Yes and no. No need to hot swap massive EV batteries. Rapid is fast enough. But yes so the EV can be upgraded. The batteries go obsolete quicker than they degrade. So make it so we can swap the batteries and keep the rest running. In fact, just right-to-repair the whole car. In fact, the whole everything!
Hot Swapping batteries is actually surprisingly good for the life of the battery if done well.
Rapid charging the battery does do permenant damage over time especially if you fast charge every time. Whereas if you can hot swap a battery and have a suitable stockpile of them you can trickle charge the battery over a couple of hours instead of 30 mins and prolong the overall lifespan of the battery. Even slowing down the charge rate to 1 hour reduces wear on the battery significantly. Plus, without time pressure from a customer, more time could be taken to replace damaged cells or blocks in a battery so that one pack will more effectively use the whole battery up instead of throwing away perfectly good cells.
See, for me, I rapid charge like once a month. All the rest of the time I use my home charger or even a granny lead. 10A granny charging is absolutely fine overnight. But for the size of the E-Berlingo, the battery is a bit small and I know all kind of new batteries are coming. More kWh for the same weight/size, less degradation, safer, etc etc. If I knew the car was designed with battery replacement in mind, I’d worry a lot less about it being obsoleted prematurely. These cars are all black boxed stuck together. It’s not built with repairing and upgrading in mind.
The batteries don’t live in isolation. There are other pieces that are dependent, whether for basic function or for calibration.
Example: Chevy issued a recall for mislabeling some Bolts as N2.1 vs N2.2. The fix is a sharpie to fix the label, and “reprogramming the Hybrid Powertrain Control Module 2”. I could find no information on either of these chemistries. Dropping in a LiFePO4 would require at least the same, and possibly more.
Now, if you’re suggesting simply swapping a matching replacement part (obsolete as it might be), then I’m on board with that
But the economics is much harder if batteties aren’t unique to each EV. (They aren’t completely of course, the guts of my E-Berlingo are shared across a number of others.) EVs, like a lot else, should be designed with maintaining and upgrading in mind. Especially with parts like batteries which are in such evolutionary flux.
Battery swapping is common practice in China. Far as I know, these swaps aren’t for huge capacity batteries, and moreso designed for smaller ones. Takes about as long as filling a sedan tank with fuel. We could have this technology, but there’s not really a push for it.
Right - I wouldn’t benefit from such a thing either. The market exists in China probably due to the density of people living in apartment buildings without access to home based charging.
That is something that I wish would come true. This would also open EVs to the industry in some new ways. Currently it kinda sucks if you have machines that have to be able to run the whole day without big interruptions. When you’re able to just swap the batteries in like 5 Minutes this machines don’t have to rely on fossil fuels that much and are open to be replaced by electric ones.
What I’m thinking about are machines like tractors for farming. During the summer it happens that they are running for 8+ hours without interruptions. Building a battery this big will be quite challengening. However, if you’re able to swap out the batteries after like 2 hours and then continue with work you effectively solved one of the biggest problems with not that much of a hassle.
These are all design constraints that need to be taken into account. Most EVs these days have heating and cooling on the battery pack, for the reasons you mention. Adequate protection for it is also certainly solvable.
Extended use is a more challenging need. I’ll assume for a moment that the machinery uses as much power as an EV at highway speed, although I’m pulling that assumption out of nowhere. That would mean a comparable battery only lasts ~5 hours, and you need it to last 15+ (with a full charge happening overnight). Farm machinery is already very heavy - would the extra 4,000lbs for a triple-size battery be a solution? What about a battery trailer that is easily swapped? That could also create a different form of vendor lock-in, just like your power tools. I really doubt the same machinery is used all year long. Branded batteries are an effective way to keep customers from jumping ship on their next purchase.
Does the same machinery have to run all at once, or is this just how things have always been done?
These ideas obviously have problems, not the least of which is running enough electricity to the farms. But it’s just engineering a design to meet the needs/use cases. I’m sure that John Deere, CAT, etc have all had conversations on the matter. I haven’t seen them announce anything yet, though. That could mean they can’t do it yet, they aren’t ready to announce anything yet, or simply that they don’t feel it to be more profitable.
Given Deere’s infamous lock-in and the repairs needed for ICE, that doesn’t surprise me.
The other thing is, using it day in and day out, from sunrise til sunset or even later, will probably wreak havoc on the battery health. I know EVs in general suffer from this, too, but I feel like it’s even worse for farming equipment, because you know they’ll get a let of extreme use, whereas a lot of people with EVs might only use it for a commute into the city, or a trip to the shops
That’s certainly a problem I didnt thought about. Driving farming away from being forced to use fossil fuels devinetively is one hell of a challenge and I still have zero Idea on how to achieve this in some practical way.
Also I can only agree with you. Where I live the attitude that you should use something as long as it runs devinetively applies.
This sounds great until you’ve had to repair an old car.
Everything rusts, warps, etc. The same things that make it hard to change your brakes will make it hard to change the battery pack, and you’re expecting a robot to do it for you (and fast!).
There were companies built on this idea. I think they’ve all gone under at this point.
The things that seize do so because they are infrequently operated/removed so I don’t see that being the main issue with this.
It still ain’t happening any time soon though…
Aside from not having to charge I think the biggest benefit to this would be charging the packs off peak to even out grid load, or when there is excess solar etc.
One of the benefits of EVs is we can get rid of a lot of infrastructure. Everywhere already has electrical so home and destination chargers are a minor add on and it’s only superchargers that are new infrastructure. Meanwhile the entire gasoline and oil refining, distribution, and tens of thousands of gas stations can just go away, along with their associated pollution.
Swappable batteries may sound cool but they’re less edficient plus now we have to build up a huge new set of infrastructure agai, we have to standardize batteries, and we can’t build them into structural parts. The only real advantage is speed but that’s not much advantage if you need to drive somewhere. I’ve never had to charge more than 25 minutes at a supercharger, so swapping a battery is only convenient if it’s at most ten minutes more away. Then you’re also assuming there will be more more battery and charger advances, such as those solid state batteries that a couple vendors claim are already in production, such as 800v charging that a few vehicles already can do, such as the latest Superchsrgers that can charge faster than any car can accept so far, or the semi chargers that have a few built out.
Long before you could build out a huge new infrastructure for seappable batteries and standardize cars around it, we’ll already have charging improvements that will make seappables irrelevant. You could argue they already are irrelevant in some areas
While 25 mins doesn’t sound terrible you have to consider throughput. Long lines, waiting for chargers could become an issue if adoption takes off, and if I ever drove by a set of chargers that was full up and more people waiting that’d probably put me off from buying one.
The destination chargers at work do get a line but we coordinate over slack so you never have to actually wait.
The trick is to get those home chargers deployed everywhere. This is what actually decided me on the futilebess of swappable batteries. Almost everyone could use a level 1 charger, but even a full level 2 charger is the same as a stove circuit or an air condioner. It’s just not a big deal for most people’s electrical service and level 1 can be anywhere. Look at how difficult it’s been to get these deployed despite them being so much cheaper and simpler than what you’re proposing. How will we possibly spend tens to hundreds of billions and decades to build out swappable battery infrastructure if a few billion in charging circuits to mostly existing service is so difficult?
Who benefits from seappable battery infrastructure? Really it’s mostly the same companies that profit from gasoline infrastructure. I’m convinced many proponents are just these companies wanting to continue business as usual. However with plugins, they don’t need to exist
I agree with you. I charge at home weekly. I expect to have enough solar soon that I’ll charge whenever the car is at home and the sun is up
When doing long (2 days of driving) trips I haven’t had any trouble getting a charge. High speed DC chargers had few queues (I had to wait 5 minutes once) and motels have usually given me parking near a power point. I’m in Australia so over night gives me 8 hrs * 240V * 10A = 19.2kWh which is usually enough to get to the next fast charger
Swappable batteries might be nice but I doubt they’d be profitable (with home charging) with most just using it to swap end of life batteries for better ones
They’d be ok for people living in apartments or otherwise with no charging at home, but better would be charging in carparks at work
You make some good points, but may I say from a single viewpoint.
I can’t physically charge a car at home.
I work from home and travel to customers - most are hours away and I (usually) can’t charge at their office.
Hence, I don’t have an electric car and my next purchase will probably be a self-charging hybrid because I need to recharge / refuel on the journey - hence quickly.
So, in my case, the only way I can go full-electric is with a short charge (/ battery swap) at the places that currently sell fossil fuel, which are becoming battery charging stations (they already have AC mains, so no new infrastructure required).
I can’t physically charge a car at home.
… and I (usually) can’t charge at their office.
Certainly this is key. Your car is sitting unused for hours at these locations, so even a relatively slow charge would be convenient. We definitely have work to do deploying these everywhere.
My point is more that every workplace, almost every home already has sufficient electrical service to charge for most car uses. We have the technology and it’s naturally broken down into many smaller less expensive projects. It’s much easier to build this out than to create an entirely new infrastructure around disposable batteries, redefine all cars and then scale out. And the technology already exists. But we still have to do it
They have gas stations in the middle of nowhere as long as there’s enough people with cars. Not saying swappable battery facilities aren’t more difficult than gas station infrastructure, but range matters a whole lot less when you can swap a battery in under five minutes.
I’ve never needed more than 25 minutes at a supercharger and that time is improving every year. We’ll probably be on par long before we could standardize swappables and get that infrastructure build out everywhere
So add infrastructure every town and each 200km (120 miles) on the highway to robotically swap batteries and charge the stored batteries (and so many stored batteries if it’s storing enough for 500 cars an hour
As opposed to building chargers with standard connectors which can charge a car in 15 minutes enough to reach the next charger, 30 minutes to 80% (which is generally the limit in high traffic chargers)
I have seen the cages of propane tanks for barbeques and boggle at the idea of the number of 50 to 100kWh batteries a swap station on a highway would need to store
Now for those swappable batteries
Including cars.
Drive in, swap non-proprietary batteries with an autoloader, drive out. Done.
Yes and no. No need to hot swap massive EV batteries. Rapid is fast enough. But yes so the EV can be upgraded. The batteries go obsolete quicker than they degrade. So make it so we can swap the batteries and keep the rest running. In fact, just right-to-repair the whole car. In fact, the whole everything!
Boy, that escalated quickly
But yes, please.
Hot Swapping batteries is actually surprisingly good for the life of the battery if done well.
Rapid charging the battery does do permenant damage over time especially if you fast charge every time. Whereas if you can hot swap a battery and have a suitable stockpile of them you can trickle charge the battery over a couple of hours instead of 30 mins and prolong the overall lifespan of the battery. Even slowing down the charge rate to 1 hour reduces wear on the battery significantly. Plus, without time pressure from a customer, more time could be taken to replace damaged cells or blocks in a battery so that one pack will more effectively use the whole battery up instead of throwing away perfectly good cells.
See, for me, I rapid charge like once a month. All the rest of the time I use my home charger or even a granny lead. 10A granny charging is absolutely fine overnight. But for the size of the E-Berlingo, the battery is a bit small and I know all kind of new batteries are coming. More kWh for the same weight/size, less degradation, safer, etc etc. If I knew the car was designed with battery replacement in mind, I’d worry a lot less about it being obsoleted prematurely. These cars are all black boxed stuck together. It’s not built with repairing and upgrading in mind.
@jabjoe
At least ‘some’ minimal standardisation so we can exercise the #righttorepair
@DrownedRats @technology
Exactly. I want things, especially expensive things, built to be repaired and upgraded. Not vendor locked and with built in obsolescence.
The batteries don’t live in isolation. There are other pieces that are dependent, whether for basic function or for calibration.
Example: Chevy issued a recall for mislabeling some Bolts as N2.1 vs N2.2. The fix is a sharpie to fix the label, and “reprogramming the Hybrid Powertrain Control Module 2”. I could find no information on either of these chemistries. Dropping in a LiFePO4 would require at least the same, and possibly more.
Now, if you’re suggesting simply swapping a matching replacement part (obsolete as it might be), then I’m on board with that
Oh totally, I have a E-Berlingo which basically an ICE converted to an EV, so there is all kind of compromises.
But batteries do improve and an old existing EV can be improved battery. Example: https://evsenhanced.com/aftermarket-battery/
But the economics is much harder if batteties aren’t unique to each EV. (They aren’t completely of course, the guts of my E-Berlingo are shared across a number of others.) EVs, like a lot else, should be designed with maintaining and upgrading in mind. Especially with parts like batteries which are in such evolutionary flux.
Battery swapping is common practice in China. Far as I know, these swaps aren’t for huge capacity batteries, and moreso designed for smaller ones. Takes about as long as filling a sedan tank with fuel. We could have this technology, but there’s not really a push for it.
I don’t need it and neither do the other EV owners I know. But we can all charge at home.
Right - I wouldn’t benefit from such a thing either. The market exists in China probably due to the density of people living in apartment buildings without access to home based charging.
That is something that I wish would come true. This would also open EVs to the industry in some new ways. Currently it kinda sucks if you have machines that have to be able to run the whole day without big interruptions. When you’re able to just swap the batteries in like 5 Minutes this machines don’t have to rely on fossil fuels that much and are open to be replaced by electric ones.
What I’m thinking about are machines like tractors for farming. During the summer it happens that they are running for 8+ hours without interruptions. Building a battery this big will be quite challengening. However, if you’re able to swap out the batteries after like 2 hours and then continue with work you effectively solved one of the biggest problems with not that much of a hassle.
deleted by creator
These are all design constraints that need to be taken into account. Most EVs these days have heating and cooling on the battery pack, for the reasons you mention. Adequate protection for it is also certainly solvable.
Extended use is a more challenging need. I’ll assume for a moment that the machinery uses as much power as an EV at highway speed, although I’m pulling that assumption out of nowhere. That would mean a comparable battery only lasts ~5 hours, and you need it to last 15+ (with a full charge happening overnight). Farm machinery is already very heavy - would the extra 4,000lbs for a triple-size battery be a solution? What about a battery trailer that is easily swapped? That could also create a different form of vendor lock-in, just like your power tools. I really doubt the same machinery is used all year long. Branded batteries are an effective way to keep customers from jumping ship on their next purchase.
Does the same machinery have to run all at once, or is this just how things have always been done?
These ideas obviously have problems, not the least of which is running enough electricity to the farms. But it’s just engineering a design to meet the needs/use cases. I’m sure that John Deere, CAT, etc have all had conversations on the matter. I haven’t seen them announce anything yet, though. That could mean they can’t do it yet, they aren’t ready to announce anything yet, or simply that they don’t feel it to be more profitable.
Given Deere’s infamous lock-in and the repairs needed for ICE, that doesn’t surprise me.
That’s certainly a problem I didnt thought about. Driving farming away from being forced to use fossil fuels devinetively is one hell of a challenge and I still have zero Idea on how to achieve this in some practical way.
Also I can only agree with you. Where I live the attitude that you should use something as long as it runs devinetively applies.
This sounds great until you’ve had to repair an old car.
Everything rusts, warps, etc. The same things that make it hard to change your brakes will make it hard to change the battery pack, and you’re expecting a robot to do it for you (and fast!).
There were companies built on this idea. I think they’ve all gone under at this point.
The things that seize do so because they are infrequently operated/removed so I don’t see that being the main issue with this.
It still ain’t happening any time soon though…
Aside from not having to charge I think the biggest benefit to this would be charging the packs off peak to even out grid load, or when there is excess solar etc.
One of the benefits of EVs is we can get rid of a lot of infrastructure. Everywhere already has electrical so home and destination chargers are a minor add on and it’s only superchargers that are new infrastructure. Meanwhile the entire gasoline and oil refining, distribution, and tens of thousands of gas stations can just go away, along with their associated pollution.
Swappable batteries may sound cool but they’re less edficient plus now we have to build up a huge new set of infrastructure agai, we have to standardize batteries, and we can’t build them into structural parts. The only real advantage is speed but that’s not much advantage if you need to drive somewhere. I’ve never had to charge more than 25 minutes at a supercharger, so swapping a battery is only convenient if it’s at most ten minutes more away. Then you’re also assuming there will be more more battery and charger advances, such as those solid state batteries that a couple vendors claim are already in production, such as 800v charging that a few vehicles already can do, such as the latest Superchsrgers that can charge faster than any car can accept so far, or the semi chargers that have a few built out.
Long before you could build out a huge new infrastructure for seappable batteries and standardize cars around it, we’ll already have charging improvements that will make seappables irrelevant. You could argue they already are irrelevant in some areas
While 25 mins doesn’t sound terrible you have to consider throughput. Long lines, waiting for chargers could become an issue if adoption takes off, and if I ever drove by a set of chargers that was full up and more people waiting that’d probably put me off from buying one.
Maybe but so far:
The destination chargers at work do get a line but we coordinate over slack so you never have to actually wait.
The trick is to get those home chargers deployed everywhere. This is what actually decided me on the futilebess of swappable batteries. Almost everyone could use a level 1 charger, but even a full level 2 charger is the same as a stove circuit or an air condioner. It’s just not a big deal for most people’s electrical service and level 1 can be anywhere. Look at how difficult it’s been to get these deployed despite them being so much cheaper and simpler than what you’re proposing. How will we possibly spend tens to hundreds of billions and decades to build out swappable battery infrastructure if a few billion in charging circuits to mostly existing service is so difficult?
Who benefits from seappable battery infrastructure? Really it’s mostly the same companies that profit from gasoline infrastructure. I’m convinced many proponents are just these companies wanting to continue business as usual. However with plugins, they don’t need to exist
I agree with you. I charge at home weekly. I expect to have enough solar soon that I’ll charge whenever the car is at home and the sun is up
When doing long (2 days of driving) trips I haven’t had any trouble getting a charge. High speed DC chargers had few queues (I had to wait 5 minutes once) and motels have usually given me parking near a power point. I’m in Australia so over night gives me 8 hrs * 240V * 10A = 19.2kWh which is usually enough to get to the next fast charger
Swappable batteries might be nice but I doubt they’d be profitable (with home charging) with most just using it to swap end of life batteries for better ones
They’d be ok for people living in apartments or otherwise with no charging at home, but better would be charging in carparks at work
You make some good points, but may I say from a single viewpoint.
I can’t physically charge a car at home.
I work from home and travel to customers - most are hours away and I (usually) can’t charge at their office.
Hence, I don’t have an electric car and my next purchase will probably be a self-charging hybrid because I need to recharge / refuel on the journey - hence quickly.
So, in my case, the only way I can go full-electric is with a short charge (/ battery swap) at the places that currently sell fossil fuel, which are becoming battery charging stations (they already have AC mains, so no new infrastructure required).
Certainly this is key. Your car is sitting unused for hours at these locations, so even a relatively slow charge would be convenient. We definitely have work to do deploying these everywhere.
My point is more that every workplace, almost every home already has sufficient electrical service to charge for most car uses. We have the technology and it’s naturally broken down into many smaller less expensive projects. It’s much easier to build this out than to create an entirely new infrastructure around disposable batteries, redefine all cars and then scale out. And the technology already exists. But we still have to do it
And range just dropped by half. Going somewhere without a loader? Have fun charging way more often.
Would still be nice for road trips in the civilized world though.
They have gas stations in the middle of nowhere as long as there’s enough people with cars. Not saying swappable battery facilities aren’t more difficult than gas station infrastructure, but range matters a whole lot less when you can swap a battery in under five minutes.
I’ve never needed more than 25 minutes at a supercharger and that time is improving every year. We’ll probably be on par long before we could standardize swappables and get that infrastructure build out everywhere
It is great until the ownership and business model comes into consideration.
Works fine for reusable bottles here.
So add infrastructure every town and each 200km (120 miles) on the highway to robotically swap batteries and charge the stored batteries (and so many stored batteries if it’s storing enough for 500 cars an hour
As opposed to building chargers with standard connectors which can charge a car in 15 minutes enough to reach the next charger, 30 minutes to 80% (which is generally the limit in high traffic chargers)
I have seen the cages of propane tanks for barbeques and boggle at the idea of the number of 50 to 100kWh batteries a swap station on a highway would need to store
That’s actually the next goal
And make all power tool batteries compatible.