…need to be more like gas stations.
They also need affordable reliable electricity, and to be as ubiquitous as gas stations, if electric cars are ever going to be a serious thing. I know a lot of people with Teslas, but they admit that they’re not for road trips.
It’s going to be dammed difficult to get under 20 minutes charging time on a BEV. And the dirty little secret there is that if you cycle your BEV enough at these superchargers you’ll likely shorten the useful lifetime of your battery. Which IIRC is normally about 5 years and not cheap to replace .
To compete with gasoline for long trips you’re gonna need replaceable battery trays where the run down batteries stay at the charging station and it only takes a couple of minutes to swap batteries.
Let alone having enough rare Earth elements to make all these batteries.
But the progressive left doesn’t want you to taking long trips by car. The point of most of these is to contaminate the National Parks. So stay the f*ck home in your 250 mile range commuter golf cart and for everything else use the Internet. But if you must travel outside work or school your travel papers please.
While superchargers “shorten” battery life, the 5 year quote is silly. These batteries are huge, with lots of redundancies. It’s not like an iPhone where it just stops working some day (the second it goes out of warranty…)
I’m driving a 2015 Nissan Leaf on the original battery right now. The range is less than the original car quoted. That’s what happens in 5 years – it does not mean the battery has to be replaced. The specs say the car has a 84 mile range. It currently has a range of 70 miles or so.
Yes, not to spec. But not a game changer. I expect in 5 years it will be down to 50 miles range. I may replace the battery pack sometime before that, just because technology marches on and I’d get over 100 miles range with a replaced pack. (My island is only 35 miles wide…)
I suspect you are not running that 400VDC supercharger on your BEV every night either. Your 5 year experience sounds typical to me for those who are are charging at home. Let me know when the time comes if you actually buy a new battery or trade the car.
I don’t live on an island and my commute is a hilly 48 miles each way. Fortunately my employer does provide charging stations for BEVs because they are in the business of selling electric power components. But this does me no good for other trips. So I’m back to owning two vehicles? Oh and I live in a part of the country that has real winters. No thanks.
If I owned a new EV, I’d be very reluctant to play battery roulette with a swap out service. My new and expensive battery could be swapped with one on its last legs. In fact, people with older EVs with dying or degraded batteries will seek out one of the swap out places to get a cheap replacement.
If batteries become commodities as they will have to become if BEVs are to replace gasoline there will have to be regulations in place to control battery quality. Much like R+M/2 octane regulations for gasoline.
Oh, don’t be ridiculous!
They’d never say “Please.”
My reply is not near enough to the original comment, I suspect. I was responding to this part of David Spain’s first post:
“But if you must travel outside work or school your travel papers please.”
The obvious thing would be to do charging at mealtimes. A family on the road might well take an hour to eat, so give the chargers some attendants to move vehicles through the queue; when you’re done eating, your car is ready to go.
Not sure why we’re not already seeing this.
Fast swapping of battery packs sounds good in principle but it’s hard to imagine it working in practice; the batteries are almost as big as the car and integral with its structure. We could redesign to enable that, and create infrastructure to do the swap (battery’s a hell of a lot heavier than a tank of gas), but it isn’t gonna happen soon.
I think that there will be mechanisms devised to do this that look a lot like those hydraulic manual lifts used to change a tire but allow one to swap a battery pack. Maybe it will require a bit of skill but not much. Hence the return of the service station “attendant”.
The trouble is that the battery is such a large structural part of the vehicle that the batteries can’t be standardized unless all the vehicles are standardized, in which case it would be simpler to just swap cars, kind of like the old Pony Express.
Reminds me of the days of early automobiles when controls were not yet standardized either. Very few people actually know what to do with the three pedals on a Ford Model T floorboard . But hint. The rightmost pedal is NOT the accelerator.
The real problem is that no one is actually building “electric charging stations” at all, other than Tesla. At least all the one I know of on my Island are a store owner that realizes that they have a parking spot, they have electric power, so they install a charging station.
But the charging station is a draw to get people to come to their store, or restaurant, or mall. In most cases here (where we have one of the highest electric bills in the nation!) the actual charging is free!
You can’t easily create a business providing a free service. Electricity just doesn’t cost enough to be worth it.
Have no fear! When it comes to building charging stations there’s little that can compete with compulsory taxation!
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/tesla-leads-race-to-draw-federal-money-for-charging-networks-85a058dd?st=niz2e16brc2xqul&reflink=article_copyURL_share
I’ve had a Tesla for six months now and have done road trips. I specifically timed my supercharging while getting a bite to eat. I didn’t feel like I was waiting at all. As more vehicles become EVs, there will be more and more supercharging stations. Charging at home overnight is painless. I didn’t get the Tesla for environmental reasons but total cost of ownership over the life of the vehicle. But along the way, I have fallen in love with its acceleration. I have enjoyed the car unlike any previous that I have owned.
Has the author of the article considered that trash cans need to be emptied and toilets need to be cleaned? That is overhead that no one is willing to pay for. So you don’t get it. The business models will evolve over time, but nothing changes the fact you have to pay someone to empty trash and clean toilets. Although I’m sure the management class thinks that Mez’cans of questionable legal status will do it for cheap so the problem is already mostly solved.
My “local” Tesla charging station sits next to a WalMart (21 miles from my house at the I-85 exit). The WalMart mens’ room is filthy. Nearby, there’s a Highway 54 and a Torreros. At the other end of the large parking lot, there’s a Bojangles. The statin is sited near a “solar farm.”
But the crux of the problem is that my 2018 CrossTrek gets about forty miles to the gallon, meaning I can go about 700 highway miles on a 16.9 gallon tank of regular. A tank which takes 5 minutes or so to fill. The downside is, I need to piss a lot more than I need to get gas on a trip to New York or Atlanta.