I love the idea of charging and easy to replace batteries.
I have to ask why? I can’t see any positives outside of fleet vehicles and there are plenty of negatives.
Speed, for one. 5 minutes vs 30 minutes to an hour to be fully charged. Makes a big difference for road trips where you need to recharge on the way.
I’m not sure I agree. Lots of EVs have a 250+ mile range. I’d need a 30 minute break after driving that kind of distance.
My wife thinks I’m insane, but my whole family is built where we would drive 10+ hours (710miles~) a couple times a year with only 1 stop at mile like 500 for fuel and a snack. Otherwise we’d just keep going. Some people don’t need a break for a LOOOONNNNGGGG time when driving. Of my friend group (20th people) on road trips only 2/3 need stops every so often. Even my wife has adjusted to my driving nature.
I’d be really interested to see the results of response time testing on drives that long. You might be highly anomalous but most people begin to suffer significant attention and reaction penalties after around an hour that get steadily worse.
I know that when I try do multitask testing (a significant part of driving) after 2 hours of continuous driving my results are like 50% of freshly rested. I’d be surprised if you were anywhere capable of navigating an emergency reliably after 4 hours.
🤔 most of us in my family LOVE driving. Usually when we even needed to think/decompress or just have fun we would hop in a car and just drive. So I’m definitely more in a minority on that front. I suspect we’re just “drivers” compared to others. I just think more people can go more than 250 miles without stopping. It probably also helps that 3 of 4 of us have some level of adhd (medical diag). I think for us driving gives our monkey brain something to do. Like meditation, but worse for the environment. 😅
You really should try testing yourself though. You might be endangering your own and other people’s lives.
Try some stuff like memory, attention, and dual n back before and after (make sure to train for a bit and discard those results to avoid training effects)
It’s not really about how much you like driving
Yeah I can do 10 hour drives also. My partner needs to use the restroom every 30 minutes. If they’ve had any amount of water, it’s every 15 minutes.
The first road trip my wife and I did when we were dating I was like 45 into the drive and she said “I have to pee” right after she had gone at the house. It set me up for a trip where I was stopping about once every 2ish hours or so. She was drinking a ton of water and didn’t realize she should pace herself.
Hey it’s me!
It sucks.
inb4: Yeah, been to doctors, had tests done, had scans done, blahblah, apparently there isn’t anything wrong I’m just cursed with…if I drink something I will have to pee like 66.67% of that amount back out relatively soon.
It sucks for drives. It sucks for flights. It sucks for movies at movie theaters. It sucks for plays. I typically just go on the verge of dehydrated so I don’t have to pee at all.
I’m sorry. I know it’s quite a burden.
Lol I just drove 14 hours one way for thxgiving. Waiting 30+ min every 250 miles is a deal breaker… I can gas and piss in less than ten min once every 400 miles. You’d add like 5 hours to that drive at least. Just waiting for charges.
People don’t want to hear stuff like that but it is a real disadvantage.
And I own an EV.
I mean, you just drove what, 800 miles in one day? Youre an extreme outlier, seeing as most people drive around 40.
Assuming 3 stops, you already waited around 30 min on that trip, but youre saying 90 makes it impossible for you?
The extra 1hr for charging vs gas makes your 14hr one way trip into a 15hr one way trip, and that’s the unbearable part? 14hr is totally workable, 15hr is a deal breaker?
“Mom, I would love to do my normal 14hr drive, but now that i have an EV and its 15hrs, I just can’t bear to do it?”
I don’t know why you’d trust a giant battery, absolutely vital to the operation of your car, to some random 3rd party service. To be arbitrarily replaced. And need to rely on it for X miles. Particularly when your use case where you’d even want a quick swap is traveling outside a regular charges’ range.
Edit - forgot the potential for catastrophic failure. Batteries can go boom.
Only in this instance it’s not a third party, it’s the car manufacturer. It’s just like Tesla and their super chargers. Only these guys are replacing the battery instead of charging it.
Does the car warranty extend to cover the replacement battery just as if it was the original battery? Given an EV battery is a pretty significant part of the cost of the entire vehicle I wouldn’t trust a swapped battery unless the manufacturer made it very clear that they would treat it as if it was the original battery if any issues arose with it. The last thing I would want is to have to fight with Tesla or whoever if the replacement battery fails and they claim it’s not covered by their warranty.
If you watched the video, you would know you don’t actually own the battery but lease it from the manufaturer.
All I did was watch a video at way to late at night.
Uh. It’s literally a 3rd party company that’s currently doing a single manufacturer atm, with explicitly (detailed in the video) plans to expand to other manufacturers.
For how much people seem to know about catalytic converter theft, they seem eager to have an easily removed battery. And full trust in no bad actors finding a way to exploit these stations for the metals in the batteries.
Repairability. A battery should be able to be replaced.
Having options is good for the consumer.
Aren’t EV batteries good for the life of the vehicle? Why would you want to replace one?
You have that backwards. The vehicle is good for the life of the battery. We could design EV where the shell and motor last 30 years, and the battery just swaps out every decade or so.
That’s already how it works
Batteries in EVs are replacable, it’s just not a quick and simple process at the moment
Very few cars now last 30 years. The US average is 12.5, which is about how long EV batteries are expected to last.
But you still have it backwards.
We could very easily design and build a car that lasts 30 years. But we don’t, because manufacturers don’t want them to last that long.
Evs don’t have transmissions, or complicated engines, and the wear on brakes is much less with regenerative braking.
Other things like air conditioning and interior coverings could be easily servicable
Why should the life of an ev by limited by its battery?
Cars get in accidents all the time, many of which will total it. Over time, the probability of that reaches 1.0. Most cars will not make it to 30 years regardless of how well they’re made.
You have that backwards.
I don’t think so. Think of the engineering challenges. The battery would have to be a separate structure so more weight, less range/performance, more wear on tires and brakes, less rigidity unless you add even more weight, etc.
Batteries can be replaced now. It’s just a time consuming job but one that might only need doing once.
Can’t tell if this is a serious comment or not… Sure a battery will last as long as the car, but it’s of limited use of it only holds 30% of its original capacity after 7 or 8 years. Sure. It’ll do 75 miles, so still useful for city drivers, but not for its intended use.
EV batteries lose about 1-2‰ per year. At the high end, that would be down to 78% after 10 years. A 300mi EV would still do 230mi.
Yep! Thats about what I think. I will not buy a car that are like most modern day cell phones. If the battery dies, I want to be able to replace it. Even better if there is a easy charging station like the above and giving the consumer more options.
So far most ev batteries do much better than cell phones, as long as they have cooling.
Cars need to repairable. Plus lithium fails quite a bit.
If a car can work 10+ years thats a good thing. And most lithium based batteries will not last that long.
I don’t think that’s a fair statement in relation to EV batteries. Most of them are proving to last well over 10 years.
I find this kind of comments so stupid. The technology is well beyond proven. Logistics have had swappable batteries for over 15 years since the time of acid batteries. Nio is a rental company first and for them the model seems to be working. It’s compelling for road trips specially since most of the charging stations are broken most of the time and for extremely dense cities where people aren’t allowed to access power plugs at parking spaces. I mean, on the suburbanite hellscape, charging at home will always make more sense, but the US is not the entirety of the world. This things seem to be ripe for success in Asia and Europe.
It’s compelling for road trips specially since most of the charging stations are broken most of the time
Do you think the battery swap station won’t be broken too?
Sure it can be broken, but since the company runs it and it’s not a set and forget facility, they have a higher incentive to keep it serviced, specially as the company owns the batteries. Tesla’s answer to broken stations is usually “we don’t care use the one next to it that’s derated and only charges at the lowest speed”. While apparently this facilities can fit 3 or 4 swap stations on the same space. One station out of order adds no wait time, and as a last resort it can still have a regular charging station next to it. I fail to see how people settle so quickly on the status quo that companies force them to, and as soon as anything vaguely threatens the status quo they purportedly hate, they jump and attack the alternative. Having options is a good thing, having multiple companies trying different things is a good thing, silver bullets don’t exist, we are all in this together, what is not good is a zero-sum mindset where only monopolistic one-size-fits-all offers can exist.
I find this kind of comments so stupid.
Nice.
That’s where I stopped reading.
20 below and you can swap out the battery quickly. Can’t charge it if it’s dead.
I believe battery and charging technology will eventually overcome the need for this.
Probably not.
Battery energy density is just about as high as it will ever get while still being a fraction of the density of gasoline. You can’t simply dump more energy into it, physics is the limit here.
You can maybe charge a bit faster but I think we’re hitting a ceiling there as well.
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It’s more like, we’re approaching the limit according to our current knowledge of physics, which is obviously a still evolving field itself.
With current materials - an important detail.
Yeah material science is a cool and rapidly evolving field
“Welp, we invented everything. Universe is over, I guess.”
That, and the internal combustion engine will never replace horses.
Well, it didn’t. If cars replaced horses why are there still horses? Checkmate atheists.
So what you’re saying is that the only thing between you and imaginary devices that break physics is just your willpower?
Because that’s not how the world (read: the entire universe) works. You can want all you want but physics is physics, you obey those laws like it or not.
Going “but Elon Musk” isn’t helping either, it only makes it worse as a known incompetent liar will make lots of ridiculous claims that never become reality
Your comment is great! I’ve never seen such a calamity of fallacies. Well done. My only point was that doubting the ability of people to solve problems with technological bottlenecks has not gone well by pointing out a famous example of that, but you invented a whole world of misinterpretation that doesn’t seem to apply to my point at all.
I hate how the internet made people vaguely aware of the concept of logical fallacies which makes them take said concept and run with it without understand how it works.
I’m telling you that you CAN’T break physics and that there are a lot of “innovations” out there that haven’t done anything and never will be anything because their very premise breaks physics and you start ranting about fallacies. I guess you don’t know how to say “I don’t know about this subject”?
Willpower is great, but there are things that either simply aren’t possible, or literally plain stupid on an engineering level (hello Hyperloop!) If you find that fact a fallacy then I have a bridge to sell you.
Yeah that’s right, the issue isn’t you making broad assumptions about a one-line comment and going off on some rant about Elon Musk and other imaginary arguments you read into my - again - one-line comment that made a simple and specific point. No no, the issue is that people on the internet don’t understand how fallacies work. I have to ask, for you to have reached that opinion, how many times have people called your arguments fallacious, and as a follow up, are you sure you aren’t the one that can’t properly identify fallacies, rather than… everyone else?
I dream of F-Zero type charging
F-zero?
Nintendo game. Cars charge up at high speeds over a magnetic track.
Something something ain’t gonna happen
You lack imagination. What if they had multiple smaller batteries, as some cell phones do? The big reason it’s not more common in phones is that space is a massive premium, which is less of a concern in cars. Weight is a bigger factor here.
EV batteries have hundreds of cells that could potentially be charged in parallel. It’s even possible to do battery swaps one cell at a time, albeit that’s unlikely.
And these are just possibilities that I came up with as a non-EE. I’m sure they have their flaws, but it would bypass those physical limits.
This is already what they do. Dry batteries that are bigger than about your phone are generally comprised a whole lot of battery cells. If you ever take em apart, you’d basically see the cells are made up of what looks like a whole bunch of AA batteries (but larger).
They do charge “in parallel”, but that’s limited by how much electricity you can feed through into the system as a whole, and doesn’t speed up the process, it just makes them all fill at about the same rate.
Making the cells swappable is basically what this video is about.
I mean separately. Why limit it to a single charging system? What if you had 2 (DC) charging ports, each capable of only charging half of the cells? Many heavy duty trucks have 2 gas tanks, each with a separate fuel door. They can be filled by 2 pumps simultaneously, cutting refueling time in half. What about 4? 10?
Obviously there would be downsides (cost being a big one), but it would enable faster charging.
I mean, this is still more or less what the fast charging standards do; they’re pouring more power into it faster with higher bandwidth cables and sectioned charging.
The level 3 fast charger is basically the equivalent of 4 power cords from your wall. Also, adding more and more hardware and things for it will effectively make the electronics more complicated, which means more expensive, difficult to manufacture and repair
But also, as you scale this up more and more you’ll start running into issues that make it difficult to start pulling more power; energy from the grid isn’t infinite
Ugh, again…
Your imagination cannot break physics and just because you can imagine it that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea or that it would ever work on an engineering level.
Take Hyperloop. Anyone with a basic insight into engineering that takes more than two seconds to think about it can conclude that it’s a horribly stupid idea that will never come to reality, yet people have invested billions in it, universities jumped the Elon band wagon because… I don’t know why but for ducks sake, it’s stupid and will NEVER work. Meanwhile in that decade that the US was playing with the Hyperloop shit, china built out thousands of kilometers of high speed rail that actually works and the US is still stuck with the laughably sad Amtrak toy trains. What has Hyperloop done in a decade and tens of billions of dollars? NOTHING.
Just because Elon musk says it’s his idea (it wasn’t, but he lies all the time so there is that) doesn’t mean it’s a great idea.
Batteries as they currently are will NOT get any more efficient. “Yes but” No. Won’t happen “BUT” No. We might be able to squeeze a few % extra here and there but a doubling or anything like that won’t happen.
We might get a new energy storage solution where maybe we store electrons in a plasma cloud in a container or something (this idea is pulled out of my ass right here and now), THAT would be a revolutionary new energy storage that maybe could give us double, tripple storage capacity.
But to give you an idea of energy storage: even the best battery out here still doesn’t get beyond 10-20% of the energy density of gasoline. You want an electrical plane? Sure, make battery energy density about 5x better (that’s a 500% increase) than it currently is and we’ll talk. Until then, it’s physically possible but practically stupid as your batteries will use 50-70% if your aircraft. That is not mentioning what will happen in case of fire. Kerosine is flammable and a problem, but kill the airflow and it’s out. Batteries, on the other hand, are a removed. A batteries catches fire and it will go until it’s done. A battery catching fire in an airplane is a problem. An airplane on batteries with one of those batteries catching fire is a “you’re fucked” situation. You won’t survive, you’ll get roasted. So again, engineering wise things aren’t that easy.
Take Elon’s SpaceX. Everyone wows it for doing stuff badly that NASA did great 50 years ago, I am not kidding. If NASA did as bad as SpaceX 50 years ago they would have been disbandoned, but SpaceX has deep pockets, apparently, and so people applaud fuckup after fuckup. It’s painful to watch.
I’m dumping on Elon now as he is the biggest abuser of “if I imagine I can then I can” bit he is far from the only one. Dreaming is fine but if you want to make it real then you HAVE to comply with science and engineering. You can solve complicated or hard problems with interesting solutions (flying an airplane with static wings, hello Orvilles)
Have an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out, please.
Anyone have knowledge of Nio and the long term viability? Are they targeting the US, or just China and Europe?
EDIT: found some info that Nio is targeting selling in the US in 2025.
It will be nice to have the options for EVs.
