JAC Motors, a Volkswagen-backed Chinese automaker, unveiled the first mass-produced EV with a sodium-ion battery through its new Yiwei brand. Although sodium-ion battery tech has a lower density than lithium-ion, its lower costs, simpler and more abundant supplies and superior cold-weather performance could help accelerate mass EV adoption.
I’ve seen a video with some electric mopeds that had very easily removable batteries. Like you just pop it out and exchange it at a gas-station equivalent.
It’d be ideal if we could settle on a few sizes - kind of like how we have AA, AAA, C, D, etc. batteries. One can be for such mopeds, one larger for cars and some smaller ones to fill various otherwise empty spaces in a car.
So if your battery goes bad or just want to change its tech you can do that.
For normal city driving you carge the car at home. If you go on a trip make a few stops for charging. If you’re really in a rush, you can always pay a premium for swapping your drained battery for a prefilled one at a gas station equivalent.
To me this seems like the ideal solution for EVs and I wonder what facts make it unrealistic.
This is precisely where we’re going to get fucked, though, because the modern pathological mindset of every tech company now is to try to build their own proprietary walled fiefdom to try to lock in
suckersrecurring revenue sourcescustomers and they won’t make their stuff compatible with anyone else’s unless the government forces them to. Maybe if we’re lucky there will be a decade or two of highly public bitching (see also: the Tesla charging connector) until someone eventually capitulates.Yup, I’ve been thinking along those lines as well. I can’t believe that every manufacturer is doing their own standards again…
Batteries are expensive, so it would be hard to offset the risk of loaning a larger battery to someone for a road trip, while still providing a reasonable price to the consumer that doesn’t end up making a rental car look like a good idea. And, maybe more importantly
Nobody wants to pay for the infrastructure. If you really wanna cut on costs and make it very quick and cheap, automation is a pretty good way to go, and if you’re making it automated, you’re either seeing ballooning install costs on future proofing on an object where every dollar matters for scaling purposes, or you’re intentionally limiting yourself and all future car models. You’d have to have a pretty ironclad design, to make it work, and the tradeoff is really not worth it when we already have fast-charging that people are only going to use maybe (hopefully) a fraction of the time, for their longer trips, or for those times when they can’t plug in somewhere else.
If we had someone willing to pay for that shit, we might as well just pay for trams and bike lanes, because the only people willing to cough up cash for that would probably be the feds anyway.
Different battery chemistries have different charging requirements. So you’d have to have more complex charger/battery interaction requirements. Not insurmountable but another layer of standardization