[crankylinuxuser]

If the ev car companies got their shit together, they could have used swappable battery packs.

You can wait around for 12h to charge, or you can turn in your cores and pay for 100% capacity batts now. And the swap would be quicker than standing around filling up a tank.

But no. Each ev is different and proprietary. The chargers aren't even the same.

[gmanley]

I mean the battery technology for EV companies is their special sauce. If they are all the same that takes away their differentiator. I agree it would be better for customers but it's understandable why that isn't something they want to do.

[macintux]

Much like swappable batteries in a smartphone, there are tradeoffs to such a scheme. And an electrical “pump” is vastly simpler to implement than something that would allow swapping out a car-sized battery.

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1090933_standardized-el...

[rhinoceraptor]

Swapping an EV battery is like swapping an ICE transmission. You can do it if you have a car lift and a scissor jack to drop it.

[mr__y]

Sure, but one can argue that a EV could be designed/optimized for faster battery replacement. While it would still need at least a forklift to move the batteries, I believe the time needed for battery swapping could be greatly reduced with a proper design.

[rhinoceraptor]

I’d much rather have an EV optimized for efficiency, battery endurance, etc. given that battery swaps would only really be useful for long distance road trips.

But you’d still need to have expensive batteries in stock on location, technicians and equipment. I can’t see that ever being done at scale.

[bluGill]

Tesla did that for a while. They abandoned the plan. Batteries are big and heavy. It turns out to be far more important that engineers have the ability to fit them around the other parts (suspension...) than the ability to swap a standard battery.

[rhinoceraptor]

Yep, the batteries are ridiculously heavy and they’re used as structural elements in the car.

So swapping batteries is hard to do, and unnecessary for most drives. Sure, you’d want to be able to swap batteries in five minutes like pumping gas. But who’s going to ship batteries out to the middle of Kansas, build infrastructure, and pay technicians just for people on a road trip who want to swap batteries?