I think the Uhaul rental model could also work. If I’m driving to my in-laws for the week I only need it for 700 miles of the drive down and 700 miles of the drive back. I don’t need it for the whole week, and indeed I might prefer to not have it the whole week. That’s in contrast to propane where it really isn’t a big deal to have it on your property.
Or CO2 for the soda stream. We just keep two canisters and when one empties we swap it with the other one and the empty canister goes in my car to be exchanged the next time I go to Target.
But that’s a lot smaller than even a tiny Uhaul trailer. And you’d want to rent a bigger one for a 1,000 mile road trip than a 300 mile road trip too. Seems better suited to the Uhaul / rental market to me.
Well, I’ll go to UHaul corporate and make my pitch.
I mean, there is no reason to have a car that has a 300-mile range for local everyday driving, when one can rent the replaceable UHaul battery pack for those rare (except for you, frequent long-hauler) long-haul trips. Just hitch it up, plug it in, and voila 1000 miles!
Now, how much should one pay for a rental of 1000 miles of juice? Eh, $50, plus deposit.
Or buy one (like in my original model) and replace when needed. Heck, you could even buy an empty one, and charge it up at home before you leave on your trip! You’d only trade in when you actually need juice right then and there, like, say, a trip to Alaska.
The battery swap idea would be better for cargo vehicles. Regional/local delivery trucks would be able to be engineered around the concept and benefit from scale of use.
I think swapping for single family passenger vehicles would only be practical if battery size comes way down and even then more so with a leasing situation.
Rental trailer works a lot more efficiently.
Downside is that a lot of people don’t know how to back up a car with a hitched trailer. That’s where the autopilot can come in!
(Runs off to Tesla for pitch…)
Fortunately China appears willing to do all the development research on swappable batteries for passenger vehicles. Manufacturers will either have a blueprint to follow or lessons learned to avoid
Well they could have a suitcase-sized one that bought you maybe another 250 miles and a trailer sized one that had maybe 750 miles and maybe one in between and you could pick what you wanted.
Even for the Alaska trip you’d be able to charge overnight, presumably so you might not need to swap much. But Uhaul could accommodate swapping too.
Hotels may need to make those charging stations separately reservable though, as the level of suck upon arriving at a hotel and learning that all of the chargers are taken would be monumental.
Of course how long it would take to charge the trailer is another question.
Again, you go to a place that has fully charged ones and trade. Will there be one on the way to Alaska? One only hopes. Still in very early stages.
The best part of this is that the rental place is the one that gets to wait for the trailer to fill with juice, not you! They would like have much more sophisticated charging stations for the trailers, though, extremely quick for faster turnover. Will there be electricity available in the future? I hope so.
I’d even go so far in my business model to allow reservations for fully charged trailers during your trip, so there will be one.
Oh, they can take reservations, but they don’t know how to hold one.
Along the lines of the trailer, maybe you can have a section in the car to place a bank of four power bars that recharge your battery on the fly (like the power bar they have for smart phones). No need to take out your battery. Perhaps each power bar is equivalent to 50 or 60 miles worth and is light enough to be easily swapped out every 200 miles or so.
I remember, back in the early days of EVs, the idea of towing a small gasoline engine. The engine would only run a generator, which would recharge the EV batteries as you drove. Because it would run at a single speed and single load, it could be dramatically simpler than current auto engines. Because it wouldn’t have to bear the burden of accelerating the car, it could be much smaller. I even recall a drawing of a trailer that integrated with the design of the specific car.
I wondered what happened to that idea. So this is interesting:
EP Tender’s initial idea was to put a combustion engine in the trailer to create hybrids out of electric cars and the company currently has 20 such trailers in use with customers, all of whom drive Renault Zoes or electric Kangoo vans. But the falling cost of batteries persuaded the company to make the switch.
Not a trailer, but a small gas engine that acted as a generator to extend range was an optional feature on the “electric” BMW i3. It bumped the range from 153 miles to 200.
Pretty sure 300 miles is bigger than a suitcase. Unless you tote huge suitcases. Yes, batteries are heavier than clothes, but I don’t think you could fit 1200 lbs of batteries into a suitcase.
The Model S’ battery is made of several thousand cylindrical cells (18650)
The battery pack includes thousands of identical cylindrical 18650 battery cells 18 mm in diameter and 65 mm in height. These cells use a graphite/silicon[55] anode and a nickel-cobalt-aluminum cathode with an aqueous electrolyte and lithium ions as charge carriers.[84] The battery capacity within the Model S has changed numerous times since its debut, ranging from 60–100 kWH. The batteries are the heaviest component within the Model S; the 85 kWh battery pack weighed 1,200 lb (540 kg).[85][better source needed]
And the only reason the gas tank (and thus the range extension) was so small was that if it had been larger, they would have failed to qualify for some EV credit. I forget the details, but that was a decision driven by policy, not engineering. And a lot of people bemoaned it at the time, because with a larger tank, that would have been a great vehicle.
Ok, well the point is that they could have different sizes for different needs, just like they rent different size moving trucks/trailers. You wouldn’t need nearly as big an extra battery if you were going on a 400 mile trip as you would on a 4,000 mile road trip.
A good friend had one without the optional gas generator. It was a very good city commuting car. Plenty of zip, practical hatchback design, and enough range to make almost every work commute viable even in chilly days. Range was way too short as a road trip vehicle. It also had really tiny tires, which boosted mileage but hurt handling.
He loved it but it got totaled in an accident. A Tesla 3 replaced it.
