Better Place

My wish list.

Add a plug to every light pole in a parking lot. Add a meter if you want, I'd be glad to drop money for every hour of charge. Just have the ability to charge when in a parking lot.

---Kent

 

With fast-charging batteries now available, and likely to become more common, battery-swapping seems to me like an idea that is obsolete before it's practical. It would require double the number of total batteries on the road, would require a high degree of standardization among manufacturers, and would be plagued by the problems of turning in a set of good batteries for a set of worn-out ones.

I agree with the idea of plugs everywhere, with meters if need be.

 

The way it is supposed to work is you drive into the 'station' and the automated system swaps out your old battery for a new one. Never get out of the car, all automatic, takes 2-3 minutes (think car wash).
IF it can work reliably I can easily see the guys doing this BECOMING the standard.
Already plans to do this in Hawaii.

 

The swapping is supposed to be for distance driving. Around town you recharge.

The idea of swapping makes sense for the technology at this instant. I suspect advances will quickly overtake this idea. This is the sort of field where the first guys in are going to get clobbered by rapid advances, almost to the point where it paralyzes progress. I wouldn't want to try and pick a winner.

Tom

 

250 KW transformers are pretty common in industrial settings (according to ex-CECO engineer aquantaince). Put one out back of a your typical gas station, and you have a quick charging station.

Do not think fast swapping will catch on.

Standardization of the pack interconnects (electrical and cooling) and cavities in the cars to put the batterieis, and bracketry - this would be very beneficial to rapid electricification. Just like it was for rapid floppy-to-hard drive conversion in computers.

 

I agree, this is a VERY limited business plan. The expense of have auto swap hardware and multiple batteries at thousands of locations is a deal killer. Not to mention a standard battery location, size and access for millions of different cars and trucks. Might work in a very isolated location (think island) or if government mandated a "standard" design (very bad idea).
Key words are "obsolete before it's practical".

I think we will quickly have "smart" chargers at many locations capable of reading your battery "SPECS" and quickly re-charging while you have lunch, shop, work, pray, etc. The smart money will be developing the smart "one size fits all" charger, hooking it up to a credit card reader and selling juice at 150%-200% markup. These will be as common as venting machines. Restaurants, stores, churches and gas stations will lease them or give you the space for a percentage.

Between overnight charging (at time-of-day rates!!!), opportunity charging and the occasional "pay-to-charge", an EV will work for everything EXCEPT the LA to NY in 36 hours mad dash. Or the long road trip to the middle of frickin nowhere.

 

To be fair, the plan has a couple of upsides, even if the overall effort does not work out.
1) It is being done by a firm that is economically motivated to do it right. Lot's of unsolvable problems are solved when the motivation is channeled to engineering solutions rather than manipulating opinion.
2) While a battery pack is a big thing to change out, A tractor-trailer shift is done quite fast and these loads are much bigger than a battery pack. Heck, look how fast tire changes can be done at a NASCAR race. If someone were to give me a million dollars to engineer a way of changing out a battery pack automatically in under a minute, I bet I could figure out a way.
3) The threshold for success is profitability, not universal popularity or even universal acceptance. Very few people run their house from 100% solar energy, but the inverter and solar panel market look pretty healthy to me.

 

Tractor trailers all use basically the same kind of hitch, and many products can be loaded on a standard palate, which can be moved with a standard fork lift.

Changing a tire is a matter of removing and replacing a set of bolts, and every Nascar team has air wrenches with the correct size ratchets for its particular car. No standardization is needed. And the team is made up of highly-motivated people well trained to do their job. And finally, the teams are very well funded by sponsors who see high value in getting their names on the cars.

Now consider the machinery needed to automatically change out a thousand-pound battery pack in any one of a dozen different car types, each of which can have any one of 5 different battery sizes; and then install that machinery in 10,000 locations, and do it for an investment that will yield a profit at prices the public can pay. -- Compare that to the cost of intelligent chargers alone, where differences in battery specs can be addresses with a computer chip in the charger, and the only needed standardization is the plug type; and even without plug standardization it's not that big an obstacle to have several plug types on each charger.

With today's lithium batteries, fast-charging is a much cheaper way to go than battery-switching. And if monster-value capacitors ever become a reality, all the technological problems of charging disappear.

I wish these guys all the best, but I won't be investing my money in battery-switching. The only thing he's got going for him is he can offer the consumer a lower price on the car purchase. But the consumer will pay through the nose in the long run because not only will he have to pay inflated rates for the charge, he'll be stuck with just the one chain of charge stations: If this guy owns your battery, you cannot buy a charge from anyone else! And he needs to recoup his investment, which means you'll be paying for the battery after all.

 

I made it clear that I'm not saying the concept is viable. There are many reasons it could fail and probably will. What I was saying is that many problems presented as hard and difficult sometimes have elegant solutions. This could be one of them. I worked on a farm with quite a bit of heavy equipment. Yet attaching and detaching heavy equipment designed for rapid and repeatable operation is quite easy.

The NASCAR example was to point out something that usually takes minutes can be done in seconds. If NASCAR was motivated to make a machine do the job, then a machine would exist that could do the job.

For example:
1) Car pulls up to battery change station. All the battery change gear is in a pit under the car
2) Changeout gear puts weight on battery and with one release mechanism, releases battery, lowers battery, rotates pit platform by 180 degrees and reverses the process with fresh battery.
3) Drive off

For all the "Equipment" needed, look at how much stuff constitutes a gas station...big tanks, lots of pumps, piping, etc. This could be less than that quite possibly

I will fully agree that a rapid charge plug beats the living daylights out of a lot of mechanical infrastructure. I was making the point that this may not be the overwhelming showstopper imagined.

 

You left out the part about "Figure out what kind of car it is and what battery it needs and move the entire pit aparatus out of the way and move in the required aparatus.

Okay, I agree with you that the technological hurdles could probably be overcome; and you agree with me that it's an un-economical way to solve the problem of how to get EVs charged and going again while away from home.

Actually, you've uncovered another reason this won't work: For a 100-mile EV to make a trip across country there must be stations (fast-charge or battery-switching) every 100 miles on the road, and before anyone will buy the car there must be a network of such stations on every route they plan to drive.

But while 100% of gas cars must fill up at gas stations 100% of the time, EVs will only be using commercial stations 6% of the time in your example. So you have a massive investment in infrastructure, where the total market is only 6% of all driving miles. The much lower investment required to install plugs everywhere makes that more practical.

I really think that battery-switching is a solution without a problem. It solves a problem in a lead-based battery economy, but not in a lithium-based one.

 

Better Place is not some fly by night operation. They have hundreds of millions of dollars of funding already (apparently some kind of record) and are well on their way to transforming Israel.

If they say that battery swapping has a role, and is feasible, then it probably is. You can poo poo it all you want but to say new battery tech will make swapping obsolete before it even gets started is just dumb.

We need to end our dependence on oil and coal now, not wait for more battery improvements to reach commercialization. EV technology has been sufficient for years for EVs to replace gas cars.

Fast charging batteries are and will always be impractical. There is no way the grid will be able to supply the power for fast charging. So a fast charging, 300 mile battery, as Agassi says, "solves a problem that doesn't exist."

For driving distance larger than 100 miles you'll need to swap. Maybe in a decade you can bump that to 150 miles before needing to swap. But better batteries will be BPs headache, not the consumers.

What BP is committed to is that wherever one parks there should be a charging point so one can top up. They will have a quarter million charging points installed in Israel before they sign up even one customer.

They also are committed to governments creating an open standard so other service providers of charging points/batteries and all share the same physical connections/technology.

Renault Nissan is currently the one car company on board, but there may be others announced soon, once momentum for the Better Place network builds.

The economics of EVs vs gas cars makes their business model a slam dunk for success. Cheaper driving/maintenance costs for the consumer and no headache as to whether they are stuck with an obselete or malfunctioning battery.

Driving at 2 cents a mile in an EV vs 15-20 cents a mile by gas. There is lots of room for overhead and profit between those two numbers.

 

Wouldn't the total market be 6% of al EV driving miles? Which is less than 1% of all miles driven. Hopefully to grow to 50% or more but that is quite a bit down the roads.

 

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Dave,

I might not have made myself clear. I am very supportive of EVs and BP providing charging stations (even at 300% markup). I just don't see how and where quick "swapping stations" (that's batteries!) can be profitable in the US, way too many locations would be needed with way too much inventory.

Being able to buy the car and "lease" the battery could make EVs very affordable. Taking your EV in every couple of years to upgrade the battery pack would take the uncertainty out of the EV purchase. I can also see a secondary market for "used, last years model" battery packs.
Would make affordable battery packs for less range intensive uses such as golf cars, NEVs, fork lifts, monster boom boxes etc. etc.

But if I was asked to invest in a very expensive infrastructure (swapping stations) that could currently service 0% of the market share and had to compete with the gas station on every corner, I would have to pass.