What about making the battery packs "hot swappable". You pull into the station, the current pack is unloaded and a new one is loaded. I It can also have interesting effects on the battery upgrade you need to do every X amount of years. The packs could be owned by the gas station chain, so you can stop at any of their establishments and get a new one refiled. These battery pack charging stations could then also be use…
I'm all for electric vehicles, but there are a few things that have bothered me about its mass adoption. Right now, electrics comprise a tiny part of the automobile market share. Yet Tesla is already running into supply issues, particularly with lithium as there are only 3 companies in the world that do industrial-scale lithium mining, that too in a handful of mines around the world. Secondly, I suppose we're current…
What about making the battery packs "hot swappable". You pull into the station, the current pack is unloaded and a new one is loaded. I It can also have interesting effects on the battery upgrade you need to do every X amount of years. The packs could be owned by the gas station chain, so you can stop at any of their establishments and get a new one refiled. These battery pack charging stations could then also be use…
There have been many demos of hot swappable battery packs.
However as long as every car maker has their own battery packs and swapping methods it means you'll need a half dozen different swapping stations at each location making the whole concept very financially inefficient.
I know what you're getting at but I don't think the above comparison is entirely fair. Those houses don't have petrol pumps outside them either
I think it is entirely fair. You can fill gas or diesel up at a station quite quickly. To charge batteries so that you can use the car, you really need a charging station available every night or day.
I don't really agree I'm sorry to say. It kinda makes assumptions about charge rates, charge locations (home, work, car parks) or even the means by which cars are "refilled".
I know what you're getting at but I don't think the above comparison is entirely fair. Those houses don't have petrol pumps outside them either
Yes, but I go to a petrol station once a month, takes me 10 minutes to fill up and the whole tank lasts me for the whole month. With electric cars there are two ways out of this, either build enough electric charging points that you can charge while you are at work, or make every single car supercharger-compatible. I personally don't think the first option is likely, I don't see why my work(or any other) would have l…
Yeah I understand what you mean and I think you're right. 1000 charge points is unacceptable but do we really need that? Given the current generation Tesla can already self navigate pretty well what's stopping the cars navigate the car park in your absence and charge themselves at a few central charge points.
I think it is entirely fair. You can fill gas or diesel up at a station quite quickly. To charge batteries so that you can use the car, you really need a charging station available every night or day.
I don't really agree I'm sorry to say. It kinda makes assumptions about charge rates, charge locations (home, work, car parks) or even the means by which cars are "refilled". https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY
Sure, but we are having a conversation about whether it's possible that electric cars will have 35% market share by 2025. Considering that apart from a few first-world countries(and even then, only in big cities) there is very little infrastructure to fully support a large fleet of electric vehicles, and the battery swapping technology is not available anywhere apart from a couple tesla testing stations, I don't think that's possible. It would require a huge investment, and even then, cars easily last 15-20 years, so expecting 35% of the market to be electric in just 9 years is crazy.
Interesting article but the timelines seem way to conservative to me. For example if batteries continue to improve over the next four years as they have over the past four years, according to the article then in 2020 the batteries will weight 1500 lbs, travel 1142 miles on a charge and cost about $10k. (Or a 500 mile battery for $5k) And the cost of electricity will be, at today's rates, $1 per "e-gallon" Who wouldn'…
There are two different studies, one which shows a 15% and one which shows a 21% learning rate (decreased price due to volume).
One thing that's worth noting is that lithium ion energy density (Wh/kg) has not increased appreciably in the past few years (~200 Wh/kg) - we're probably maxed out w/o switching chemistries. Oxis and Sony are targeting 500 Wh/kg Li-S batteries for 2019/2020, but I'll believe it when I see it - most of the Li-S research is super gee-whiz (lots of coated nanotubes, nanocomposites, etc) but that stuff never tends to make it outside of the labs, and if it does, will be quite expensive.
We would probably solve that by putting up more charging points at the roadside (there are quite a few of these around already in the UK), with a card reader for payment or perhaps a payment chip within the car's charging connector.
Where I live (in a dense German city) there wouldn't even be space at the roadside to install charging points; even the street lights are attachted to the houses because there was no space left. I have the same situation at work, so personally have a difficult time imagining to own an electric car anytime soon.
There's someone in Halifax researching Sodium Batteries, which would be a fair bit easier to find than lithium, though less effective.
Sodium batteries have been around since the 1960s.[1] They're a high-temperature battery, 90°C and upwards. Ford built some experimental vans with sodium-sulfur batteries in 1991. Two of them caught fire. That technology was abandoned for mobile applications. There's still interest in this for stationary energy storage on power-grid scale. But not for mobile. Sodium catches fire if exposed to air. [1] https://en.wiki…
Sodium-ion batteries aren't necessarily the dead end you might think.
Faradion has been working on portable batteries w/ decent energy density (~150 Wh/kg), excellent charge-discharge performance (93% capacity after 1000 cycles) and competitive costs: http://www.faradion.co.uk/about/news/2015/05/489/
I don't really agree I'm sorry to say. It kinda makes assumptions about charge rates, charge locations (home, work, car parks) or even the means by which cars are "refilled". https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY
Sure, but we are having a conversation about whether it's possible that electric cars will have 35% market share by 2025. Considering that apart from a few first-world countries(and even then, only in big cities) there is very little infrastructure to fully support a large fleet of electric vehicles, and the battery swapping technology is not available anywhere apart from a couple tesla testing stations, I don't thin…
35% Market Share generally means in this context: "35% of the cars sold in the year 2025 will be electric".
If you want to talk about the number of cars in use that are electric, then "installed base" may be the more traditional term.
Market share generally preceeds, installed base, especially in markets with durable goods.