The batteries in this car are not easily replaceable I believe. This is one of the problems of this solution - coming up with a size and spec standard.
One of the issues is the battery is the heaviest part of the car, and tend to be pretty large. Most EVs today are basically built around the battery, using it as a foundation that everything else attaches to.
Making it replaceable means sacrificing range, because the battery must be smaller and there's more weight for a frame to hold the battery pack(s).
This is in addition to the more practical problems such as standardizing packs, network of swap stations, ownership of the batteries. If the packs are big you need a machine at every station (which can break), but if they're small enough for a driver to swap you sacrifice even more range and increase other potential problems like theft.
There is a fundamental problem that these are highly complex highly integrated system. The cell is totally structural and glued together in a sandwich that is literally as hard as a brick.
You simply can not replace individual cells or individual models.
The level of replacement is a the whole battery pack. Anything else makes very little sense.
Your model is basically, putting a box in a box in box and then adding a huge amount of complexity on all layers to make it possible to cheaply disassembly. You are gone have a far heavier car, that is far, far more complex to build and far more prone to actually breaking.
Right now AFAIK batteries are placed deep in the guts of the car, cf the "electric skateboard" design. This is because they are large and heavy so you have to spread the weight around.
It might be possible to have some of the battery packs replaceable and some fixed, so that you can get to 40% charge or so instantly if you need it. I'm a bit more pessimistic on getting the car makers to standardize on a battery size, especially as long as battery technology is a competitive advantage.
The thing you are missing is that currently, batteries are built in to the structure of the vehicle. To do otherwise would necessarily reduce the size of the battery significantly, as now the battery needs to fit in a convenient to remove location, and all the parts necessary to enable insertion/removal of the battery would take up space. Not to mention that the batteries are wickedly heavy, too heavy to be lifted by a single person, so there would need to be a machine to swap them, which takes up real estate at the gas station, and just generally complicates things.
Maybe there will be swappable batteries eventually, or one part of the battery will be swappable, but as far as I understand thats not coming soon.
Now, this probably isn't for the average person, an independent dealer or a resourceful (and careful) car owner could easily replace batteries much much cheaper.
I don't see swappable batteries in the future. Those things weigh 500kg or more. Sure you could theoretically build a machine which is capable of swapping it but that's a big bit of infrastructure and the constraints it would impose on the design of the car would be huge.
That said, I do have hopes for more standardisation in battery form factors. I'd like for there to come a day when changing a battery is no more hassle than say having a new exhaust installed currently.
The size of battery needed to propel a full-size car makes swapping mechanically prohibitive. It would be like swapping a 4U rackmount server loaded with HDDs.
I wonder if it would be easier to switch to say a part swappable battery, rather than try and make the whole thing swappable. Something smaller, but with a reasonable range, say 50 miles, might allow for a smaller ejection port on the car and possibly even light enough to handle by a person.
Assuming everyone's selling it back I'd imagine there have to be easily swappable batteries then to deal with the increased wear. At least so it's not a big operation for the dealer. I wonder how much more difficult this would make car designs...
Why do you say the batteries cannot be replaced? Swapping a battery literally takes five minutes. The cost of a new one is high, but will likely come down.
As for why these cars exist, it's simple: they're awesome cars. They're powerful and quiet and have advanced technology. Never mind environmental concerns, not having to visit the gas station is just very convenient.
Not emitting (local) pollution is a nice bonus, but it's pretty far down the list.
Absolutely. If the battery were easily swappable, either by me or a low cost service center, AND a promise of bigger batteries was made, I'd probably bite. But as it sits, it seems like batteries are very central to the car and rather cost prohibitive to swap out.
What about changing out the whole battery? (You no more own a battery but you rent one from the gas station.) The infrastructure is hard to build, it's not easy to standardize in a future proof way (The same battery or at least very few different models of battery have to fit every car and they should be replaceable within minutes in some automatable way.) but I still think that the idea is very appealing.
That's a brilliant solution to the problem for cars that aren't Teslas, which has something like 1800 batteries lining its cabin floor. I don't think they'd be easily swapped.
For cars that don't implement batteries this way, I'm wondering how they allow for non-floor-mounted installations preventing the batteries from destroying their handling.
Further, how are the filling stations expected to deal with the variety of non-standard battery types on the market?
User-replaceable batteries by law might be a better first step. Heck, maybe even some standard sizes for mobile device batteries (and while we're at it, also EV batteries... some sort of standard 'battery module' used by most/all vehicles would hugely help reuse/repair/recycling/upgrades).
Unfortunately some OEM's have decided that structural batteries are the way of the future. Real difficult replace something that's a integral structural member of the car
I think the great failure of the electric car industry is how little effort was put into replaceable batteries.
Imagine if all the cars used a set of standard sized battery packs, engineer an interface where they can be easily replaced, size them so they can be easily manhandled(about 10 kilograms 20 pounds). Then you could stop at the service station, pay the fee, pull your empty packs, and replace them with charged packs. you would be on your way and the service station would charge the packs for a future customer. Something like the batteries for power tools.
The main point is that battery packs would become a commodity, easily acquired interchangeable and everywhere.
And how many people drive more than 300km per day AND don't have the time to wait 50 minutes, but only got 5? The replaceable car batteries is technically possible (heck, everything is possible with engineering), but totally useless.
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