|
I just noticed Hertz is renting the Model S through their Dream Cars program at certain California locations. I'd be tempted if they ever got one of the new ones with the autopilot system.
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 02:53
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 16, 2024 13:14 |
|
|
If you look at the physical limits of the Model S's supercharging capacity and battery swap program, the inventory management is not even an interesting question anymore. The Model S can go from dead to full charge off a supercharger in approximately an hour, or 3600 seconds1. It can enter the battery swap port and complete a battery swap in about 90 seconds2. Each battery swap terminal in their network is also a supercharger terminal. With supercharger capacity to simultaneously charge 40 batteries at once, a supercharger terminal can literally be swapping batteries non-stop and keep up with demand perpetually. Once you have this limit, you can model how much of the physical limit to demand you observe and scale down supercharging capacity accordingly. If you consistently swap packs less than every 3 minutes, you only need 20 chargers. If you consistently swap packs less than every 6 minutes, you only need 10. If you swap 1 battery an hour, you need one supercharger for the entire inventory. When modeling any continuous flow system like this it's not enough to look at the rate over big time spans, you also need to examine burst consumption: what happens during e.g. spring breaks? This is where a buffer of previously charged packs can allow the system to temporarily exceed the supply dictated by the number of superchargers. 1 supercharger can keep up with 1 battery an hour, but with an inventory of 10 batteries, you can meet the demand of 10 people one right after the other, provided there is a <10 hour lapse period of no activity. Once you start factoring in consumptive tendencies such as: people are less likely to do battery swaps at night, people are likely to swap a non-empty battery, price can influence people's behavior, and the battery swap already has dynamic pricing built in, the system can be much more robust: in the face of demand approaching the excess of the system's capacity, you increase pricing to reduce demand. A supercharging terminal can have about 5 surface supercharger ports for parking your Model S next to and charging up at. It's entirely reasonable that the battery storage facility can have similar charging bandwidth at far lower cost. A facility which can supercharge 5 packs at once can keep up with one battery swap every 12 minutes for 24 hours. With an inventory of 16 packs, and an 8-hour dead window, it can swap one every 10 minutes for 16 hours. At these figures, it starts to look a lot like reality. Tesla's poo poo phones home all the time, so they have a very crisp idea of what reality actually is.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 15:35
|
|
|
Dwight Eisenhower posted:If you look at the physical limits of the Model S's supercharging capacity and battery swap program, the inventory management is not even an interesting question anymore. How does the fact that Tesla stated your original pack needs to be picked up on the return trip (or be delivered for a fee to your nearest service station) affect all that? I still think Tesla was only serious about swapping if it awarded them ZEV credits which it no longer does.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 15:59
|
|
|
eeenmachine posted:How does the fact that Tesla stated your original pack needs to be picked up on the return trip (or be delivered for a fee to your nearest service station) affect all that? I still think Tesla was only serious about swapping if it awarded them ZEV credits which it no longer does. It fucks things up significantly; the storage needs expand significantly and the inventory of stored batteries goes up by a big margin. It's not without good cause, because battery packs are not fungible; a brand new pack will hold charge better than a several years old one, one that's gone through many charge/discharge cycles has less life in it than one fresh from the factory, heat cycles will reduce its life, and it's probably the case that despite their marketing, Supercharging will impact the lifespan of a pack. There was talk of "either come back and retrieve your own pack which has been charged up, or pay a premium to keep the new pack". The latter case being a killer feature; the biggest cost on any electrically powered vehicle is the finite lifespan battery pack and its replacement, and Tesla dropped the labor cost for that to drat near 0. I think if they had a trustable battery pack lifelog, it's still a pretty tractable problem. Then you swap batteries like for like; if you got a run down pack you swap for a run down pack that's fully charged. If your Tesla has 500 miles on it, you swap for a new pack that's fully charged. The scale of inventory on hand balloons, but by a much smaller degree than "You have to come get your exact pack back."
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 17:27
|
|
|
The idea that you own a specific battery pack is dumb. Instead, you should own the car but lease a nonspecific battery pack for a handful of money per month/year. The lease income would collectively bear the costs of periodic repair/replacement of worn out packs. As a bonus owners wouldn't have to worry about a big future cost of having to replace their battery pack 10 years down the line, which has been a criticism of EVs. The pack's logic could easily keep track of the number of charge cycles (I assume they do this already), and if a pack exceeds a cycle threshold or the station's charging system detects an error with the pack it gets automatically stashed away for repair, reconditioning or recycling. So you don't have to worry about getting a worn out pack as replacement.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 17:27
|
|
|
Dwight Eisenhower posted:It fucks things up significantly; the storage needs expand significantly and the inventory of stored batteries goes up by a big margin. I think their 8 year unlimited mile battery warranty fixes this pretty well. Assuming the batteries they're giving out aren't totally thrashed, there isn't a big reason to get upset if you get a battery back with 10% less capacity than the one you gave up. As long as you can go to a Tesla dealer at the end of the warranty (or any other time, maybe change of ownership) and get one with the capacity you should have based on the age of the car (or just a completely new replacement), I'd be happy with random swaps.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 17:55
|
|
|
Dwight Eisenhower posted:There was talk of "either come back and retrieve your own pack which has been charged up, or pay a premium to keep the new pack". The latter case being a killer feature; the biggest cost on any electrically powered vehicle is the finite lifespan battery pack and its replacement, and Tesla dropped the labor cost for that to drat near 0. What? Pretty sure their proposed automated battery swap system is just a prototype and is likely to be fabulously expensive to construct and maintain considering it has to handle hundreds of pounds of batteries for a single car and there's multiple mechanically complex steps. And this isn't even getting into the issues regarding battery packs that cost tens of thousands of dollars each. You can account for this, and the battery as a service system makes the most sense for this, but it will not be cheap. Again, all your speculation is heavily affected by the fact that a lot of Tesla's figures are likely bullshit, either entirely so or by omission. For instance, the claim that Supercharging doesn't "significantly" affect battery life is almost certainly some bullshit number obtained by a combination of convenient assumptions and a questionable definition of the term significant. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Jan 29, 2015 |
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 17:56
|
|
|
How are you supplying enough current from the grid to the supercharging stations to charge 40 batteries simultaneously and then how are you replicating that grid structure such that it scales out so you can get a high enough density of those stations? These are huge public works projects. Ones that need to be done for sure, but they aren't trivial.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 18:22
|
|
|
Mange Mite posted:What? Pretty sure their proposed automated battery swap system is just a prototype and is likely to be fabulously expensive to construct and maintain considering it has to handle hundreds of pounds of batteries for a single car and there's multiple mechanically complex steps. And this isn't even getting into the issues regarding battery packs that cost tens of thousands of dollars each. You can account for this, and the battery as a service system makes the most sense for this, but it will not be cheap. There's armored belly pans for protecting the battery pack, and then there's the battery pack, one integrated unit, which drops from the bottom of the car and can be replaced by another pack being inserted from the bottom. That's how Model S are built today. They haven't implemented automated swap stations in the wild, but it's not multiple mechanically complex steps. Their pilot program that they're using with customers' vehicles purportedly gets it done in 3 minutes. bull3964 posted:How are you supplying enough current from the grid to the supercharging stations to charge 40 batteries simultaneously and then how are you replicating that grid structure such that it scales out so you can get a high enough density of those stations? Noone's charging 40 batteries simultaneously. 40 is the absolute hard limit of charging bandwidth you'd need to be swapping batteries non-stop, 24 hours a day, with a 90 second swap process.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 19:17
|
|
|
Dwight Eisenhower posted:There's armored belly pans for protecting the battery pack, and then there's the battery pack, one integrated unit, which drops from the bottom of the car and can be replaced by another pack being inserted from the bottom. That's how Model S are built today. They haven't implemented automated swap stations in the wild, but it's not multiple mechanically complex steps. Their pilot program that they're using with customers' vehicles purportedly gets it done in 3 minutes. There aren't multiple mechanically complex steps to the swap itself, no, but there sure as hell will be if you're going to store more than just the last battery you swapped out. The mechanics for a 40-battery (or even 5,) magazine with integrated charging would be pretty freaking complicated. Dwight Eisenhower posted:Noone's charging 40 batteries simultaneously. 40 is the absolute hard limit of charging bandwidth you'd need to be swapping batteries non-stop, 24 hours a day, with a 90 second swap process. This assuming just one swap mechanism, though. And again, the mechanical system you'd need even to just store 40 batteries in an automated magazine would be pretty astounding.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 19:28
|
|
|
Dwight Eisenhower posted:There's armored belly pans for protecting the battery pack, and then there's the battery pack, one integrated unit, which drops from the bottom of the car and can be replaced by another pack being inserted from the bottom. That's how Model S are built today. They haven't implemented automated swap stations in the wild, but it's not multiple mechanically complex steps. Their pilot program that they're using with customers' vehicles purportedly gets it done in 3 minutes. Removing any part from the bottom of a car is already pretty complex, let alone automating it. There's also steps you've left out like disconnecting the liquid cooling systems. Now you have to do all this either on a lift or a pit built into the ground, then get your 1300+ lbs of batteries out and stored somehow, and get a new one out of storage, then lift and install it. That's an extremely complex process. You might as well say "well it's easy to replace the headlights in this car, all you need to do is drop the engine then screw the light bulbs in." edit: I looked it up and it looks like the battery pack for a Model S weighs 1323 lb. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Jan 29, 2015 |
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 19:30
|
|
|
Cockmaster posted:I just noticed Hertz is renting the Model S through their Dream Cars program at certain California locations. I'd be tempted if they ever got one of the new ones with the autopilot system. drat, it's $400 per day with 75 miles included. That's expensive. I'm still tempted to do a day.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 19:33
|
|
|
Mange Mite posted:Removing any part from the bottom of a car is already pretty complex, let alone automating it. There's also steps you've left out like disconnecting the liquid cooling systems. Now you have to do all this either on a lift or a pit built into the ground, then get your 1300+ lbs of batteries out and stored somehow, and get a new one out of storage, then lift and install it. That's an extremely complex process. You might as well say "well it's easy to replace the headlights in this car, all you need to do is drop the engine then screw the light bulbs in." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_XEv2f_Uhw demo starts at 42s
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 19:34
|
|
|
Cocoa Crispies posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_XEv2f_Uhw A tech demo is not the same as real life is what I'm saying. There's a lot of ways to fudge things for a demo that aren't realistic. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Jan 29, 2015 |
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 19:37
|
|
|
Ola posted:Good point by InitialDave. Western Norway is "the land of a thousand tunnels". Some of the projects are very impressive, corkscrews, subsea etc. But the way they did it in the olden days was quite impressive as well: Please tell me I can cycle up/down this. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 20:00
|
|
|
I'm pretty sure that 120 years ago people were laughing at the ICE car and saying it would never replace the horse drawn cart. And who would also call you crazy for saying we'd eventually have a world-wide network of refuelling stations each having buried tanks with thousands of liters of gasoline. Not saying that battery swap is necessarily the future, but it's one option. Liquid batteries would obviously be even better since you could probably re-use a lot of the existing liquid fuel infrastructure.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 20:09
|
|
|
Mange Mite posted:You might as well say "well it's easy to replace the headlights in this car, all you need to do is drop the engine then screw the light bulbs in." Sure, if the car was designed from the get-go to have the engine easily removed by a custom-designed robotic engine-swap station. The Tesla battery swap is effectively a mechanized verison of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP5NezZdGhw If you simplify the task at hand enough and design a mechanism that can perform that task repeatedly and reliably, you can cut the time for what would otherwise be a "major repair" into next to nothing. IOwnCalculus fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Jan 29, 2015 |
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 20:11
|
|
|
Aren't those quick battery swaps going to run in to some issues after the cars aren't brand new, been through some north eastern winters, and owned/cared for by bubba?
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 20:18
|
|
|
Collateral Damage posted:I'm pretty sure that 120 years ago people were laughing at the ICE car and saying it would never replace the horse drawn cart. And who would also call you crazy for saying we'd eventually have a world-wide network of refuelling stations each having buried tanks with thousands of liters of gasoline. I don't think anyone is saying never. It's just that we have a much longer way to go than most people would like to admit. One other key difference here is widespread power stations are going to rely on a public utility that's already criminally under-engineered for our current needs. You couple that with a political narrative that's loath to raise public funds to upgrade said infrastructure (along with a whole lot of NIMBY crap) and you have a very very uphill battle. Electric for daily commuter cars is totally a viable thing. Complete replacement of ICE is still out of the question though. Since many people are only capable of owning one car (if that), that is going to require a massive shift in behavior to accommodate range limitations. bull3964 fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Jan 29, 2015 |
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 20:24
|
|
|
Yeah the point is that doing an automated battery swap is feasible based on the way that Tesla has built the car, instead of prohibiting it forever by burying the fuckers in the C-pillars. With on-site charging you don't have to shlep 3/4ton batteries around on a regular basis. A gasoline tanker is dragging around 45,500 lbs of gas, at that kind of a weight budget you're talking 34 Model S battery packs. Those packs are less dense, rigid bodies so there's different problems to solve with transporting them, but the incidences of those transportation cycles can be far more infrequent than with gasoline. The hardest parts of automated battery swaps system will be system maintenance and longevity, alignment with the car's undercarriage, and economically swapping non-fungible units. It won't be in the inventory control of battery packs, which are all relatively slim, flat, rectangular boxes of uniform shape and size.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 20:25
|
|
|
IOwnCalculus posted:Sure, if the car was designed from the get-go to have the engine easily removed by a custom-designed robotic engine-swap station. Yeah except that guy said that they've "solved the problem" when what they've actually done is made an expensive highly specialized system that iwll likely be pretty finicky and require a ton of maintenance. Which combined with the significant up-front price and quiestionable long-term utility this makes it a lot harder to create a network or do it at any sort of reasonable price. And it also does nothing to solve the existing infrastructure problems in terms of how the batteries will be charged in the first place. It's just another example of how most of these 'solutions' consist of throwing money at the problem in a way that scales poorly and is in general unsustainable. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Jan 29, 2015 |
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 20:28
|
|
|
I too thought you would buy a car with a swap option which included a leased battery pack and access to the swap network. One point to consider is the cost of the packs. A battery pack is easily a quarter, maybe a third of the car's price. So if you drive home for Christmas, you might be renting hardware for the price of your own car, and paying the insurance premiums of these high turnover, high dollar objects, in addition to paying for the electricty and the overheads. That's where inventory management comes in, you need to make sure people are willing to pay enough for this to support the risk of many millions of dollars worth of batteries behind moved around and supercharged all day, and you need to keep a very close eye on over/under-capacity, planning for all sorts of breakdowns and eventualities etc. Then there's rural areas or areas with very seasonal traffic. It's a problem even for gas stations today, but gas just scales better since it's a gas station comparatively simpler, likely cheaper and the range of a tank is not too bad meaning you need fewer gas stations to consider a stretch of land viable for car travel. If there was some limited amount of research budget that could be allocated either to battery chemistry or battery swap logistics, I would opt for the former and hope for the best. It's the simpler way, it just requires the fatter grid that the swap option also demands, but nothing more - apart from driver patience, since charging will obviously always take more time than swapping. But it could be that they'll never get enough range out of batteries and swap is the only way to get long range electric travel possible. Or the fluid thing, hope it works. jammyozzy posted:Please tell me I can cycle up/down this. You can! It's a long road over mountains etc meant for horses and carts from medieval times to mid 1800s. It's not all windy and snaky, that particular bit with the high dry stone walls starts here at N61.0435 E7.7963[url] and [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borgund_Stave_Church]ends at this attraction. You'll find tons of other amazing roads for cycling if you want to go on holiday. This post brought to you by the Norwegian Tourist Board.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 20:54
|
|
|
blugu64 posted:Aren't those quick battery swaps going to run in to some issues after the cars aren't brand new, been through some north eastern winters, and owned/cared for by bubba? It'll be a drat long time before "bubba" gets to care for a Model S, but valid point on the road salt fears. Perhaps that'd be a reason to go get it done once in a while? I don't know. Mange Mite posted:Yeah except that guy said that they've "solved the problem" when what they've actually done is made an expensive highly specialized system that iwll likely be pretty finicky and require a ton of maintenance. Which combined with the significant up-front price and quiestionable long-term utility this makes it a lot harder to create a network or do it at any sort of reasonable price. And it also does nothing to solve the existing infrastructure problems in terms of how the batteries will be charged in the first place. Just about everything you've said there could be said about the auto industry as a whole in its infancy, before the Model T got cheap enough for drat near everyone to get their hands on. No, these solutions are not easily scaled, they aren't simple, and the form they exist in today is probably not what they're going to be long-term. But it's still more of a solution than we had five, ten, or twenty years ago.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 20:56
|
|
|
IOwnCalculus posted:
Even though I'm a nay-sayer on swapping, this is a good insight. The boss of IBM in the late 1940s or whatever is often ridiculed for saying there was a global market of maybe 5 computers. But he was right, there wasn't any market for more than about five, given what he was selling at the time. He wasn't looking into the future, he was worrying about the present. Who knows what it's like in 10 or even 3 years? I think, fundamentally, electricty is a medium for transporting energy between where it's harvested and where it's used, and the simplicity and awesome practicality of the electric motor means there is just no way around it. That's the way to do it. Exactly how we do it is fun to talk about, but not much to worry about, there is incentive for clever people to take chances, experiment and figure it out.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 21:57
|
|
|
It still seems that resources would be better spent trying to get people into the "Buy the 100 mile range electric for your commuter and rent a gas car for longer trips" mindset. It's a huge shift to be sure, but it's going to be one hell of a lot easier than trying to solve the range issue before mass adoption of electric cars. I would like to see stuff like a government backed subsidy of "x" number of car rental miles per year when your only car is an electric vehicle rather than a straight up subsidy of the car's price. In the end, it's the same outlay of tax dollars. However, one nudges toward a certain type of behavior. Someone who was only looking at the price of the vehicle would dismiss the electric car out of hand even after subsidy because it won't work for the 6 times a year that daily miles exceed 100. However, that same person may look at a slightly more expensive vehicle with "500 free rental miles on Enterprise per year for 5 years" and go "huh, maybe this could work for me."
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 22:11
|
|
|
Yeah honestly it's so rare to go over 100 miles in a day if your commute is under say 20 or so miles each way. I would love to see a resurgence of lower-priced lower-range electric vehicles, say in the $15-20k range. It will take a while to get there. Companies seem to be focusing on range maximization. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 23:09
|
|
|
IOwnCalculus posted:Just about everything you've said there could be said about the auto industry as a whole in its infancy, before the Model T got cheap enough for drat near everyone to get their hands on. No, these solutions are not easily scaled, they aren't simple, and the form they exist in today is probably not what they're going to be long-term. But it's still more of a solution than we had five, ten, or twenty years ago. Yeah and until that happened it was pretty much a toy for rich people. We haven't hit the point where electric cars are useful for more than a pretty narrow slice of people yet, and buying into futurist hype just because it claims to be the future is silly, especially when the major technical and institutional issues consist of handwaving about future killer tech that's, for the most part, not even in the workbench stage yet let alone anywhere near production (especially since battery technology is infamous for being very slow). Even more so when there's plenty of hucksters who have a major interest in selling you on unrealistic hype.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 23:17
|
|
|
bull3964 posted:It still seems that resources would be better spent trying to get people into the "Buy the 100 mile range electric for your commuter and rent a gas car for longer trips" mindset. Some other 'shifts' that need to happen for this to be acceptable by most people are in the rental car industry itself. - Need reasonably secure parking at the rental facility for my electric car. - Rental car facility needs to be within round trip range of my electric car, or it needs to have charging stations. - Rental car facility needs to be in the direction I want to go, not 30 minutes in the wrong way. - Rental car 'transaction' needs to be re-vamped so that I don't leave wanting to shoot every employee in the building. Much of that is situational, or location issues, but they are real issues if 100 mile range electric cars are going to become 'acceptable' to many people. Michael Scott posted:Yeah honestly it's so rare to go over 100 miles in a day if your commute is under say 20 or so miles each way. I would love to see a resurgence of lower-priced lower-range electric vehicles, say in the $15-20k range. It will take a while to get there. Companies seem to be focusing on range maximization. More range means a larger potential customer base. I have a 52 mile one-way commute, so obviously the only electric I could even consider would be a Model-S, which would be silly to buy as a commuter car. Add in factors like temperature, sitting in rush-hour traffic with the A/C (or heater) and stereo blasting, and the range issue just keeps getting worse. I'd love to live closer to work, but other economic factors make that a non-starter for at least a few more years (yay for the real-estate crash and home ownership).
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 23:21
|
|
|
All of those problems are more solvable in 5-10 years than installing massive electrical substations every 15 miles so that supercharging stations can mass dump amps upon amps of current into battery packs. Besides, most car rental places will pick you up and you can schedule online. There are some things that need to be done there, but most people won't have to rent a car more than a handful times a year. Only times I drive more than 100 miles in a day is if I visit my sister who lives 60 miles away or if I visit friends 250 miles away. The former instance is solvable even with an electric car with 100 mile range assuming I'm there long enough to get sufficient range to go home. For the 2-3 trips to DC I take a year, I could rent. The point is, we need to be doing more to encourage mass adoption of cars. However, the range issue is never going to be fully solved until you can easily drive an electric car 600-700 miles a day on any route you drat well choose. so, the mindset of renting a gas vehicle when necessary needs to be something that has to gain acceptance. For example, one of the times I drove down to DC there was an accident on the highway and I had to detour. If the only supercharging station was on the stretch of highway I had to bypass, I would have been hosed and it's unreasonable to expect middle of the rear end no where PA to have a supercharging station anytime within the next 30-40 years. We don't have the infrastructure. bull3964 fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Jan 29, 2015 |
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2015 23:46
|
|
|
Anyway, so the Tesla battery swap system is going from a demo to a beta program apparently: https://gigaom.com/2015/01/29/this-is-teslas-first-battery-swap-station-photos/ Whether it ever turns into a proper service, and just what need it will serve remains to be seen. But for me, if it allowed me to purchase a Model 3 with a small pack relatively cheaply, and rent the larger packs for holiday trips, then that would be ideal.
|
|
#
?
Jan 30, 2015 01:57
|
|
|
Michael Scott posted:Yeah honestly it's so rare to go over 100 miles in a day if your commute is under say 20 or so miles each way. I would love to see a resurgence of lower-priced lower-range electric vehicles, say in the $15-20k range. It will take a while to get there. Companies seem to be focusing on range maximization. On the plus side, lower-end electrics and PHEVs are pretty cheap on the used market. You can pick up a used Volt with less than 30k miles for $15-17k in my area.
|
|
#
?
Jan 30, 2015 17:05
|
|
|
angryhampster posted:On the plus side, lower-end electrics and PHEVs are pretty cheap on the used market. You can pick up a used Volt with less than 30k miles for $15-17k in my area. I was briefly tempted to trade in my Prius for a C-Max Energi, but there's no way I'm giving up adaptive cruise control.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2015 20:36
|
|
|
Dwight Eisenhower posted:Noone's charging 40 batteries simultaneously. 40 is the absolute hard limit of charging bandwidth you'd need to be swapping batteries non-stop, 24 hours a day, with a 90 second swap process. The gas station down the street from me has eighteen pumps, and every time I drive by it there's at least four or five people filling up. On Saturdays, every pump is in use and there's a line out the entrance. This is in San Francisco, one of the cities with the highest rate of electric car adoption. Your 40-bay supercharger station would be able to run for three minutes handling what I see on Saturday at my local gas station, and then it'd be another 57 minutes until the next batch. And, of course, this is assuming you can somehow construct the electrical supply equivalent of a constant line of tanker trucks driving in the back. I don't know if you're planning on ripping up the streets or putting in aerial transmission lines or what, but here they won't even put in fiber-optic internet because the hippies and wealthy fuckoids don't like the look of the routing boxes on the street corners. Mange Mite posted:Removing any part from the bottom of a car is already pretty complex, let alone automating it. There's also steps you've left out like disconnecting the liquid cooling systems. Now you have to do all this either on a lift or a pit built into the ground, then get your 1300+ lbs of batteries out and stored somehow, and get a new one out of storage, then lift and install it. That's an extremely complex process. You might as well say "well it's easy to replace the headlights in this car, all you need to do is drop the engine then screw the light bulbs in." On the other hand, I don't think this is a terrible problem. Quick-disconnects exist for every kind of system you can think of, including fluid pipes. Look at how race cars are refueled, for instance. Road grime, weather, corrosion, all of that is a much bigger deal. You don't want a bunch of salt getting all over your electrical contacts every time the battery is swapped.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2015 21:12
|
|
|
Sagebrush posted:The gas station down the street from me has eighteen pumps, and every time I drive by it there's at least four or five people filling up. On Saturdays, every pump is in use and there's a line out the entrance. This is in San Francisco, one of the cities with the highest rate of electric car adoption. Your 40-bay supercharger station would be able to run for three minutes handling what I see on Saturday at my local gas station, and then it'd be another 57 minutes until the next batch. You do realize that most of the people using the gas station you describe probably aren't people transiting the area on long trips and are most likely local people who need to periodically fill their gas cars up there because they cant do it at home like a Tesla owner would be. The use volume would be a lot lower because the majority of drivers would be getting their daily "fill up" when they plug it in at home at the end of the day. A more apt comparison would be if you were talking about a gas station at a highway rest stop.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2015 21:16
|
|
|
Sagebrush posted:On the other hand, I don't think this is a terrible problem. Quick-disconnects exist for every kind of system you can think of, including fluid pipes. Look at how race cars are refueled, for instance. Road grime, weather, corrosion, all of that is a much bigger deal. You don't want a bunch of salt getting all over your electrical contacts every time the battery is swapped. The key is that each bay requires a lift or pit large and equipped enough to handle over half a ton of batteries, even before getting to the automation part. You're looking at some huge installation and maintenance costs, and far less versatile or future proof too
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2015 21:19
|
|
|
Mange Mite posted:The key is that each bay requires a lift or pit large and equipped enough to handle over half a ton of batteries, even before getting to the automation part. You're looking at some huge installation and maintenance costs, and far less versatile or future proof too Unlike underground fuel tanks at gas stations.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2015 22:48
|
|
|
Godholio posted:Unlike underground fuel tanks at gas stations. That's why I put "far less versatile or future proof". Mechanically speaking, tanks are far far less complicated even with modern environmental equipment
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2015 23:21
|
|
|
I'm pretty sure someone raised the exact same argument the first time someone wanted to bury a massive gas tank. It's not like we don't have machines that do far more complicated tasks already. Yeah, it'll be pricey at first but you can bet Chevron or some other major company can get some scale pricing magic and get that ball rolling if they want to. I'm only seeing arguments that will prevent this from being an overnight development, not some sort of fatal flaw.
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 05:30
|
|
|
I was thinking about that the other day - imagine if we were just now rolling out oil-based fuels to cars today. You'd be considered a lunatic for wanting to offer multiple grades (let alone diesel), for letting people handle a volatile and toxic chemical, and you'd definitely need something more secure than a tube you vaguely poke into another tube to transfer it.
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 06:34
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 16, 2024 13:14 |
|
|
A lady at my wife's office, who drives a Suburban 25 miles each way to work, raised the argument "Aren't you worried about sitting above that big flammable battery?" Certainly a whole lot less than installing a child's seat above 40 gallons of high explosive!
|
|
#
?
Feb 2, 2015 08:12
|
|
