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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (70232)	5/26/2016 5:04:59 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 86350

Ah, the old chicken and egg argument. That's one of the ones I'd get in the oil industry. It did exist to an extent for gasoline powered cars, but not to the same extent. For one thing you were not replacing an installed base using a different competing technology, so it just had to work it didn't have to beat out something with existing expensive infrastructure. Also gasoline worked (if not as efficiently) as a fuel source even with small refineries, and transport of oil and/or gasoline in barrels, and hand pumped cranks. Cars built to use those, would also with with large refineries, pipelines and tanker trucks, and modern pumps. You didn't need a redesign of the cars to deal with bigger scale on the production and distribution and sales end, and you only needed to redesign that side for economies of scale, and other efficiencies not to deal with new car designs. As you mentioned, swapping BIG batteries would be more tricky. But 3 or 4 small modular batteries would not. Mostly people would need only one battery for tootling around town. What might work for a transition is a combination. Cars have big batteries built low in their structure, very hard to swap, for range and packaging and center of gravity reasons, then they have one or two or 4 smaller swappable modules for quick changes. That might not be just a transitional thing it might even be a long run thing (with the big battery packs getting a bit smaller over time and more standard quick modules making up the difference in capacity.