV rhetoric is "the infrastructure doesn't exist". This is actually FUD. The infrastructure is everywhere: we have electricity pretty much everywhere. (Consider: all these gas stations have electricity, so the penetration of electricity is a superset of the penetration of gasoline). What we don't often have is the right plug, but that is a relatively small problem.
But if you start talking about installing a widespread battery swapping paradigm, then that is a huge infrastructure problem, because you need to have stocks of all these physical things all over the place.
On the other hand, with Supercharger, you don't need that. You just need some electricity. It is much simpler.
If you wave your hand enough anything is trivial. The "some" you are talking about is 250A @ 400V (100kW) which is a trifle more than a typical gas station can readily supply (especially if you want to charge more than one at a time).
Okay, so what if a particular gas station can't supply 100kW, so what? You charge at 50kW? That is definitely less convenient, but still feasible for filling up your battery and getting you where you want to go. It's still infrastructure that works, so the anti-EV argument "there's no infrastructure and the infrastructure can never be built" is still obviously wrong. It's also still obviously wrong if you drop the charging to 25kW. etc, etc.
Besides, do you know that a typical gas station can't readily supply 100kW? How do you know? Has anyone even thought about this seriously (except Tesla)?
I am a little bit shocked by the amount of specious naysaying that is happening in this thread. This is supposed to be Hacker News, where people are motivated to really think about problems, to build solutions, etc, etc. I don't see any of that attitude in some of these replies.
I don't really understand why it matters whether gas stations have electricity and chargers...doesn't charging take hours? Who wants to sit at a gas station for hours waiting for their car to charge?
I think this "electric grid can't handle it" is another piece of anti-EV FUD that is not representative of the situation in reality.
Right now, peak electricity usage times are during the day. This is why in most urban areas electricity is cheaper at night: they want to encourage you to distribute your usage more evenly throughout the day.
The NEMA 14-50 (a.k.a. standard appliance outlet that most people plug their dryers into) is a totally fine plug for an EV. It will charge the car up fully overnight. This plug is going to deliver you, at maximum, 40 amps at 220 volts.
Electric dryers often use something like 25 amps at 220 volts (of course it varies by machine). This is not far from the 40 amps we are talking about. So this whole "grid can't handle it" pseudo-panic is sort of like worrying that everyone is going to run their dryer at the same time, times 1.5, at off-peak hours. It is just not a big deal. FUD.
The grid is not a big bucket. The local conditions matter.
Your local neighborhood transformer might be serving only 5 houses. If one or two of them decide to charge an EV every night, the transformer may not get a chance to ever cool down, like it is designed to do.
Oh, hey, this is JM from RAD. Didn't see your user name at first. :)
Re: 220V outlets, it's surprisingly hard to find the true average power consumption by a dryer, now that I just tried. I do know that the heating element in a dryer is usually rated for 5000 watts+, but you have to keep in mind that it doesn't run at a 100% duty cycle, even on high heat. (I can't find anything that talks about what the typical duty cycle on high heat is, so maybe I'll measure mine the next time I dry something.) I'm pretty sure it would more or less nuke your clothes if the dryer dissipated over 5000 watts all the time.
Point being, if an EV charger really does draw 40 amps at 220 volts, that is about twice the real power consumption of a clothes dryer. This is a non-trivial amount of juice. It would be a massive problem if half the automobile-owning households in the US started charging their cars all night long at those rates.
It's not just a matter of you not personally having any use for swappable batteries. It's a matter of electricity not being quite as trivial to generate and distribute as you suggest.
Nobody that I'm aware of, including me, is trying to spread FUD. I would gay-marry Elon Musk, if I were gay. I wish him all the success in the world. But the numbers behind his prediction simply do not work... unless he has something up his sleeve along the lines of the Better Place concept.
40 amps at 200v will completely charge a Roadster in something like 7 hours. I don't know how long for a Model S, but it is probably longer. I am only familiar with the day-in, day-out of the Roadster so I will stick to that mostly.
So the "charge the car all night (7-8 hours) scenario" only makes sense if you need to charge up the battery 100%, i.e. you were on fumes before you plugged it in, which means you drove 200-240 miles the day before. This may be true for some people but it is not going to be true for most people most of the time.
I drive from SF to Berkeley and back most work days, a 25-minute commute each way, and I like to drive it like a sports car, so I use relatively a lot of power for that length of trip. Generally I use about 20% of the Roadster's battery on such a day, so that's probably about 1.5 hours to charge in a 220V outlet. If everyone did that, you would probably want to stagger the charging times, but it is totally doable even with current setups.
I do think that there would be some increased power draw and that we would want to beef up our electricity infrastructure a little. But that is pretty different than what I see as a Republican talking point, which is something like "there is no way that the USA can support everyone plugging in their EV, it's impossible." That is not my experience as an EV driver.
When I was coming up with the dryer analogy I was just using numbers I pulled off the Internet about what people were measuring their dryer's pull at. It's possible dryers just are not very efficient, I don't know! (Though I thought the whole Energy Star thing was supposed to put pressure on that).
And this would be a problem if half the ICE car owning public went out and bought electric cars all in the same month. There will be time to upgrade the distribution grid.
Unless we invent new battery technology, that prediction won't come true. There is simply not enough easily obtainable lithium in the world for the batteries. Lithium production in 2011 was 34 kilotonnes. For 50 million cars you already need ~2500 kilotonnes. So unless we can somehow increase production 70x while keeping prices low, we're going to need something else. Not to mention that at that with the total lithium reserves, we can build just 250 million cars.
According to a 2011 study conducted at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California Berkeley, the currently estimated reserve base of lithium should not be a limiting factor for large-scale battery production for electric vehicles, as the study estimated that on the order of 1 billion 40 kWh Li-based batteries could be built with current reserves.[71] Another 2011 study by researchers from the University of Michigan and Ford Motor Company found that there are sufficient lithium resources to support global demand until 2100, including the lithium required for the potential widespread use of hybrid electric, plug-in hybrid electric and battery electric vehicles. The study estimated global lithium reserves at 39 million tons, and total demand for lithium during the 90-year period analyzed at 12–20 million tons, depending on the scenarios regarding economic growth and recycling rates.[72]
Interesting. Unfortunately the paper is behind a paywall. According to Wikipedia lithium reserves are 13 million tonnes [1], but of course their 39 million could be due to a different interpretation of "reserve". I based my calculation on a Chevy Volt, which uses 1.4kg lithium per kwh for a total of 60kg per 40kwh, perhaps other cars are more efficient in their lithium use.
If we use those figures, 39 million tonnes / 1 billion cars comes down to 39kg per car; not too far off. According to this [2], there were around 60 million cars produced in 2011. Conservatively assuming that that grows to 100 million in 2025, that's 50 million electric cars per year according to Musks prediction. At 39kg per car that is around 2 million tonnes of lithium per year. Not too far off my 2.5 million tonnes. So my point still stands that we have to increase lithium production around 70x just for cars (and consider trucks, cargo ships, motorcycles, farming vehicles etc). Perhaps we will be able to do that without increasing prices significantly, perhaps not.
Better Place has solved this. They lease out the batteries. You drop your old battery off and get a new battery in less time than it takes to fill up a gas tank. They can figure out how many miles you put on the battery pack in any number of ways (even live while you drive via 3G) and bill you on that.
You can also charge the battery on your own. I'd sign up for it even if they billed me the same for charge I supply or they supply.
That's cool for replacement, but the weight of these things is in the X00 kilos range. This is not swappable like a laptop battery. It may weigh up to a quarter ton. =/
Every existing shop and many auto enthusiasts can currently handle that without too much of a problem.
I'd see it as similar to a transmission swap, but more likely simpler.
The average person can't change a tire, or the small 40lb battery in their existing car. It's unlikely they'll try to change a full battery in their new electric vehicle.
As long as it can be replaced and upgraded to keep up with the battery tech, then that's all that's really needed.
I imagine you'd see small forklifts at service stations for that purpose. It would require a standardization effort that I don't believe is happening, though.
It would be great if the batteries were hot-swappable in a user-serviceable fashion and accessible via opening the front and rear car doors to reveal a panel at the bottom with battery bays. The batteries could be approximately the width of a hard drive with the depth of the battery being half the width of the vehicle. You would have perhaps 8 such battery bays accessible from behind each door, for 32 hot-swappable bays in total. A quick search shows that the batteries in a Tesla S weigh about 600 pounds, meaning each one would be 20 pounds; easy for just about anybody to change.
Superconductors have the ability to transfer electrical energy extremely quickly. Which is an ideal characteristic for a battery. I don't know enough about SMESes to say whether they are a good storage solution (assuming we could eventually develop a room temperature one).
They probably don't. Just as there is a critical temperature, Tc, at which superconductors stop superconducting, there is a critical current density, Ic, at which they stop superconducting. That places a limit on the amount of energy you can store in a superconducting loop. Then there is also the consideration that Ic scales as approximately 1/Tc, so high-temperature superconductors have a lower critical current density than low-temperature ones.
The "Supercharger" already works pretty well. It's the first attempt at such a thing. I would expect that maybe subsequent attempts would be even better?
So I don't understand why you are saying "the only way they can possibly make sense" is if the batteries are swappable. There is already sort of an existence proof otherwise, in California, right now.
I think he's referring to 8-year lifetime of the battery pack. Current car economics (used market, resale value, TCO) don't work as well when a few years down the road the car turns into a brick.
Neither the car nor the battery turn into a brick. That's why utilities will offer plenty of money for used batteries once the range is too low for your comfort. Selling batteries to utilities helps to offset the cost of replacement batteries.
70% range on a Leaf or a Tesla battery after eight or ten years is still very valuable for offpeak energy storage applications.
It is a very large assumption that the packs found in all cars will be the choice of utility companies. Electric car manufacturers (full EV or PHEV) cannot even agree on chargers.
To me this idea that utility companies step up is like the age old promise, the check is in the mail. Until a full life cycle plan is shown and incorporated as part of each sale its simply a sales gimmick.
Plus we haven't hit the tip of the iceberg when it comes to new regulations governing these cars. They are new and they are very PC now but laws will come along to deal with them, the first being, how do you tax them since they won't be caught at the pump? Politicians won't let that go easily. Plus we haven't seen how response crews will handle these cars in accidents. Testing is one thing but people tend to wreck cars very differently from how tests are performed.
There is also the incredible cascade effect of electric only cars. (disclosure I work for a major parts distributor) The majority of what automotive stores sell and repair shops fix simply don't exist in these cars. How many years before battery technology pushes more than your corner fuel store out? Jay Leno on his Jay Leno's Garage series recently remarked on how little his nearly hundred year old electric car needs. This will be true for the current and new generations.
Still back to your point, until I see it regulated or guaranteed in contract I don't subscribe to the idea the utilities will step up. There will vastly easier solutions for them, like taking up all those batteries that end up in government vehicles from fleets of buses to cars.
Do you have a link to utilities offering money for those batteries?
Looks like the cost of complete replacement is around $30,000 on Roadster and $50,000 on Model S (discussion here http://www.teslamotors.com/en_EU/forum/forums/replacing-mode..., the poster does assume retail pricing for batteries), so wondering what's the range of "plenty".
Naah, all electric car batteries are replaceable in the sense you are talking about. "Swappable" means you can change them out in a short period of time (10 minutes or less) in lieu of recharging. Completely different concept.
I am big electric engines for cars fan, I just thing we should use fuel cells and fill them with something very similar to gasoline just generated from wind, sun, tides, or nuclear sources.
