Thread: Car Talk
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joveblue
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: Melbourne
 
2009-12-06, 20:06

Quote:
Originally Posted by Chinney View Post
Battery swap technology is a central part of the approach of the Better Place company which is among the world leaders in the practical implementation of electric cars. I suspect that this is what joveblue was remembering.
Yes! Thanks

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kickaha View Post
Until there's a battery swap center on every corner there's now a gas station... you have to carefully plan your routes and nearness to a swap center. That's going to reduce adoption rate, which reduces incentive to create swap stations, which... you see the problem.
That's a very good point. We probably won't see a solution like this work for quite some time. But hopefully we'll see some great advances in battery technology over the next 10 years and we'll almost certainly see the price of petrol go through the roof (especially if a price is put on greenhouse emissions). So in 2020 the economic incentive might be there to help with this. Also, you'd probably mainly really need them along highways and such. You'd plug your car into a charge station at home, work, shopping centres, etc.

Quote:
Secondly, gas is gas is gas. Battery technologies have vastly different discharge profiles. Each car would have to know about each kind of battery technology and know how to best take advantage of it.

Third, battery formats. Consider how many kinds of batteries there are for just cell phones... can you imagine a swap station having to have a couple of every kind of battery out there for every possible model that might pull in? Oy.
Presumably there would have to be some sort of international standard applied here. Obviously that's not going to be a simple task, at all.

[/quote]Finally, you'd have to design the car around a quickly removable battery. They're big (.5mx.5mx2m), they're heavy (600-800kg), and from a vehicle design perspective, best buried deep in the car's center of gravity, under a bit of armor for crash safety. And those are the *forty mile* batteries! How are you going to just swap one of these things out in a few minutes? Heck, again, look at the cell phone. A non-user-replaceable battery in the iPhone means it's thinner, simpler, and a better functional design. Adding quick swapability adds weight, size, and distracts from creating a *car* instead of a battery holder on wheels.[/quote]If the battery is placed underneath the car, like in the YouTube video, that may solve this problem.

There's a lot of challenges to be overcome, for sure, but it could be quite an attractive solution in 10 years time. No solution is going to be ideal.
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