IMO, battery swaps are the wrong priority. To get them reasonably working you need standardized batteries and a way to identify wear on the battery to figure out the discount or extra charge (wouldn’t be fair if I could swap a battery with 30% degradation for one that’s brand new).
What we really need is more L2 or L1 chargers. They are a lot cheaper to install and for 90% of drivers they can deliver enough juice to get people where they need to be.
Put them in every office parking lot and grocery store lot and suddenly EVs become a lot more feasible as daily commuter vehicles (particularly for apartment dwellers).
Fast charging is only needed for long distance traveling.
wouldn’t be fair if I could swap a battery with 30% degradation for one that’s brand new
Would this matter if you never owned a battery to begin with? I assume degradation would affect your range, but in terms of ‘fairness’ I don’t think it matters too much.
Sure, I was thinking that too but how do you do that? You’d either need a repo rule where if you stop paying a subscription or whatever you have to return the battery, or they come take it. That or you need to pay a large fee for the cost of the battery and you get it back upon its return when you stop the service. The latter solution would lose a lot of customers who can’t or don’t want to afford that cast. The former is a huge hassle and I don’t think it’s work at all. Uninstalling a car battery isn’t simple. I guess it could just be handled as general debt?
Anyway, there’s a lot of issues with battery swapping to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist, for the vast majority at least. Most people will never need a fast charger or battery swap. They’ll charge at home or work and never have to think about running out. It doesn’t need to be complicated.
IMO, battery swaps are the wrong priority. To get them reasonably working you need standardized batteries and a way to identify wear on the battery to figure out the discount or extra charge (wouldn’t be fair if I could swap a battery with 30% degradation for one that’s brand new).
What we really need is more L2 or L1 chargers. They are a lot cheaper to install and for 90% of drivers they can deliver enough juice to get people where they need to be.
Put them in every office parking lot and grocery store lot and suddenly EVs become a lot more feasible as daily commuter vehicles (particularly for apartment dwellers).
Fast charging is only needed for long distance traveling.
Would this matter if you never owned a battery to begin with? I assume degradation would affect your range, but in terms of ‘fairness’ I don’t think it matters too much.
Sure, I was thinking that too but how do you do that? You’d either need a repo rule where if you stop paying a subscription or whatever you have to return the battery, or they come take it. That or you need to pay a large fee for the cost of the battery and you get it back upon its return when you stop the service. The latter solution would lose a lot of customers who can’t or don’t want to afford that cast. The former is a huge hassle and I don’t think it’s work at all. Uninstalling a car battery isn’t simple. I guess it could just be handled as general debt?
Anyway, there’s a lot of issues with battery swapping to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist, for the vast majority at least. Most people will never need a fast charger or battery swap. They’ll charge at home or work and never have to think about running out. It doesn’t need to be complicated.
Pretty sure this is not hard to digitally manage and change payment once deployed.