There's something we can agree on: <It won't be after government sees their fuel tax revenues decline and of course the convenience cost of swapping batteries.> Especially in high fuel tax countries like NZ and Europe though USA is light on fuel tax. Electric cars will have to pay a mileage tax, as is charged in NZ for diesel cars and trucks. That's a good idea and when based on GPS/terrestrial position location, could be used as a road toll and congestion management fee [charge more when congested and nothing when the road's empty].
Ah, the old motivation suspicion. <Why are you so against faster charging technologies that would bring better solutions than swapping batteries? Do you have an agenda here?> I'm all for fast charging and if batteries could be nuked full in 7 seconds, that would be great, but the wires would melt and battery/capacitor explode. I'm an engineer and market strategy bloke = I deal with what's real and what actual people would like to buy. I have no axe to grind for any technology [though I have invested in CDMA for quarter of a century and my imagination turned to reality, and big heaps of cash]. Swapping batteries is a very obvious solution to the problem of getting a lot of electricity into a car in a very short time. Filling a tank with methanol to power a fuel cell would be fine too, if that looked as though it might be economic. Apparently gasoline can be used for fuel cells but they have to run really hot and are impractical for cars. Chris Borroni-Bird of Halo worked on inventing those a couple of decades ago for Chrysler: cargroup.org
I have no agenda other than to figure out what's the best way of doing things.
<stopping for 7 seconds
That's just a BS number - can't even get your credit card through the machine that fast - now days they ask for zip code and my local Texaco has inked a deal with Safeway to offer a discount - and of course they often times ask if I want a car wash. The capital cost to build battery storage and install chargers every 50km would be astronomical - no financial incentive to get from the present to your imagined future.>
Credit cards wouldn't be needed. A car announces it will be there in five minutes, the battery is got ready, the car has an identification. The car pulls in to its designated bay, say number 7. The puller pulls out the old battery while the pusher pushes the new one in. The batteries lock into place, the bar goes up and the car takes off. The old battery had reported its remaining charge, which is confirmed by the station and the car's account is debited for the net number of joules or kilowatt-hours or ergs supplied. Car washing, cafe, newspaper, clothes shop, pharmacy, medical centre, movies, etc is a separate business. The battery swap would be simply for battery swap.
Regarding the capital cost being astronomical, that's what the refinery managers used to argue when I'd propose something such as a swanky new fuel aka BP Ultimate, which is now sold all over the place. They'd say "But that will cost hundreds of $millions". I'd say "Let's divide that by how many motorists will buy it, their fuel consumption and all that individual stuff and see what the cost per litre will be and compare that with the benefits to the motorists". It was invariably a tiny cost and worth doing. Which is not to say that any idea at all is a good idea and there might be places where it's uneconomic to provide battery swap stations. You are right that there would need to be a financial incentive but there is already a financial incentive for hundreds of thousands of people to buy electric cars because they are doing it now, even without my amazing new technological invention [which is not really very amazing but it is apparently a difficult concept].
7 seconds isn't really all that fast but maybe it's a slight exaggeration and 30 seconds might be more relaxed for people. But really, 30 seconds is a longggg time to do a very simple thing. Formula 1 cars get 4 new wheels, used to be refueled and get running repairs done, all in those few seconds. It just takes some thinking and doing to achieve it.
The point about the snowmobiles was to show that being lightweight doesn't necessarily mean snow is problematic for a car. <Snowmobiles are super light and go really well on snow
They run on tracks - not tires - and they burn gas.> With electric motors, electronically controlled, a car would not suffer wheel-spin, unlike a regular car if the driver is not adept at snow driving. A regular car could be designed to avoid wheel-spin on acceleration and they probably are these days [I'm not up with it]. A really little car would get problems with lumps of snow on a road but having driven in snow for a few winters [in Canada], it wouldn't be much of a problem and in only some areas on some days. I got in trouble with a big car where a little one wouldn't have had a problem - my front tyres cracked through some ice on the road over a very shallow trench and I got stuck. A little car would have gone over. Snow driving requires good judgment and skill.
Of course the costs would be different and would have to be low enough to be a good deal for the car driver: < Will need to staff up those fueling stations with more (paid) employees. That's going to hurt the bottom line - Robby the robot will cost a fortune compared to a pimply faced teen at $10/hr.> Even if a fork lift adaptation was used, and a driver hired, it would be nothing much per swap. Say they took 1 minute per battery [a very long time for a fork lift to move something - having driven them myself, albeit decades ago] that would be 60 per hour. At $60 an hour for the pimply youth that would be $1 per swap. I dare say the motorist would not worry about that on their bill. At 50km per swap, that would be 2c per kilometre and $4 for a 200 km journey. My Camry needs 20 litres at NZ$2.30 per litre = NZ$45. If my electricity was half price, so I paid only $22 for a swap and $4 for the action that's quite a saving. With extra time of nothing really [because filling the car with gasoline takes 3 minutes per 400 km] half price electricity would be a good deal. Add on the "distance tax" that government would levy and it could be a good deal overall.
That's the big question: <Finally - you have come back to my main point and appear to agree - why pay more for this fantasy technology now - wait until charging is as fast and easy as filling up on liquid fuels.> I was in charge of alternative fuels for BP Oil in the early 1980s after the big fuel crisis of 1979. Lots of money was lost as crude oil prices fell from $40 per barrel to $10 a barrel and projects were shut down. I'm happy to fund Halo now as a preparatory technology. So many people are going electric that I guess at $80 a barrel, oil is uncompetitive for a lot of cars. Of course people wanting to go into the hills with tents, fishing rods, towing boats, with horse and dogs on board, along with 10 friends, would need something other than a fast swap small car, even if it also had Halo for cheap charging at home.
Waiting until things are not fantasy is no way to be an investor. That's why L M Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Alcatel and others lost out in the big shift to CDMA and then OFDM. They spent years denying CDMA only to find they missed the boat. Intel is now up the creek without a paddle and QCOM market cap is bigger than Intel [and Cisco]. Apple is huge. Nokia should have spent less time fighting with Qualcomm and more time doing what Apple did. And Samsung.
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