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The big difference between Gas and electric vehicles is that all electric vehicles will be able to be charged while when not in use at home. This will mean that you will only have to change batteries for extend trips.
Anybody who owns an electric golf cart already knows the drill.
Wallmart sized battery changing stations might be the thing of the future on the interstate but not so much in your neighborhood.
actually you will still have wal mart sized battery stations in the cities. think about it for a minute, if electric cars get enough range to actually travel long distances on the interstate, lets say 150 miles, then the drive from phoenix to tucson means that you will have to either stay overnight in tucson, or head to the battery changing station and swap batteries before heading back to phoenix. or driving around los angeles, it would be very easy to put 150 miles down in one day, you might need to hit the battery changing station to "fill up" before you get home. you wont need as many changing stations as gas stations, but you will have them just the same.
as to the difference in electrical needs, not a problem. you build the batteries to fit the smallest vehicles, say a prius, and you put in more batteries for larger vehicles. an all electric F150 might use three battery packs for instance. each battery pack would have identical mounts and connectors to make swapping the out easy.
Having a standard battery is a great idea.. With americans they love diversity too much. Just like with their cell phones.Now everyone even gets to pick certain apps(more cost) . Americans demand cars with apps. They dont give a ratts ass about cost but yet complain about it if they cant buy it.The average yuppy isnt going to drive a car that uses the same friggin battery that blue collar workers have in their cars..no way
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or driving around los angeles, it would be very easy to put 150 miles down in one day, you might need to hit the battery changing station to "fill up" before you get home.
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Many years ago I worked with a guy in LA that leased one of the EV1 electric cars. He always wanted to use it to go to meetings at various sites in the area but it was such a hassle to find out where charging stations were and to schedule things so we would not get stuck waiting to get home.
I may be spoiled but I like to use lights, heater, AC, and wipers when I need them and still have range and quick refuel. I have experienced the hassle of EVs and am not in a hurry to use them again.
Too few of you are thinking outside the box IMO. Electric cars are not gasoline cars. You top off your tank after every trip in an EV. You do not top up your tank after every trip in a gasoline car. You drive until you are near empty and take on a full load of "charge". The difference is key. The Tesla S has a 165 mile range in standard configuration and there is a 300 mile battery available. Do you really need battery swapping capability with that kind of range? I think not. More and more charging stations are popping up around town. They can get you home if unforeseen wind or road conditions or whatever, eat into the usual range of your battery. Batteries that can take power as fast as the grid can throw it at them are a more practical design goal than attempting to figure out how to "swap" batteries that can weigh 800 pounds. The average driver goes weeks, months and even years before they will ever take a trip that would tax the range of a Tesla Model S standard battery. For the once in awhile exception? Try this: a small "powercart" that you would tow behind your car only when you need extended range. It could be as simple as another battery or maybe even a medium size gas (gasp) generator. Any of the ideas I have mentioned will work more with the way people work, than figuring out a way of practically swapping out batteries. Some people abuse their batteries, some don't. Do you want to be the guy (or gal) who gets the battery that some mouth breather trashed on his last trip and its going to leave you stranded on your way to a job interview? I thought not.
H
Last edited by Leisesturm; 10-09-2012 at 08:42 AM..
Reason: clarity
Many years ago I worked with a guy in LA that leased one of the EV1 electric cars. He always wanted to use it to go to meetings at various sites in the area but it was such a hassle to find out where charging stations were and to schedule things so we would not get stuck waiting to get home.
I may be spoiled but I like to use lights, heater, AC, and wipers when I need them and still have range and quick refuel. I have experienced the hassle of EVs and am not in a hurry to use them again.
I didn't think this was an EV or not EV kind of thread. TBB you are, in fact, spoiled, and that will change and soon. When it simply isn't something you have a choice about... ...The Tesla S has every modern convenience a car could have and it does not cost anymore than a dozen internal combustion cars I could name. What's your argument now? 71% of the oil the world uses goes into transportation devices. Oil makes a lot of very useful things besides gasoline. Medicine will be VERY severely impacted when the worlds oil supplies are at critical levels. A migration now to electric grid power for cars, trucks, buses and diesel locomotives means more oil tomorrow for medical and agricultural needs.
The Tesla S has a 165 mile range in standard configuration and there is a 300 mile battery available. Do you really need battery swapping capability with that kind of range? I think not.
More and more charging stations are popping up around town. They can get you home if unforeseen wind or road conditions or whatever, eat into the usual range of your battery.
The average driver goes weeks, months and even years before they will ever take a trip that would tax the range of a Tesla Model S standard battery.
For the once in awhile exception? Try this: a small "powercart" that you would tow behind your car only when you need extended range. It could be as simple as another battery or maybe even a medium size gas (gasp) generator.
Any of the ideas I have mentioned will work more with the way people work, than figuring out a way of practically swapping out batteries. Some people abuse their batteries, some don't. Do you want to be the guy (or gal) who gets the battery that some mouth breather trashed on his last trip and its going to leave you stranded on your way to a job interview? I thought not.
H
Not it doesn't that is the advertised range. It does not get that. If you add in a few hills, wind, cold weather more than one person in the car, a bit of age on the batteries, use of heat, wipers, radio or AC. . . pretty soon that range is reduced to "I cannot quite make it to work and back on one charge"
That is great, but If I had six hours to sit at a charging station I could just walk home. They have quick charging batteries, but they do not last very long. Still it takes half an hour of charging and a lot of electricity.
Actually making smaller lighter batteries and simply using more of them is already being done and has been for years. Some older electric cars run on batteries the same size as car batteries. They weigh about 15 pounbds not 800.
No. I woud exceed the actual range of an S pretty much every day, at least in the winter. That is why I gave up ont he idea of trying to find a used one someday. You forgot to mention the Tesla S with decent options is about $90,000. It is a really remarkable car, but really it is a toy for rich people.
My brother looked into this. He is an electric car nut (he has two of them). It is impractical right now becuase the reduced range from the added weight results in little or no net added range. His little car could not tow anything. The truck could tow a small generator, but you also need fuel for the generator. The combined wieght woudl reduce the range of the batteries dramatically, then you have to factor in the cost, maintenance storage and safety issues. This is nto an original idea, it has been considered and rejected a hundred times over. However a small built in generator that runs on gasoline is practical. In fact they already have that. It is in a car called Chevvy Volt.
You are not more likely to miss your interview with a battery than you are to run out of gas and miss the interview. Inside electric cars you have various guages and meters that tell you how much power you have left, the range, and sometimes the condition of your battery. These meters are notoriously inaccurate (but then so is the gas guage in many cars), but they are improving. Even with inaccurate meters, they give you decent warning. It is not like the existing all electric cars are sitting along the road all over the place because someone ran out of power by surpise. LIke anything you have to keep an eye on your range and do not run out. This is true whether ti is a swap battery system, your own battery (like you are promoting) or gasoline. However it would be a bigger problem with the system that you are advocating becuase the quick charge batteries fail faster and fail suddenly with less wanring than with deep cycle batteries.
Join an electric car club and you will learn all kinds of things about batteries. One of whch is that a computer cna test a battery and determine its condition in a matter of seconds. I am not sure how someone would "abuse" a battery in any event. However there are several practical options. Probably the most practical is consumers woudl not own the batteries, the service stations would own them. Thus, when a battery becmoes worn out, it is merely taken out of service and the repalcement cost is rolled into the price of swapping. Another less practical alternative that woudl still work would be to test the discharged batteries on the spot and charge the consumer based on the condition of their turned in batteries vs the condition of the replacement batteries they are getting. This is less practical simply because you would never know what you will pay for a swap. It might be $18 one time and $180 the next. It is probably better to just spread to cost of replacement batteries to everyone in the overall cost of swapping/recharge. Just like insurance and warranties spread the cost of people not taking care of their cars to those who do take car of their cars, or tax and redistrubute charging to cost of supporitng lazy people to those who work hard and or take risks. It is already accepted in our society, so it woudl nto be a problem. It is a cost you have to bear evertually anyway. Thus rather than paying to replace all of your batteries at an astronomical price, you merly pay for replacement gradually each time you charge up.
The biggest issue I see is simply we do nto have enough power. The only practical solution is more nuclear plants. (Don't even bother saying windmills, all of the windmills in the US do not even manage the output of two nuclear plants.)
One thing that will help is cars starting to make inroads into generating their own power. The Tesla S for example has solar collectors to power some of the accessories. Pretty much all of the cars have braking regeneration.
as to the difference in electrical needs, not a problem. you build the batteries to fit the smallest vehicles, say a prius, and you put in more batteries for larger vehicles. an all electric F150 might use three battery packs for instance. each battery pack would have identical mounts and connectors to make swapping the out easy.
An all electric F150... ... why? See, that right there is the final piece of it. This is where even the Telsa visionaries get it wrong, wrong, wrong. Internal combustion vehicles were and are designed around a fuel that has an energy density of like 40+ MegaJoules/kg. A lithium battery, the current state of the art if you will, is .42 MegaJoules/kg. I bolded the decimal point in front of the 42 so no one could miss it. You don't have to be a physicist to see that the difference in energy density is immense! Taking a car designed to run on gasoline, ripping out the gas guts and stuffing in an electric motor, controller and battery gets you a vehicle with a battery that weighs as much as the vehicle does! Sick. And not in the West Coast usage of the word. Successful electric vehicles will one day be based on the work that is now being done on human powered vehicles. Weight and aerodynamics are VERY important in designing a vehicle that will be powered only by human muscles. Putting as little as 3 or 4 horsepower of electric motor power into one of those puppies gets you supercar performance levels of acceleration and speed. Of course such a vehicle isn't practical for a run to Home Depot, but it can certainly get you to the office every morning and home again at hight. Do you really need to fire up a 300 hp truck just to go to the Flying J for Mountain Dew and pork rinds?? Change can't come soon enough...
As long as we require cars to survive accidents from getting hit by those heavy trucks or immoveable objects, cars WILL weigh a bunhc. No getting around it except with very expensive exotic materials. So saying that we will se featherweight vehicles powered by small batteries with small electric motors is a fallacy. But I like the rest of your posts on the subject, especially about the high charge rate batteries vs swappable batteries.
And recently Motor trend, IIRC, tested teh Tesla S and with the medium battery pack, got 265 miles of range before needing a charge, and Tesla's quick home charger recharged the car in 4 hours. Tesla is installing many rapid charger stations around the country along major routes that wil bring the cars up to 80% capacity in as little as an hour, so if you wanted to make a trip from say, New York to DC and back, you're only going to add about an hour round trip to your time vs a normal car.
Yes, the Tesla is an expensive car, but it's no more expensive than a Porsche Panamera or Mercedes S class or BMW 7 series, and we see a lot of those on the road. And like all tech, it goes to the wealthy first who like playing with the newest stuff, then the tech trickles down from there. Look at how plasma TVs were $10k playtoys of the rich just a few short years ago and now they are $1k or less and avaialble in WalMart for the average person to buy.
PEVs will not drop in price like plasma TVs. Nor improve in capacity/power/efficiency like computers do. The rate of improvement in batteries is painfully slow. We still don't have a laptop that can run all day on a charge nor a phone that can run a week.
No doubt for some people today's PEVs can meet their needs for 95% of their driving.
I agree that fast charging batteries seem like a better answer than replacing some yet-to-be built standardized battery.
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Many years ago I worked with a guy in LA that leased one of the EV1 electric cars. He always wanted to use it to go to meetings at various sites in the area but it was such a hassle to find out where charging stations were and to schedule things so we would not get stuck waiting to get home. 
