Right now, there are a tiny proportion of the car fleet needing a Tesla supercharger. Teslas are operated by rich people who can afford to play games and hang around a supercharger showing off. < Are charging and/or battery swap points going to be so rare compared to the number of electric cars? Right now the quick charge points I do see are often empty.> Tesla can afford to build a big surplus of 'free' charging stations so each car has 3 available for them at any time. But when half the car fleet is electric, that won't be doable.
< If electric cars become really common, a large percentage of the total cars on the road, than even if quick charge points become as common as gasoline pumps an hour per charge would result in backups (even if not normally backups of hundreds of cars).>
Queues of cars sitting for an hour to get a part charge isn't going to happen [for long]. People will figure out that unplugging one and plugging in another is much more sensible.
Yes, 7 seconds to swap a battery might not be doable. But it might. It looks like a job for a robot, not a human [other than a supervisor hiding inside a nice warm room over-looking the scene].
A car could show up at a particular time at the 7SSS station and the robots would have the right battery sitting there ready to go because cars will have GPS and systems integrated with all sorts of traffic management and communications. Qualcomm and Google are working on that. As are many others. Economics dictates that there wouldn't be many battery types anyway. They'd be modular with one, two or three being swapped at a time depending on the range wanted.
When the car has stopped, the robot would reach over with an arm and pull on the battery handle. The car would have released the battery clamps so it could be removed. The battery would slide out onto the carrier. On the other side of the car, another robot would push the new battery in from the carrier on that side.
7 seconds is a long time for a battery to slide, so it should be doable. Once the battery is out and the other in, the car would be good to go. No need to walk inside to somebody sitting behind a till. Electronics can very easily move money these days, wirelessly.
The system would be comparable to a vending machine that dispenses fizzy drinks. Walk up to the machine, pop in a couple of dollars, push the button that says which drink is wanted. A robot pushes that drink out into the collection tray. 7 seconds later, we can walk away drinking our cool, refreshing, flavour, caffeine, sugar and water rev up with a fizz up our nose.
But suppose 7 seconds isn't easily doable. If it did take 1 minute, that would not be much of a problem. At present filling with petrol, or gasoline, or diesel, is a five minute hassle involving getting out into the rain, wind, cold, and robbery zone. Convenience, comfort, speed, cost would all make 7SSS more attractive than gasoline or Superchargers.
Mqurice |
