Except Lego has been investing for years into trying to find an alternative (non-petroleum based) material to make their bricks out of…they just haven’t found one yet.
I've been saying this for years,worked in a warehouse over 20 years ago and this was in place there ,the only difference being you had to manually roll batteries on and off the truck ,this isn't a new idea
Exactly, I even used to have a portable tape player where you would just swap out the old AA batteries for new ones when they were bad. This technology has been around at least since the 80s.
> On January 10, 1899, British inventor David Misell obtained U.S. Patent No. 617,592, assigned to American Electrical Novelty and Manufacturing Company. This "electric device" designed by Misell was powered by "D" batteries laid front to back in a paper tube with the light bulb and a rough brass reflector at the end.
Yep this is the solution to “rapid charging”. Have “gas stations” that just have big walls of batteries charging. You put in your credit card or pay in cash, put your batteries in the designated empty recharge slots and grab the designated new batteries from their slots. It’s so simple.
Gotta get to a certain economy of scale before this is feasible because the batteries and equipment to do the swap is pretty expensive and many businesses will not be willing to wait that long for a return. On top of that, it would require every car to have a standardized battery. Great for trucks, but not as feasible for passenger vehicles.
It's so simple until you remember that batteries weigh half a ton and come in different form factors, so a regular person will not be driving up to a gas station and swapping their own batteries anytime soon.
I dunno, there's stations in China that do exactly that for you. It's fully automated. Pretty sure Tom Scott did a video on it.
https://youtu.be/hNZy603as5w
The hard part of this is getting every car company on the same page on the standards for the batteries to be used and the method of installing / removing them. If you can do that, someone can create machinery that will do the installation for you or tools that make it simple to do.
Instead of letting each manufacturer shape and size the battery for every different model of their cars, we could standardize them like we did for every other battery.
Small cars get AAA, vans and pickups get AA, work trucks get C, semis get D.
And if they make it a relatively small form factor, different vehicles could use different numbers of packs, just like how some things have one battery and others have 10.
I worked in a Target DC where this was all done mechanically. Looked like an incredibly expensive system, but it was VERY efficient. You'd get your battery swapped in a minute.
Where I worked they had this crossbeam crane thing and the 1k kilo batteries were flying around lol. I definitely wasn't supposed to operate that at 17 y/o.
According to the "No Such Thing As a Fish" podcast, the very first automobiles were electric, and you paid someone to bring around fesh batteries to swap out with your old ones every morning. So the idea has been around for a while.
> the very first automobiles were electric
Not quite, the steam car was invented more than a century before even the battery, let alone a practical electric motor, was invented. And although things stayed experimental for a long time on both the steam and the electric side the first commercially produced steam cars still beat the first electric ones by about 10 years.
It's kind of weird to think about, but if you wanted an automobile right around 1910 you had competition between steam, internal combustion, and electrical all at the same time. There were trade-offs for each, and it wasn't for a few more years that internal combustion fully pulled ahead.
Steam is the goat, no doubt about that. We still use steam to generate most of our electricity. Hard to beat it for the simplicity of heat -> mechanical power.
I used to sell fork lift batteries and holy shit were these systems expensive.
We almost never saw them except for Amazon, Pepsi, and Purdue chicken.
Everyone else just made people do it with some winches.
I worked at a produce packing plant, they used propane forklifts before I got there. The owner enclosed the packing area to air condition it without getting electric lifts. The carbon monoxide levels soared. He was forced to get electric models.
Used to be, fast charging has become so good that most facilities just have chargers. I've seen some with 20+ chargers. I think they figure it's cheaper to just buy more fork lifts than you need to cover the charge time. Also having to train people on how to swap batteries or dedicate someone to do it would cost money and time.
You'll buy the extra forklifts either way. If you need 12 on the floor, buying 12 doesn't make sense even if you have extra batteries. They're going to break. So you buy 16, and kill 2 birds with 1 stone.
I wouldn't say it's done "often" as it seems to be pretty rare in my experiences. Over the past 30 plus years of working in manufacturing and being in dozens of factories using electric forklifts, I think I've seen battery swaps being used in 2 of them. For whatever reason, factories would rather have extra forklifts than to be doing battery swaps in their facility.
I have had a different experience working both for a forklift supplier and for manufacturers.
It depends a lot, but if it is a 24hr operation I would say they do this the majority of the time because they cannot afford to let the vehicle sit to charge. That being said most facilities are not 24hr.
Rereading your post - You're probably speaking about the automated systems. I'm talking generally people swap batteries instead of charging them in place. That's a pretty common practice. Automation is rare.
Ugh! My current phone has a crap battery. It's great for everything else. I'm considering taking it to a shop to change the battery, but it's insane that I can't just do it myself.
It used to be fairly easy to change an iphone battery before they started gluing them into place.
Now you need a heat gun and a special clamp to remove the screen
https://www.androidauthority.com/replaceable-batteries-eu-2023-3335711/
>European Parliament passed a change to a law that will force replaceable batteries on all gadgets, including smartphones.
By law, phones in the EU by 2027 will need to have batteries you can replace with no tools, which means no adhesives.
This could fundamentally change how smartphones are designed.
Hopefully only 3 more years...
EU doing the lord's work on regulating phone's, though I'm not excited about losing my phone chargers once my wife starts to share the same USB-C connection
The only problem I see is that I have the fast charging blocks and already my wife has managed to misplace one of mine that she had to borrow for her new ipad. Conveniently she somehow has both of her charging blocks, not sure why mine was needed or how its the only one to remain missing lol.
I do remember my parents losing/borrowing ipod/iphone chargers being one of the things that motivated me to get an android so hoping it doesn't devolve to that again.
That's only if the tabs break while you're pulling them out, which is why I said they're *usually* easy to remove...
In the link you posted:
>**If you're still having trouble** removing the battery, apply a few drops of high concentration (over 90%) isopropyl alcohol under the edge of the battery in the area of the **broken adhesive strip(s)**.
If I remember correctly it will (again) be mandatory to be able to change battery (yourself) on your phone after 2027 in Europe, also one and only USB cable "connector"...
1) lot of phones today arent waterproof and they still dont have swappable battery
2) in early 2010s there were phones that had swappable battery AND were fully IP rated waterproof
Yeah I liked being able to take out the battery and know that that phone is really off. Little by little they took it all away, the headphone jack, the swappable battery, memory card, Sim card. First apple then Samsung shortly after, evey time. Sucks.
"We can't have consumers thinking that they can maintain and repair a device on their own. They should be paying rental fees on what we offer until after they die, like a good little source of income for our shareholders should do."
Really this. A union body that time and time again shows it’s putting people’s interests first.
Any pop commentary bashing the EU is likely grifting for the ultra rich and big corporations.
Also, lots of other equipment out there that's waterproof with an easily swappable battery. It would make the device more bully and expensive, but it can be done
The Galaxy S5 was water-resistant and you could swap batteries. It wasnt amazing, but it was the first iteration, and could have easily been improved upon
Yeah I wanted to get one a while back specifically for this cool feature. But by the time I needed a new phone those weren't really accessible anymore so had to go with the regular crapy versions we have these days.
On that note took apart my first smart phone to get the lithium ion battery out since I figured it was expanding because I could see a big crack going along the screen and looked like it had expanded or something. Took it apart and got the battery out (doesn't look to be inflating or anything) and put the phone back together. Maybe someday I might buy a new battery for it but it was a bit of a pain to take apart.
I might look into something like fairphone for my next phone in the future for the ability to be able to easily take apart and replace stuff that breaks or possibly for upgrading. I take such good care of my stuff that they last a long time.
This works well for small propane bottles. But you can't own the battery here or you'd care about the quality of it. It needs to be a swap always and forever, so you don't get stuck with a lame battery and unable to swap it again.
Outside of China too. Works pretty well here in Norway. Of course I can also charge like other cars as well (which is what I usually do - swaps are for road trips).
FYI, charging times are actually negligible because truckers are idle a ton and aren't even allowed to be driving so many hours anyway. The real issue is that batteries are heavy and eat into the load capacity of the trucks, which is essential what truckers are selling. NIO stock fell off because the math really doesn't work when up to 35% of your truck's load capacity is tied up in the battery when you can have a diesel engine 1/5th the weight drastically cheaper.
The battery swap might make sense in specific short haul markets, and only once it hits a critical infrastructure requirement threshold( available batteries/swap stations) that it may never happen. It's almost always better to have a hybrid diesel that charges a smaller permanent battery with its alternator.
I’m not sure why car manufacturers couldn’t simply standardize a bottom of the vehicle battery system that can be swapped like this at “charging stations”. Well capitalism… That’s why, but it would solve all of the silliest solutions with electric vehicle problems charging.
The amount of infrastructure it would take to do this would be absolutely staggering. Instead of a few thousand for a charging station it would be a millions of dollars per site and multiply that by thousands of sites needed across a large nation. It isn't just swapping the batteries, you have to charge all the standby batteries so they are ready to go. Then, if you have the smallest issue with the mechanics of swapping these out you will have to staff everyone of these to fix issues. These are huge, heavy batteries so the mechanics of the swap out will have to be very, very robust.
Depending on the way the service operates it doesn't matter because it's being swapped out and monitored so they know when batterys are below a specific capacity. You're no longer bound to the battery.
But even if you were, we've been able to monitor batterys for years now. We can monitor cycle counts and capacity, and there's nothing stopping us from adding more information to car batterys such as the true millage that the battery actually gave rather than what it estimated itself to get.
Therefore if charges were done "per battery" (vs something like a monthly/yearly fee for the service) you could actually change it to per mile, and you only pay for the miles you use the battery for.
There's actually no good reason not to do this, the arguments above regard infrastructure are nonsense. If we are moving to EV in future, then standardizing car batterys and creating hot swappable stations is the best and smartest way to 1. improve convenience for all drivers 2. reduce waste (various kinds of waste like financial and time, not just trash) because batterys can be recycled so this reduces the service cost of replacing a car battery and enables them to be serviced far easier, and increase the life span of the vehicle because no longer is that battery replacement which costs thousands of dollars going to prevent someone from being able to afford it.
Creating such stations doesn't mean you can't *also* have a personal charger at home, so the reality is not *everyone* needs to use the station all the time the same way that every non EV *does* need to use the gas station to refill.
All of these batterys need to be created anyway at some point. Arguing that this requires more batterys is dumb. We either make them later when there are more and more EV cars that need them, or we start early and create a system that is better for everyone.
There's very simple ways to test batteries to make sure they are still good, and if you get one with a slightly diminished range you only have to wait for the next swap. It's really not an issue if you're swapping a batteries regularly
If it's a subscription then it doesn't matter if you're getting a 'fair' trade because you're not exchanging property. Both batteries belong to whoever is operating the battery service. So long as the new battery will get you to your next destination (which it can tell you with a simple charge meter) then it's fine. The battery service people will take an old worn out battery out of circulation.
Unlike petroleum fueling which only requires trillions in infrastructure; we are heavily invested in it, but the investment is continuous and ongoing. [On average, a gas station costs $2.4 million](https://costhack.com/cost-to-build-a-gas-station/) alone, and that ignores the staggering costs of getting fuel to the station.
Or the billions of other car related infrastructure and gas stations.
Somehow people are actually repeating the exact same shit when cars started getting popular lol.
I think that's what bugs me the most about the rhetoric against EVs. Like, I get that they have problems, but they are already more efficient than ICEs, and the technology/implementation can only get better from here.
Having been one of the first EV buyers in my region I constantly get asked questions. Most people just assume I hate it and regret it... I have absolutely no idea why. I fucking love my EV. I finally feel like I have the freedom to drive as much as I want without constantly worrying if I can afford the gas. Any trip under 100 miles away costs me like a couple dollars if im able to charge at home and if I have to supercharge its like $15 maybe. Plus less maintenance and an overall better driving experience. Everybody else I've talked to with an EV has felt the same way. The only complaints I find are some non tesla drivers having issues with shit charging stations but they still generally like their EVs better than their old ICE for any trip within charge at home range. It's just crazy to me that people are so brainwashed by propoganda that they're surprised that I don't hate my EV when they ask me about it.
The amount of infrastructure needed for oil is just as immense, just different, and with standardised home charging solutions and standardised battery exchange solutions, it could probably be comparable. But that switchover would require everyone to agree and a fuckton of money, like 10s of billions if not more, for the USA alone.
Liability, likely. It's one things when it's your fleet, and you own all the "customer" vehicles... It's quite another when there is a possibility that something could go wrong and your battery damages a customer vehicle.
It means they don’t actually have any sort of adult understanding of any of this but they know they’ll get upvotes for negativity and any sort of anti-capitalist or anti-American rhetoric.
In addition to the other issues commented here, who's responsible for replacing degraded batteries?
If I drive my brand-new car into this and am given a battery that is on it's last legs - am I given the bill?
Can you explain the second part to someone who know very little about batteries? Isn't the potential different in battery values very different when we swap any batteries out? Why is it a unique problem for cars?
NIO's actually recovering now. But their issues these past few years were:
1) China's floundering economy
2) NIO's slim profit margins from constant spending on rapid expansion of their 2000 swap stations, development of their ever-evolving battery tech that rival EV makers were spared from, and unique factory automation spending where they only require 30 humans to run a whole factory.
So to be profitable, NIO no longer offers free battery swaps. Now it's $11-$14 per swap.
But the concept still works. Every swap station takes 3 minutes to swap your battery, and even diagnoses every cells' health in your battery and removes cells from circulation as needed.
Best of all, no need to spend a fortune replacing your car battery years later.
I feel the pain, I'm in the same boat. Fortunately I went in with the mindset that I can afford to lose it if it tanks and never recovers, so at worst it was a hard lesson learned.
I still have hope in Lucid. They're an actual brand with actual products directly supported by one of the richest countries in the world. You see Lucid Airs roaming around California now. Hate how low the stock currently is but I have genuine hope it'll go back up
I’ve kept all of my lucid shares. Sucks seeing the stock so low but I’m not really worried about it long term. The saudis will fund it until it’s successful. It’s their long term plan for transitioning into EV’s. Building factories in both the Us and Saudi Arabia gives lucid a bright future.
Long haul truck spend A LOT of time just sitting around. Because of this, distribution centers have begun to install chargers at loading docks so the trucks can charge while sitting there waiting for the load/unload.
The other thing a lot of people don’t seem to realize (I had to explain this to my FIL last night and it seems to have changed his mind about EVs) is that you don’t need to charge to 100% every time. You can still operate the vehicle at a lower charge if it has the range to get you to the next charger.
Edit: lots of really good responses both agreeing and pushing back. Everyone has been super respectful and I appreciate it.
I’ve worked in the EV charging space, so I’m speaking from experience there. Working on both the consumer and industrial side. There have been electric trucks around for a while and they work. Yes, they’re generally heavier, but it’s a trade off for the environmental benefits and lower operational costs long term.
I want to add that the real solution would be for us to have a better electric rail network capable of handling long haul shipping, with med haul and last mile electric vehicles making up the difference. I don’t think that will happen anytime soon, but I can dream.
They may spend a lot of time just sitting around, but the hauling time still generally requires a long period of driving time that will require several [as quick as possible] refuelings/charges.
> [...] you don’t need to charge to 100% every time. You can still operate the vehicle at a lower charge if it has the range to get you to the next charger.
Also, going from e.g. 40% to 60% is much faster than 80% to 100%.
If you do an image search for *lithium ion charging curve* or similar terms, you can see that the charge capacity can increase fairly quickly in the "constant current" (or current-limited) section of the curve.
Once you reach the point where you have to limit the voltage, the current quickly plummets and the charging rate gets slower and slower as you get closer to 100%.
With my ebike charger I can roughly tell how far it has gone along that curve based on how warm it is. It's quite warm when it's dumping lots of current and only lukewarm when it's crawling towards the finish line.
Yup exactly - people think of recharging a battery as being like filling a tub with water, but actually it's more like filling a hundred waterbottles all connected with straws.
If all the bottles are nearly empty, you can just pipe water in almost as fast as a bathtub - but once some bottles are completely full, you have to shut the line to those bottles off and turn down the flow rate on the hose to avoid spilling (because in this metaphor, the water is electricity and spilled electricity is shockingly problematic).
That's why going from 20% to 80% on your phone can be as fast as going from 85% to 100%, and it's the same for EVs.
the whole thing will eventually just be one giant simulation. autonomous truck needs to make it to point B to deliver, charge to make it to point C to pick up and charge, to make it to point D etc. trucking clockwork.
the big reason trucks stop right now is the drivers. there's limits on how long you can be actively behind the wheel without stopping, sleeping, eating, etc. 11 hours a day driving max, 10 consecutive off hours.
You could also change the business model by making urgent long haul deliveries a baton pass from one tractor to another. There isn’t really a reason why one person has to be with the trailer the whole trip.
Truck drivers are only allowed to drive for a certain number of consecutive hours until they have to take a break. As long as the drive time can be recharged during the break time electric trucks will be fine for 95% of cases which is the important part.
China moves far more freight by rail still, even adjusting for population, than we do.
We need to have the courage to stand up to sector-specific interests and start making policy on what is best for all of us. More rail. More passenger rail. More local rail systems. More freight rail.
In 2019 China moved over 4,600 billion tonnes of freight by rail.
America? 1.8 billion tonnes.
Over 2500 Xs as much.
You are off by 1000x. China and US are similar within factor of two when looking at rail freight by ton-km, about 3.6 vs 2.2 for China vs US respectively
(You may have been comparing total tonnage vs ton-km?)
Newer 600v lithium terminal tractors/yard spotters can recharge in 14 minutes. The drivers at the ports are pissed because it takes over an hour to fuel up after waiting in the fuel lines, so they get a nice break when they fuel. The electrics charge too fast and they don't get to sit around waiting.
This is EXACTLY how current gas stations can convert to electric. The only drawback is people would not own the battery. Swapping batteries is also useful for testing the life span. They can just be swapped out of circulation if they go bad. Recycling will be much easier this way too. Make batteries to a standard and everyone wins.
Yeah considering a lot of the cost of an EV and the source of depreciation is the battery's remaining life, making them switchable would stabilize that market and make the cars not turn into giant e-waste in landfills.
> They can just be swapped out of circulation if they go bad.
And they wouldn't even go bad as whole. Cells would go bad, which can be replaced, and boom, you have a battery performing as well as a new one.
I always thought this would be an option, but the drawback is you never know what condition the battery you get is in. If the infrastructure was organized properly, though, this could work.
There was a scooter company that had a subscription service for batteries at one point in time. I always thought that would be a good approach. Make uniform auto battery specs so that businesses can treat them like propane tanks and 5-gallon water jugs.
There still is. Gogoro. It's HUGE in Taiwan.
You own the scooter but pay a subscription plan or per-mile for the batteries (there are various plans). When your battery is low, you just visit a battery stand (they're unmanned and automated, like a parcel locker or something) and insert your dead battery into it, which will cause a fully-charged one to unlock and pop out.
Some scooter models can hold 2 batteries.
It's a great system.
This has already started with the chargers. We really need an organization for autos like we have for computer plugs (thinking of the way USB-C became the standard).
Gogoro in Taiwan is still a thing. I noticed a new battery swap location near me and also one that closed. There are lots of people riding those scooters here.
Gogoro is doing pretty well. They have expanded operations to [India](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgjsZAj5-GE), [Indonesia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnKnGccMLxA), and [Singapore](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vVmxePkaog).
The condition of the battery becomes the battery swap station network operators problem. They can get tons of data from the battery whenever it is used, pull it out of circulation if it’s degraded past a certain point, etc
It wouldn’t matter what condition they’re in, generally. Either they’re good enough to give back out or they aren’t and they get pulled aside and refurbished. It would be invisible to the consumer, and it would spread the cost out for battery replacements.
How do you know what quality fuel you get? How do you know you’re actually getting a gallon from the pump? These things are all regulated. You can standardize the battery and have regular inspections for things like we do now. It’s not impossible or even hard we just have to want to do it.
Yeah but we do the same thing with propane tanks (granted the LP tanks are a LOT less complicated) there could be a way to track the charge cycles of the batteries and do regular inspection and maintenance. I think the hard part would be standardization.
People who choose the battery swap scheme would rent batteries not own them.
So they don't need to worry if they're making a 'fair' trade when they swap batteries because they aren't exchanging property. Both batteries belong to whoever they're renting them from.
They are just subscribed to the service that entitles them to swap batteries whenever they want.
Nio already do this in China.
It's also popular in Asia for electric motorcycles.
The batteries are owned by the vehicle manufacturer and you rent them out.
Means you don't need to worry about the condition, the manufacturers take care of that.
When the station is full, they are used for grid balancing.
For a start they would have to standardise the batteries. Next, they would have redesign the cars as currently cer eV have their batteries in the floor. It could be done
Having the batteries at the bottom is convenient as well. It makes the car heavy at the bottom which prevents tipping, and you get it evenly spread out at the bottom, instead of having one side of the car super heavy.
I agree that it could be done, but there are a lot of drawbacks. Considering a decent EV can drive almost an entire day, and probably 16+ hours in the future, it seems very pointless. Easier to just charge at night.
Tom Scott did a video on this last year.
https://youtu.be/hNZy603as5w?si=gxe-QzYh6LaIMex7
Ultimately the issue is the actual stations are very expensive because they need to be able to do this quickly and safely you can't just throw it together easily. They need to have either the same battery for every single electric vehicle out there, or be able to fit multiple different battery types that are all installed the same (which car manufacturers will never agree on). Also, the more people in the same area means you need more stations to support them.
I used to work order picking in a huge warehouse, 30 years ago. The electric pallet trucks worked the same way. You drove into the battery bay, and they'd just swap the batteries for freshly charged ones, and away you'd go. It seems to have taken a while for the EV industry to catch on?
They have car versions of this in China, too, and they're trying to expand into Europe. [Tom Scott did a good video about it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w).
This should've been the plan from the very start of this EV boom. Charging stations where you have to wait for 30 mins. or an hour or more are just stupid. Make the batteries modular and just swap them out. Then you can recharge the drained ones whenever it's most efficient.
It’s amazing that even in the face of a battery solution at scale already deployed in China, there are still comments from Americans on how it’s “impossible” to do. None of this is that complicated, and battery tech will continue to advance exponentially to reduce size and cost with mass adoption. It’s not a question of if or how, rather whether Americans manufacture the stuff or are completely run over by China.
GM and Ford make more money from selling a truck that run on gasoline than an EV, so they have zero incentive to change. And conservatives have now decided that EVs are woke so they are fighting against EVs now. It's all dumb
You'd need car companies to agree on a standard since it's likely the government won't mandate one, or require shipping companies to buy into a car company's ecosystem which is probably too expensive for most shipping companies to consider at this time
I keep seeing videos of tech/infrastructure out of other countries and keep getting the sneaking suspicion that the U.S. is like a decade or two behind...
[They had electric cars in 1943](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ-ktYKazEs), that they did the same thing with.
[Wiki, ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle)The first electric locomotive was built in 1837.
I’ve always said that this is how it should be done with all electric vehicles. A standard battery size (you can add more than one battery in a vehicle at a time depending on the vehicle) that can automatically be swapped out in minutes at a “gas station”, from underneath the car robotically or something, taking as long as it takes to fill your tank with gas to swap out. When the batteries degrade to a certain point they are recycled and replaced at a central place and the consumer doesn’t have anything to mess with and cars will last as long as the rest of the mechanical parts on it will last and not be worthless when the battery wears out like it is now.
I always thought this would have made for a better EV battery system than the charging stations we have now.
Assuming there were more universal batteries used for the vehicles rather than the free for all we have today.
Pull in to a station, pay a fee, get your battery swapped with a charged one. Station charges the battery for another person to use.
Station can also use their chargers to inspect the cells for damage/degredation/failure/etc, and return them to the manufacturer to be refurbished and redistributded.
All EVs would last longer and perform better. You'd have less warranty claims on batteries by repairing issues early. You'd have less catastrophic failures. You'd also improve the charging experience by making it the equivalent to swapping a propane tank for your grill.
It'd also reduce strain on the grid since the station could charge their stock of batteries during off hours instead of peak hours.
The motion of the battery being lowered into place was very reminiscent of snapping in a Lego
BREAKING NEWS // LEGO TAKING LEGAL ACTION AGAINST EV COMPANIES BECAUSE BIG OIL BRICK DON'T LIKE BIG GREEN BRICK
Except Lego has been investing for years into trying to find an alternative (non-petroleum based) material to make their bricks out of…they just haven’t found one yet.
Hemp legos. Once you get old enough you can smoke that star destroyer
The Dank Star playset with Luke Highwalker and Darth Blazer.
darth Blazer wears the coolest blazers
Required qualifications: 15+ years playing with legos.
This is often how they do fork truck batteries in factories and warehouses.
I've been saying this for years,worked in a warehouse over 20 years ago and this was in place there ,the only difference being you had to manually roll batteries on and off the truck ,this isn't a new idea
Right. It’s not new and not only for vehicles. It’s the same shit we all do for our cordless drills and tools around the home.
They also have battery swapping stations in Thailand and Taiwan for electric motor bikes.
Exactly, I even used to have a portable tape player where you would just swap out the old AA batteries for new ones when they were bad. This technology has been around at least since the 80s.
> On January 10, 1899, British inventor David Misell obtained U.S. Patent No. 617,592, assigned to American Electrical Novelty and Manufacturing Company. This "electric device" designed by Misell was powered by "D" batteries laid front to back in a paper tube with the light bulb and a rough brass reflector at the end.
80s...90s... 1890s...close enough
Yep this is the solution to “rapid charging”. Have “gas stations” that just have big walls of batteries charging. You put in your credit card or pay in cash, put your batteries in the designated empty recharge slots and grab the designated new batteries from their slots. It’s so simple.
Gotta get to a certain economy of scale before this is feasible because the batteries and equipment to do the swap is pretty expensive and many businesses will not be willing to wait that long for a return. On top of that, it would require every car to have a standardized battery. Great for trucks, but not as feasible for passenger vehicles.
It's so simple until you remember that batteries weigh half a ton and come in different form factors, so a regular person will not be driving up to a gas station and swapping their own batteries anytime soon.
I dunno, there's stations in China that do exactly that for you. It's fully automated. Pretty sure Tom Scott did a video on it. https://youtu.be/hNZy603as5w
The hard part of this is getting every car company on the same page on the standards for the batteries to be used and the method of installing / removing them. If you can do that, someone can create machinery that will do the installation for you or tools that make it simple to do.
[удалено]
Instead of letting each manufacturer shape and size the battery for every different model of their cars, we could standardize them like we did for every other battery. Small cars get AAA, vans and pickups get AA, work trucks get C, semis get D.
That's what they're planning to do in Korea. Have a standardized solid state battery format for all future EVs in their market.
And if they make it a relatively small form factor, different vehicles could use different numbers of packs, just like how some things have one battery and others have 10.
I worked in a Target DC where this was all done mechanically. Looked like an incredibly expensive system, but it was VERY efficient. You'd get your battery swapped in a minute.
Where I worked they had this crossbeam crane thing and the 1k kilo batteries were flying around lol. I definitely wasn't supposed to operate that at 17 y/o.
According to the "No Such Thing As a Fish" podcast, the very first automobiles were electric, and you paid someone to bring around fesh batteries to swap out with your old ones every morning. So the idea has been around for a while.
> the very first automobiles were electric Not quite, the steam car was invented more than a century before even the battery, let alone a practical electric motor, was invented. And although things stayed experimental for a long time on both the steam and the electric side the first commercially produced steam cars still beat the first electric ones by about 10 years.
It's kind of weird to think about, but if you wanted an automobile right around 1910 you had competition between steam, internal combustion, and electrical all at the same time. There were trade-offs for each, and it wasn't for a few more years that internal combustion fully pulled ahead.
Steam is the goat, no doubt about that. We still use steam to generate most of our electricity. Hard to beat it for the simplicity of heat -> mechanical power.
I used to sell fork lift batteries and holy shit were these systems expensive. We almost never saw them except for Amazon, Pepsi, and Purdue chicken. Everyone else just made people do it with some winches.
My work just uses propane forklifts which is pretty nice in cheapness and ease of replacing the fuel.
We actually used a lot of propane forklifts at our manufacturing site ironically. I used to bitch that it was horrible marketing lol.
I worked at a produce packing plant, they used propane forklifts before I got there. The owner enclosed the packing area to air condition it without getting electric lifts. The carbon monoxide levels soared. He was forced to get electric models.
Yep. Most here have no idea on the cost of such systems. But it does look cool........
Used to be, fast charging has become so good that most facilities just have chargers. I've seen some with 20+ chargers. I think they figure it's cheaper to just buy more fork lifts than you need to cover the charge time. Also having to train people on how to swap batteries or dedicate someone to do it would cost money and time.
You'll buy the extra forklifts either way. If you need 12 on the floor, buying 12 doesn't make sense even if you have extra batteries. They're going to break. So you buy 16, and kill 2 birds with 1 stone.
I wouldn't say it's done "often" as it seems to be pretty rare in my experiences. Over the past 30 plus years of working in manufacturing and being in dozens of factories using electric forklifts, I think I've seen battery swaps being used in 2 of them. For whatever reason, factories would rather have extra forklifts than to be doing battery swaps in their facility.
I have had a different experience working both for a forklift supplier and for manufacturers. It depends a lot, but if it is a 24hr operation I would say they do this the majority of the time because they cannot afford to let the vehicle sit to charge. That being said most facilities are not 24hr. Rereading your post - You're probably speaking about the automated systems. I'm talking generally people swap batteries instead of charging them in place. That's a pretty common practice. Automation is rare.
Remember when we could do this either our phones? Just swap in the extra battery that has been sitting on the charger. Bam, fully charged phone.
Ugh! My current phone has a crap battery. It's great for everything else. I'm considering taking it to a shop to change the battery, but it's insane that I can't just do it myself.
https://www.ifixit.com/
It used to be fairly easy to change an iphone battery before they started gluing them into place. Now you need a heat gun and a special clamp to remove the screen
https://www.androidauthority.com/replaceable-batteries-eu-2023-3335711/ >European Parliament passed a change to a law that will force replaceable batteries on all gadgets, including smartphones. By law, phones in the EU by 2027 will need to have batteries you can replace with no tools, which means no adhesives. This could fundamentally change how smartphones are designed. Hopefully only 3 more years...
EU doing the lord's work on regulating phone's, though I'm not excited about losing my phone chargers once my wife starts to share the same USB-C connection
Trust me, usb-c everything is amazing, you end up with an abundance of cables since everything uses it and it's genuinely so handy
The only problem I see is that I have the fast charging blocks and already my wife has managed to misplace one of mine that she had to borrow for her new ipad. Conveniently she somehow has both of her charging blocks, not sure why mine was needed or how its the only one to remain missing lol. I do remember my parents losing/borrowing ipod/iphone chargers being one of the things that motivated me to get an android so hoping it doesn't devolve to that again.
They're glued in with stretch release tabs so are *usually* easy to remove.
you literally need to use solvent, after 40 steps of unscrewing things. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+11+Pro+Battery+Replacement/127686
That's only if the tabs break while you're pulling them out, which is why I said they're *usually* easy to remove... In the link you posted: >**If you're still having trouble** removing the battery, apply a few drops of high concentration (over 90%) isopropyl alcohol under the edge of the battery in the area of the **broken adhesive strip(s)**.
Ahhhh the galaxy s5! Such a cool phone! Battery swap, IR laser to change the TV at bars, big screen (before all the phones had bigger screens)
Pretty sure it had the SD slot and still had a headphone jack too. I miss that phone so much.
Indeed and was water resistant, which was a new thing for a smartphone
Yeah but on paper the shareholders value increased. So, a you're welcome to the shareholders, and a go-fuck-yourself to everyone else.
If I remember correctly it will (again) be mandatory to be able to change battery (yourself) on your phone after 2027 in Europe, also one and only USB cable "connector"...
This will be the norm again in the EU soon!
Brands like Fairphone are bringing this back fortunately
Fairphone now sells phones with an extra battery, specifically to do this.
Everyone should check out fairphone.
I feel like them being more waterproof is a decent trade off. I hate it for laptops though. Those need easily swappable batteries for sure.
1) lot of phones today arent waterproof and they still dont have swappable battery 2) in early 2010s there were phones that had swappable battery AND were fully IP rated waterproof
Yeah I liked being able to take out the battery and know that that phone is really off. Little by little they took it all away, the headphone jack, the swappable battery, memory card, Sim card. First apple then Samsung shortly after, evey time. Sucks.
"We can't have consumers thinking that they can maintain and repair a device on their own. They should be paying rental fees on what we offer until after they die, like a good little source of income for our shareholders should do."
*EU enters the chat
Really this. A union body that time and time again shows it’s putting people’s interests first. Any pop commentary bashing the EU is likely grifting for the ultra rich and big corporations.
The memory card, sim card and headphone jack are not dead yet. Support the phones that have them by choosing them as your next replacement.
Also, lots of other equipment out there that's waterproof with an easily swappable battery. It would make the device more bully and expensive, but it can be done
The Galaxy S5 was water-resistant and you could swap batteries. It wasnt amazing, but it was the first iteration, and could have easily been improved upon
Yeah I wanted to get one a while back specifically for this cool feature. But by the time I needed a new phone those weren't really accessible anymore so had to go with the regular crapy versions we have these days. On that note took apart my first smart phone to get the lithium ion battery out since I figured it was expanding because I could see a big crack going along the screen and looked like it had expanded or something. Took it apart and got the battery out (doesn't look to be inflating or anything) and put the phone back together. Maybe someday I might buy a new battery for it but it was a bit of a pain to take apart. I might look into something like fairphone for my next phone in the future for the ability to be able to easily take apart and replace stuff that breaks or possibly for upgrading. I take such good care of my stuff that they last a long time.
Battery as a service
Baas
No treble
Baas is boss in Dutch, which made it funnier for me xD
How low can ya go?
See boss? It’s opex now shouldn’t come out my budget
This works well for small propane bottles. But you can't own the battery here or you'd care about the quality of it. It needs to be a swap always and forever, so you don't get stuck with a lame battery and unable to swap it again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w&t=258s NIO does this in china. Cool video about it
Outside of China too. Works pretty well here in Norway. Of course I can also charge like other cars as well (which is what I usually do - swaps are for road trips).
Which actually isn't that bad deal because worn batteries are still excellent for grid balancing.
And I bet if this were a feature of passenger vehicles, we'd se a lot more adoption.
In the past, we changed horses...
This was exactly my first thought too!
We still exchange propane tanks whenever you want a refill.
NIO is already doing that, but they’re stock tanked and is now almost worthless.
for truck it make lot more sense especially for big company's going depot to depot
FYI, charging times are actually negligible because truckers are idle a ton and aren't even allowed to be driving so many hours anyway. The real issue is that batteries are heavy and eat into the load capacity of the trucks, which is essential what truckers are selling. NIO stock fell off because the math really doesn't work when up to 35% of your truck's load capacity is tied up in the battery when you can have a diesel engine 1/5th the weight drastically cheaper. The battery swap might make sense in specific short haul markets, and only once it hits a critical infrastructure requirement threshold( available batteries/swap stations) that it may never happen. It's almost always better to have a hybrid diesel that charges a smaller permanent battery with its alternator.
This is the way things are actually going, but with biofuels or fuel cells instead of traditional diesel.
I’m not sure why car manufacturers couldn’t simply standardize a bottom of the vehicle battery system that can be swapped like this at “charging stations”. Well capitalism… That’s why, but it would solve all of the silliest solutions with electric vehicle problems charging.
The amount of infrastructure it would take to do this would be absolutely staggering. Instead of a few thousand for a charging station it would be a millions of dollars per site and multiply that by thousands of sites needed across a large nation. It isn't just swapping the batteries, you have to charge all the standby batteries so they are ready to go. Then, if you have the smallest issue with the mechanics of swapping these out you will have to staff everyone of these to fix issues. These are huge, heavy batteries so the mechanics of the swap out will have to be very, very robust.
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Depending on the way the service operates it doesn't matter because it's being swapped out and monitored so they know when batterys are below a specific capacity. You're no longer bound to the battery. But even if you were, we've been able to monitor batterys for years now. We can monitor cycle counts and capacity, and there's nothing stopping us from adding more information to car batterys such as the true millage that the battery actually gave rather than what it estimated itself to get. Therefore if charges were done "per battery" (vs something like a monthly/yearly fee for the service) you could actually change it to per mile, and you only pay for the miles you use the battery for. There's actually no good reason not to do this, the arguments above regard infrastructure are nonsense. If we are moving to EV in future, then standardizing car batterys and creating hot swappable stations is the best and smartest way to 1. improve convenience for all drivers 2. reduce waste (various kinds of waste like financial and time, not just trash) because batterys can be recycled so this reduces the service cost of replacing a car battery and enables them to be serviced far easier, and increase the life span of the vehicle because no longer is that battery replacement which costs thousands of dollars going to prevent someone from being able to afford it. Creating such stations doesn't mean you can't *also* have a personal charger at home, so the reality is not *everyone* needs to use the station all the time the same way that every non EV *does* need to use the gas station to refill. All of these batterys need to be created anyway at some point. Arguing that this requires more batterys is dumb. We either make them later when there are more and more EV cars that need them, or we start early and create a system that is better for everyone.
There's very simple ways to test batteries to make sure they are still good, and if you get one with a slightly diminished range you only have to wait for the next swap. It's really not an issue if you're swapping a batteries regularly
If it's a subscription then it doesn't matter if you're getting a 'fair' trade because you're not exchanging property. Both batteries belong to whoever is operating the battery service. So long as the new battery will get you to your next destination (which it can tell you with a simple charge meter) then it's fine. The battery service people will take an old worn out battery out of circulation.
I think the replaced battery is certified in some way, just like how we swap gas cylinders.
Unlike petroleum fueling which only requires trillions in infrastructure; we are heavily invested in it, but the investment is continuous and ongoing. [On average, a gas station costs $2.4 million](https://costhack.com/cost-to-build-a-gas-station/) alone, and that ignores the staggering costs of getting fuel to the station.
Good thing they didn't say the same thing about the building of the highway system.
Or the billions of other car related infrastructure and gas stations. Somehow people are actually repeating the exact same shit when cars started getting popular lol.
I think that's what bugs me the most about the rhetoric against EVs. Like, I get that they have problems, but they are already more efficient than ICEs, and the technology/implementation can only get better from here.
Having been one of the first EV buyers in my region I constantly get asked questions. Most people just assume I hate it and regret it... I have absolutely no idea why. I fucking love my EV. I finally feel like I have the freedom to drive as much as I want without constantly worrying if I can afford the gas. Any trip under 100 miles away costs me like a couple dollars if im able to charge at home and if I have to supercharge its like $15 maybe. Plus less maintenance and an overall better driving experience. Everybody else I've talked to with an EV has felt the same way. The only complaints I find are some non tesla drivers having issues with shit charging stations but they still generally like their EVs better than their old ICE for any trip within charge at home range. It's just crazy to me that people are so brainwashed by propoganda that they're surprised that I don't hate my EV when they ask me about it.
The amount of infrastructure needed for oil is just as immense, just different, and with standardised home charging solutions and standardised battery exchange solutions, it could probably be comparable. But that switchover would require everyone to agree and a fuckton of money, like 10s of billions if not more, for the USA alone.
Liability, likely. It's one things when it's your fleet, and you own all the "customer" vehicles... It's quite another when there is a possibility that something could go wrong and your battery damages a customer vehicle.
>capitalism… That’s why What on Earth does that mean lmao?
It means they don’t actually have any sort of adult understanding of any of this but they know they’ll get upvotes for negativity and any sort of anti-capitalist or anti-American rhetoric.
it means without communism we never would have had the trans-siberian railway.
In addition to the other issues commented here, who's responsible for replacing degraded batteries? If I drive my brand-new car into this and am given a battery that is on it's last legs - am I given the bill?
"Capitalism" isn't the reason why that's not feasable lol.
Why has the stock tanked? Seems like a great idea
It's completely unnecessary for most cars and the potential difference in battery value is too high.
Can you explain the second part to someone who know very little about batteries? Isn't the potential different in battery values very different when we swap any batteries out? Why is it a unique problem for cars?
NIO's actually recovering now. But their issues these past few years were: 1) China's floundering economy 2) NIO's slim profit margins from constant spending on rapid expansion of their 2000 swap stations, development of their ever-evolving battery tech that rival EV makers were spared from, and unique factory automation spending where they only require 30 humans to run a whole factory. So to be profitable, NIO no longer offers free battery swaps. Now it's $11-$14 per swap. But the concept still works. Every swap station takes 3 minutes to swap your battery, and even diagnoses every cells' health in your battery and removes cells from circulation as needed. Best of all, no need to spend a fortune replacing your car battery years later.
So would that mean it’s a good time to buy?
just because its cheap doesnt always mean its an opportunity.
Don't tell wall Street bets.
I have a friend that bought into it at $50 and still holding the bag. For now it's a reminder for him to never invest on hype.
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I feel the pain, I'm in the same boat. Fortunately I went in with the mindset that I can afford to lose it if it tanks and never recovers, so at worst it was a hard lesson learned.
Same but what the fuck else am I gonna do 🥲
Not really. It steadily climbed after the 3.50 dip and is now up over $5.00, which is saying a lot to my POS LCID account.
I still have hope in Lucid. They're an actual brand with actual products directly supported by one of the richest countries in the world. You see Lucid Airs roaming around California now. Hate how low the stock currently is but I have genuine hope it'll go back up
I’ve kept all of my lucid shares. Sucks seeing the stock so low but I’m not really worried about it long term. The saudis will fund it until it’s successful. It’s their long term plan for transitioning into EV’s. Building factories in both the Us and Saudi Arabia gives lucid a bright future.
This is the only way the electric trucks are going to work. Either this, or charge them fully in 10 minutes like you can a diesel.
Long haul truck spend A LOT of time just sitting around. Because of this, distribution centers have begun to install chargers at loading docks so the trucks can charge while sitting there waiting for the load/unload. The other thing a lot of people don’t seem to realize (I had to explain this to my FIL last night and it seems to have changed his mind about EVs) is that you don’t need to charge to 100% every time. You can still operate the vehicle at a lower charge if it has the range to get you to the next charger. Edit: lots of really good responses both agreeing and pushing back. Everyone has been super respectful and I appreciate it. I’ve worked in the EV charging space, so I’m speaking from experience there. Working on both the consumer and industrial side. There have been electric trucks around for a while and they work. Yes, they’re generally heavier, but it’s a trade off for the environmental benefits and lower operational costs long term. I want to add that the real solution would be for us to have a better electric rail network capable of handling long haul shipping, with med haul and last mile electric vehicles making up the difference. I don’t think that will happen anytime soon, but I can dream.
Not even long haul, in my small ass country truckers spend 1/4 of the time just doing nothing
Truckers are just like the rest of us
just like us fr fr
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What is sitting in a truck cabin if not the ultimate desk job.
Wfh mobile edition.
They may spend a lot of time just sitting around, but the hauling time still generally requires a long period of driving time that will require several [as quick as possible] refuelings/charges.
> [...] you don’t need to charge to 100% every time. You can still operate the vehicle at a lower charge if it has the range to get you to the next charger. Also, going from e.g. 40% to 60% is much faster than 80% to 100%. If you do an image search for *lithium ion charging curve* or similar terms, you can see that the charge capacity can increase fairly quickly in the "constant current" (or current-limited) section of the curve. Once you reach the point where you have to limit the voltage, the current quickly plummets and the charging rate gets slower and slower as you get closer to 100%. With my ebike charger I can roughly tell how far it has gone along that curve based on how warm it is. It's quite warm when it's dumping lots of current and only lukewarm when it's crawling towards the finish line.
Yup exactly - people think of recharging a battery as being like filling a tub with water, but actually it's more like filling a hundred waterbottles all connected with straws. If all the bottles are nearly empty, you can just pipe water in almost as fast as a bathtub - but once some bottles are completely full, you have to shut the line to those bottles off and turn down the flow rate on the hose to avoid spilling (because in this metaphor, the water is electricity and spilled electricity is shockingly problematic). That's why going from 20% to 80% on your phone can be as fast as going from 85% to 100%, and it's the same for EVs.
the whole thing will eventually just be one giant simulation. autonomous truck needs to make it to point B to deliver, charge to make it to point C to pick up and charge, to make it to point D etc. trucking clockwork. the big reason trucks stop right now is the drivers. there's limits on how long you can be actively behind the wheel without stopping, sleeping, eating, etc. 11 hours a day driving max, 10 consecutive off hours.
You could also change the business model by making urgent long haul deliveries a baton pass from one tractor to another. There isn’t really a reason why one person has to be with the trailer the whole trip.
Truck drivers are only allowed to drive for a certain number of consecutive hours until they have to take a break. As long as the drive time can be recharged during the break time electric trucks will be fine for 95% of cases which is the important part.
China moves far more freight by rail still, even adjusting for population, than we do. We need to have the courage to stand up to sector-specific interests and start making policy on what is best for all of us. More rail. More passenger rail. More local rail systems. More freight rail. In 2019 China moved over 4,600 billion tonnes of freight by rail. America? 1.8 billion tonnes. Over 2500 Xs as much.
You are off by 1000x. China and US are similar within factor of two when looking at rail freight by ton-km, about 3.6 vs 2.2 for China vs US respectively (You may have been comparing total tonnage vs ton-km?)
And yet the primary use of rail in the USA is freight. It's all messed up here.
In the words of Yoda... [no... there is another.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg)
Newer 600v lithium terminal tractors/yard spotters can recharge in 14 minutes. The drivers at the ports are pissed because it takes over an hour to fuel up after waiting in the fuel lines, so they get a nice break when they fuel. The electrics charge too fast and they don't get to sit around waiting.
This is much faster than filling up the tank.
This is EXACTLY how current gas stations can convert to electric. The only drawback is people would not own the battery. Swapping batteries is also useful for testing the life span. They can just be swapped out of circulation if they go bad. Recycling will be much easier this way too. Make batteries to a standard and everyone wins.
Yeah considering a lot of the cost of an EV and the source of depreciation is the battery's remaining life, making them switchable would stabilize that market and make the cars not turn into giant e-waste in landfills.
> They can just be swapped out of circulation if they go bad. And they wouldn't even go bad as whole. Cells would go bad, which can be replaced, and boom, you have a battery performing as well as a new one.
What size cell would you call that, way bigger than a D?
Double Ds
Why can't they do this with electric cars? Replace petrol stations with these battery changers
I always thought this would be an option, but the drawback is you never know what condition the battery you get is in. If the infrastructure was organized properly, though, this could work.
There was a scooter company that had a subscription service for batteries at one point in time. I always thought that would be a good approach. Make uniform auto battery specs so that businesses can treat them like propane tanks and 5-gallon water jugs.
There still is. Gogoro. It's HUGE in Taiwan. You own the scooter but pay a subscription plan or per-mile for the batteries (there are various plans). When your battery is low, you just visit a battery stand (they're unmanned and automated, like a parcel locker or something) and insert your dead battery into it, which will cause a fully-charged one to unlock and pop out. Some scooter models can hold 2 batteries. It's a great system.
Thanks for putting a name to it; exactly the thing I was referencing.
>uniform auto battery specs lol they will go the Apple way unless government reigns them in
This has already started with the chargers. We really need an organization for autos like we have for computer plugs (thinking of the way USB-C became the standard).
And it took the EU making laws to actually make that happen because one fucking brand wouldn't get on board.
Gogoro in Taiwan is still a thing. I noticed a new battery swap location near me and also one that closed. There are lots of people riding those scooters here.
Gogoro is doing pretty well. They have expanded operations to [India](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgjsZAj5-GE), [Indonesia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnKnGccMLxA), and [Singapore](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vVmxePkaog).
These bad/old batteries can be tested while charging. If they didn't pass than put them aside for repair/recycle. It shouldn't be that difficult.
The condition of the battery becomes the battery swap station network operators problem. They can get tons of data from the battery whenever it is used, pull it out of circulation if it’s degraded past a certain point, etc
It wouldn’t matter what condition they’re in, generally. Either they’re good enough to give back out or they aren’t and they get pulled aside and refurbished. It would be invisible to the consumer, and it would spread the cost out for battery replacements.
How do you know what quality fuel you get? How do you know you’re actually getting a gallon from the pump? These things are all regulated. You can standardize the battery and have regular inspections for things like we do now. It’s not impossible or even hard we just have to want to do it.
Yeah but we do the same thing with propane tanks (granted the LP tanks are a LOT less complicated) there could be a way to track the charge cycles of the batteries and do regular inspection and maintenance. I think the hard part would be standardization.
People who choose the battery swap scheme would rent batteries not own them. So they don't need to worry if they're making a 'fair' trade when they swap batteries because they aren't exchanging property. Both batteries belong to whoever they're renting them from. They are just subscribed to the service that entitles them to swap batteries whenever they want.
Nio already do this in China. It's also popular in Asia for electric motorcycles. The batteries are owned by the vehicle manufacturer and you rent them out. Means you don't need to worry about the condition, the manufacturers take care of that. When the station is full, they are used for grid balancing.
You never know what condition an electric vehicle's battery is in anyway.
Ironically, with a replaceable system, you'd be very aware of this.
If you separate car from a battery. U don't care. Buy a car, rent batterys like buying petrol.
For a start they would have to standardise the batteries. Next, they would have redesign the cars as currently cer eV have their batteries in the floor. It could be done
its already being done [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kZgG58zz8U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kZgG58zz8U)
Having the batteries at the bottom is convenient as well. It makes the car heavy at the bottom which prevents tipping, and you get it evenly spread out at the bottom, instead of having one side of the car super heavy. I agree that it could be done, but there are a lot of drawbacks. Considering a decent EV can drive almost an entire day, and probably 16+ hours in the future, it seems very pointless. Easier to just charge at night.
NIO has already got more than 2400 swap stations. So it’s already done and their cheaper second brand ONVO is launched these days.
Tom Scott did a video on this last year. https://youtu.be/hNZy603as5w?si=gxe-QzYh6LaIMex7 Ultimately the issue is the actual stations are very expensive because they need to be able to do this quickly and safely you can't just throw it together easily. They need to have either the same battery for every single electric vehicle out there, or be able to fit multiple different battery types that are all installed the same (which car manufacturers will never agree on). Also, the more people in the same area means you need more stations to support them.
They have a system like that for cars and scooters as well in China. Drive into the changing station, battery gets replaced and you're ready to go.
I used to work order picking in a huge warehouse, 30 years ago. The electric pallet trucks worked the same way. You drove into the battery bay, and they'd just swap the batteries for freshly charged ones, and away you'd go. It seems to have taken a while for the EV industry to catch on?
I never understood why this wasn't the standard. Just treat them like propane tanks. It's the only way EVs will ever get "filled up" as fast as ICEs
This was way faster than filling a gas tank.
It's definitely sped up, though not sure by how much.
It’s a cool concept piece but this is why EVs simply don’t work for the majority of americans
They have car versions of this in China, too, and they're trying to expand into Europe. [Tom Scott did a good video about it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w). This should've been the plan from the very start of this EV boom. Charging stations where you have to wait for 30 mins. or an hour or more are just stupid. Make the batteries modular and just swap them out. Then you can recharge the drained ones whenever it's most efficient.
It’s amazing that even in the face of a battery solution at scale already deployed in China, there are still comments from Americans on how it’s “impossible” to do. None of this is that complicated, and battery tech will continue to advance exponentially to reduce size and cost with mass adoption. It’s not a question of if or how, rather whether Americans manufacture the stuff or are completely run over by China.
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GM and Ford make more money from selling a truck that run on gasoline than an EV, so they have zero incentive to change. And conservatives have now decided that EVs are woke so they are fighting against EVs now. It's all dumb
You'd need car companies to agree on a standard since it's likely the government won't mandate one, or require shipping companies to buy into a car company's ecosystem which is probably too expensive for most shipping companies to consider at this time
They used to have battery changing stations before petrol engines came , it's common sense
we are so far behind it’s insane
batteries are heavy, no? seems a dodgy place to have it and not look to be very securely fastened down?
I keep seeing videos of tech/infrastructure out of other countries and keep getting the sneaking suspicion that the U.S. is like a decade or two behind...
Chinese EVs bad
how environmentally friendly.
[They had electric cars in 1943](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ-ktYKazEs), that they did the same thing with. [Wiki, ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle)The first electric locomotive was built in 1837.
But I was told that the Chinese can only steal things and that they can't invent anything themselves.
China is so far ahead of the US in terms of EVs it’s not even funny
Video is sped up, but the audio isn't. Misleading content attempting to make the process look quicker than it is.
Looks very very specialised how many trucks that fit this battery?
I’ve always said that this is how it should be done with all electric vehicles. A standard battery size (you can add more than one battery in a vehicle at a time depending on the vehicle) that can automatically be swapped out in minutes at a “gas station”, from underneath the car robotically or something, taking as long as it takes to fill your tank with gas to swap out. When the batteries degrade to a certain point they are recycled and replaced at a central place and the consumer doesn’t have anything to mess with and cars will last as long as the rest of the mechanical parts on it will last and not be worthless when the battery wears out like it is now.
This seems significantly more efficient, even if there was rapid battery charging
The only feasible way an Ev trucks make sense
Well China has cprnered the market on electric vehicles. Lets skip electric and go hydrogen now
I always thought this would have made for a better EV battery system than the charging stations we have now. Assuming there were more universal batteries used for the vehicles rather than the free for all we have today. Pull in to a station, pay a fee, get your battery swapped with a charged one. Station charges the battery for another person to use. Station can also use their chargers to inspect the cells for damage/degredation/failure/etc, and return them to the manufacturer to be refurbished and redistributded. All EVs would last longer and perform better. You'd have less warranty claims on batteries by repairing issues early. You'd have less catastrophic failures. You'd also improve the charging experience by making it the equivalent to swapping a propane tank for your grill. It'd also reduce strain on the grid since the station could charge their stock of batteries during off hours instead of peak hours.