Why can’t we keep battery stock at charging stations and replace the batteries in the car instead of waiting for the battery to charge? It would be much faster and many electric bikes and skateboards have this opportunity. I can understand that the current structure of the car might not allow but why is it not possible or if it is possible what is the issue being faced?
In: Engineering
Tesla did it, set up a station and the results were that nobody actually wanted it.
First, charging isn’t really a problem for EVs. You charge your car at night, every night, so typically you start the day at 100%. If you need to charge during a trip, you take a bathroom break and eat during the charging. So for the most part, it very rarely bothers people. If you’re commuting regularly and rarely do very long trips then the time when you wait for it to charge may be essentially never.
The second issue is that the battery is an important, expensive part of your car. And swapping your new, well cared for battery for one that may have been abused wouldn’t be a good tradeoff for a bit less waiting. People would need to be convinced that this downside is really worth it, and so far it seems they’re not buying it.
The second part may also set up some perverse incentives — the best time to swap your battery for somebody else’s is if you’ve abused your. And since you’re going to swap, there’s little incentive to take care of it. So a battery swap system may result in mostly abused and old batteries being swapped around.
It may be a better idea for some sort of industrial environment like delivery trucks, where there’s central management of a fleet of vehicles, and there are policies and monitoring, and consistent practices that ensure that the bad outcomes don’t happen. But you can’t do that with random people.
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