this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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I'm still dreaming of seeing EVs with flexible battery space, which users can fill according to their needs.
Like a car comes with space for 10x 10 kWh slots.
If 20 kWh serve your usual needs, the other spaces remain empty.
And if you plan longer trips and don't want to recharge each 100 miles, you put in additional batteries. Those batteries don't need to be owned, but can be rented.
Ideally there are lots of battery rental stations, where you can get charged batteries and instead of recharging the batteries in the EV, the rent'n'swap stations recharge them.
During (EV) wise low use times, these stations can provide a buffer to the energy grid.
...one can dream...
Do not encourage businesses to rent more necessities to us.
You'll own nothing and be happy happy happyyyyy
Id sooner reenact the french revolution by myself than allow neo feudalism to take full control.
The good news is there's only 8 of them, the bad news is they have robot dogs with machine guns on their backs
Then buy it. No need to rent it then.
The main focus was on flexible energy packs not on the renting, although I'd find it convenient if done right.
You have far more faith in capitalists to do the right thing than I. They'll put this shit behind user hostile DRM the same that Disney does for drink refills.
I've seen a video with some electric mopeds that had very easily removable batteries. Like you just pop it out and exchange it at a gas-station equivalent.
It'd be ideal if we could settle on a few sizes - kind of like how we have AA, AAA, C, D, etc. batteries. One can be for such mopeds, one larger for cars and some smaller ones to fill various otherwise empty spaces in a car.
So if your battery goes bad or just want to change its tech you can do that.
For normal city driving you carge the car at home. If you go on a trip make a few stops for charging. If you're really in a rush, you can always pay a premium for swapping your drained battery for a prefilled one at a gas station equivalent.
To me this seems like the ideal solution for EVs and I wonder what facts make it unrealistic.
This is precisely where we're going to get fucked, though, because the modern pathological mindset of every tech company now is to try to build their own proprietary walled fiefdom to try to lock in ~~suckers~~ ~~recurring revenue sources~~ customers and they won't make their stuff compatible with anyone else's unless the government forces them to. Maybe if we're lucky there will be a decade or two of highly public bitching (see also: the Tesla charging connector) until someone eventually capitulates.
Different battery chemistries have different charging requirements. So you'd have to have more complex charger/battery interaction requirements. Not insurmountable but another layer of standardization
Yup, I've been thinking along those lines as well. I can't believe that every manufacturer is doing their own standards again...
You know, putting and removing batteries would be a very tedious task and I really doubt that many owners will bother with it.
It wouldn't be necessary very often unless you'd want to take advantage of swapping instead of reloading.
also it's not a trivial task to engineer for swapable EV batteries, doing so comes with a whole host of disadvantages / compromises that don't make sense for most (I guess) consumers right now. It's not very different from the phone battery issue, except on a huge scale and with much more severe consequences if things go wrong
Yes, you need to make the puncture proof, they are a fire hazard if stored at home, they degrade over time and if left empty long enough might not even work, etc.
The enginnering part is for sure one of the reasons we don't see that idea in the wild (yet?).
The fire hazard at home and degradation when stored full or empty (speaking of lithion ion based batteries here) go away if you lean on the rental approach.
Wouldn't it be nice to save investment and weight by using the required amount of battery capacity while still being able to extend the range of your car easily when needed?
I mean, US Cellular had a free battery swap program for a while. If you were a subscriber and your phone battery was low, you could go into any store and they'd swap you out for a fully charged battery for free. I presume they just ate the cost of damaged or degraded batteries as part of it. I only used it a couple times, but it was kinda nice.