"... I went to a facility [in Israel] run by Better Place — a company that seems to have worked all the kinks out of making electric cars free of gasoline a reality. The cars look like any other car, and drive smoothly and silently... Once charged, either at your home or at a station, the car can drive 100 miles without needing another charge. The new twist? Rather than wait for a recharge, you can go to a battery switching station that will install a new battery in less than two minutes. They charge up your old battery for another customer... " Range anxiety? What is range anxiety? More. Of course, this would require an internat'l or mutually agreed upon by EV manufacturers standard for battery physical configuration/form factor. (I take it that battery chemistry and charging details can be accounted for in charging circuitry/control software.) Any chance that this could actually happen, say in 5 years, 10 years?
if congress had it's act together, it could offer existing gas stations incentives to put these in, and work with mfg's and other countries to standardize equipment. ahh, but that would be too easy and how would that help them get reelected anyway.
This idea sounds like it won't work to me. Ignoring the cost, let's assume it doesn't cost that much to go in and have somebody spend 2 minutes replacing your battery and your cost for the power in the fresh one. How will this scale? It won't, not even at all in any way shape or form. Even if many people are topping up at home, think about a gas station on the highway (i.e. one supporting primarily interstate travel). They're reasonably full with people who get 300+/tank. If they're only getting 100 you've got to satisfy three times the demand. That means you'll have to have a ton of people on staff doing nothing but swapping batteries (a regular joe is ok holding a pump but two minutes of fiddling around and moving a heavy battery on a cart, forget it). Then what do you do with these batteries, who is going to charge them? The grid isn't going to see a couple of megawatts to your gas station to charge the batteries, so they have to be shipped somewhere. A truck driving around a ton of batteries to get charged. The above is just an off-the-cuff idea on why it won't work. The future of electric is capacity. Period. You cannot get around poor range with tricks and inconvenience. A car like the leaf makes sense in a lot of cases but will never be a suitable replacement until you can either fast charge (and even then, who's going to drive their car on a long trip if every 100 miles they are sitting around for 10 minutes charging up?--and again, what station has that electricity capacity?) or really jack its range up high. My above assumes gas doesn't become as dear as hen's teeth, but at this time a gas car can go 300-400+ and takes just a few minutes to fill and is easy to do so and the infrastructure supports it everywhere, even in a backwoods anywhere in the world. People like convenience.
And where will the batteries be stored in the car? Usually in the boot/trunk under all your luggage! Don't fancy having to remove all my luggage in the rain or snow to allow some minimum wage attendant to lug out your dead battery and drop (probably literally) a new charged one in, before you then reload all your (now wet) stuff again. It ain't going to happen.
Good point, although I suppose you could have it on a drawer that slips out of the bottom of the car, perhaps through the bumper... Anyway, if we need all of these additional batteries, what's that going to do for battery costs? It's not like lithium is free.
