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.
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.