[swagempire]

With standardization -- how is a battery swapping network any different from a gas station network?

Our entire society is based on these kinds of things. "Electricity?!" -- what if they stop producing that...then what? No, I'll stay with my steam powered...

[Qwertious]

>With standardization -- how is a battery swapping network any different from a gas station network?

Because if one bad actor screws you over (e.g. a faulty battery that lies about its charge status), then you're potentially out thousands of dollars. Saying "with standardization" glosses over possible decades of cracking down on every dipshit that passes off dodgy batteries and makes thousands of dollars a day.

Also, you need lots of extra batteries everywhere, to swap with. Hopefully everyone has the exact same form-factor of battery too, vehicle design flexibility be damned, because otherwise you'll need multiple stockpiles of batteries.

Also, making batteries modular is expensive and adds weight, which reduces practical range.

Battery swapping also doesn"t have a good path to adoption, since it's capex-heavy and at first is operating in a world where nobody uses it. In contrast, EV charging infrastructure is everywhere as long as there's a power socket.

Also, adding a charger for your swappable-battery car costs pennies, so lots of people won't even use their car's battery a swapping feature (which is really bad for battery swapping outlets). If most people only use the battery-swap at Christmas and $HOLIDAY, then the networks could be underprovisioned during those spikes and overprovisioned in the other 363 days of the year.

[swagempire]

So even though there would be incredible benefits -- we just should not try according to this position.

I mean hasn't every great engineering achievement in human history basically been about overcoming a litany of "it can't be done because"? We would still be in caves with this approach you suggest.

[Anticlockwise]

I understand this feeling, and feel it frequently with other comments, but don't see the comment you're replying to as the best example of that. Their list of reasons are mostly not overcomable with "great engineering achievement" - they're mostly economics. If you don't see a path to overcoming the economics, then you can engineer all you want and it won't succeed in our society.

So maybe a better contribution would be to ask what would drive successful economics of battery swapping? It seems like one critical piece which could happen on its own and would then potentially enable battery swapping is battery standardization. Yes, standardization reduces engineering options, as the parent suggests, but it also makes consumer lives much much better. I've got some non-standard batteries on my ebike and it probably puts a much shorter time limit on the bike's life than I'd prefer.

Standardization doesn't have to reduce engineering options as much if there are a handful of form factors. That's what we've seen with AA, AAA, 9V,etc. We should be aiming for a small set of form factors and connectors that enable sufficient engineering options.

[Qwertious]

Battery swapping schemes have already been tried, theyy all flopped. I don't mind if people attempt it again, as long as they don't fall into the "it failed because it wasn't large-enough scale" trap.

And I'm sure battery-swaps are possible, they're just a really dumb idea. Engineering isn't about what can be done, they're about building the best solution to the problem - and that includes not overengineering it.

As the saying goes: any idiot can build a bridge that stands up, but only an engineer can build a bridge that barely stands up.

[erik_seaberg]

The trouble is that power outlets are mostly installed indoors. Many parking lots aren't wired at all, even for lighting.

[ruined]

the supply chain.

nobody puts gas into the gas station but the delivery tanker. nobody puts electricity into your mains but the grid operator.

when you get electricity from the grid or gas from a gas station, you have a pretty solid expectation that the service knows where it came from, and nobody else has had access to it.

at a battery swap station, you are receiving a high energy object of essentially unknowable provenance, to which many people have had private unsupervised access.

a lot can be done to mitigate this but you can't make it not true, and by nature of the service it is a very lucrative vulnerability to exploit.

[crazygringo]

Battery swap stations don't take random batteries of unknown provenance -- they only take known batteries with known, tracked histories from one or more manufacturers who have set up to participate, and they're not going to take damaged ones.

> by nature of the service it is a very lucrative vulnerability to exploit

I'm having a hard time imagining what the lucrative vulnerability is here?

The only thing I can imagine is for someone to take a new battery, swap its insides with a 10-year-old or otherwise damaged battery and put that into circulation, so that they now have a new battery almost for free.

But there are so many safeguards you can implement against that -- even if you manage to bypass all manner of physical anti-tampering and cryptographically signed hardware attestation, the swap is going to be detected during the next charging cycle (you can't fake receiving electricity the way fraudulent 32 MB flash drives can fake having 128 GB written to them), and you can go arrest the culprits for stolen goods and/or fraud and/or whatever.

I'm having an extremely difficult time seeing any viable "lucrative" criminal enterprise here at all. Sure, someone can tamper with or damage a battery the same way they could with a gas grill propane canister, but there's no money to be made in that.

[nick222226]

Counterfeit coulombs sounds like a great premise for Sci Fi.

[brianwawok]

The big difference is battery life. Every time you use a battery the lifespan shortens a little bit. Abuse it and it is shortened a lot. If you have a swap network you no longer care if you take good care of your battery, and if you do - your nice month fresh battery gets swapped for an abused beat up battery. For sure for my car I wouldn’t want someone else’s abused battery, I spend a fair bit of effort to baby mine.

[tzs]

An interesting way to address that is to only swap in new batteries.

That would of course be completely impractical with current rechargeable batteries, but who says the batteries have to be rechargeable?

I remember a few years ago a company that was developing an aluminum-air battery was demonstrating an EV using it. They were getting something like 1200 km range (about 750 miles), which is enough that the average driver would only need to do a battery swap every couple of weeks.

Aluminum-air batteries react the aluminum in the battery with oxygen from the atmosphere producing aluminum oxide. Once the aluminum is all used up the battery is dead, but it can be processes similar to the way aluminum ore is processed to recover the aluminum and use that to make a new battery.

Processing aluminum ore takes a lot of energy so this isn't something you'd actually do on site at the battery swap stations. You'd ship the spent batteries to someplace with really cheap electricity (i.e., the same kind of places we put aluminum smelting facilities).

Compared to the current gasoline distribution system this would be more work, because it would be two way. With gasoline, it has to be shipped from the refinery to the gas station and after that it is the atmosphere's problem. With swappable aluminum-air batteries you'd have both distributing the new batteries to the swap stations and distributing spent batteries to the smelting and battery making facilities.

[superb_dev]

I think this could be solved with automated monitoring and safety. The scooter should prevent excessive abuses, and the chargers should flag and remove poor performing batteries

[waihtis]

Batteries are not a natural resource though. I have no information how it works currently, but presumedly vendors lock in the devices to only work with certain types of batteries. Please correct me if I'm wrong in this case.

[Euphorbium]

You are just dependant on coal network.