• arin@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Battery swap stations when? China already has them for fleets of ev taxis.

    • stoy@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      Tom Scott did a video about Nio’s battery swap stations in a test facility in Europe

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      3 months ago

      Never. The industry would have to standardize too much. Maybe for niche applications like taxis or long haul trucking, but not general use.

      It took enough fighting to standardize on a plug, and that’s not 100% there yet.

      • arin@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        We don’t have standardized batteries for a lot of electronics, different types of lipo, lead acid but they are swappable(not interchangeable) you understand. Doesn’t mean never. But we need to start, innovation should not stagnant because people think it’s never gonna become one single standardized option. Also that sounds like a monopoly

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          3 months ago

          We don’t need it. More chargers can solve the problem fine. Swappable batteries change the infrastructure build out from chargers to swap stations. It’s not going to be deployed any faster, but we already have a running start on chargers.

          Also, there’s savings to be had by integrating the battery directly into the frame. You’re not going to swap that.

          Trying to get the industry to standardize is a waste of time.

    • cogman@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      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.

      • thetreesaysbark@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        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.

        • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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          2 months ago

          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.

      • arin@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Pretty sure this is not hard to digitally manage and change payment once deployed.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Never. There’s too much efficiency advantage to making the battery pack part of the structure.

      We dont need to save the gas station industry. Let them go the way of haberdasheries.