Electric Vehicles? Towing? Hauling?
There seems to be quite a push lately for zero emission vehicles and electric only vehicles. How on Earth would these ever work for us? You can't go cross country in an electric vehicle in a pra...
Forum Discussion
2112 wrote:
I haven't read past the third page posted three days ago so this may have already been said:
The logical solution to the recharge downtime while travelling is to create an integrated infrastructure allowing to quickly and safely replace the vehicles discharged battery pack with a freshly charged pack. You would pull into a 'fueling station', an attendant will remove your pack and install a fully charged pack. This could take a few minutes and even be automated to where no human involvement is needed. The vehicle needs to be designed to allow this.
The problems:
- It needs to be universal for all manufacturers. Not as easy as it sounds once you get past 3-4 models.
- A gas station might fill up 1000 cars per day. That means you would need close to 1000 battery packs per gas station. At 10k-15k per battery pack, that would be 10-15 million in stock.
You could cut the stock a bit fewer if you are charging the spent battery packs but that creates other issues. If they can put 80kwh into a battery pack in 30min would require, around 1350amps @ 120v per battery pack. To top up 1000 packs at 30min each would require around a 28,000 amp service (probably use higher voltage but puts it in perspective how much the station would need). Also, this assumes evenly distributed swaps over a 24hr period. With spiking demand in the morning and evening, likely would be higher.
No swapping battery packs is not reasonable.
