What people don't realise is that hardly anyone needs to use this sort of infrastructure regularly. We fixate on the range of a gasoline tank, thinking that an electric car must match that range if it's to be useful. In truth, long range driving is a very niche use case.
How many times in the last year did you start a trip with a full tank and need to refuel before you reached your destination? The mode answer to that question is zero. According to the Department of Energy, the average vehicle trip is just 10.1 miles. 98% of car journeys are less than 50 miles.
Battery swap technology is irrelevant and always will be. It's a great marketing move by Tesla, because it undermines one of the key arguments against electric cars, but it has little or no practical importance. The fast-charge infrastructure is what matters, because it's cheap enough to realistically become ubiquitous.
We're just very poor at translating our experience of car ownership to electric technology. There's a long thread of comments about peak demand, in which several people clearly haven't internalised the idea that you can charge your electric car at home, so you only need to use a fast-charge or battery swap facility if you've just driven 300 miles in the same day.
How many times in the last year did you start a trip with a full tank and need to refuel before you reached your destination?
Well, there was that time in the last year that I drove from New York to Jackson, Wyoming and back (~2000 miles each way). If I did that in a Tesla I'd want to battery-swap once or twice a day. Um, it looks like that might be possible sometime in the next year or two. Hurray!
(right now there aren't even any supercharger stations along that route, much less battery-swapping ones. There's an interactive map of stations here: http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger )
Though there's another question about that: How do you charge overnight at a hotel? Do you stay at motels and run an extension cord out the window? Is there a special database somewhere of hotels with convenient charging stations?
Comments
What people don't realise is that hardly anyone needs to use this sort of infrastructure regularly. We fixate on the range of a gasoline tank, thinking that an electric car must match that range if it's to be useful. In truth, long range driving is a very niche use case.
How many times in the last year did you start a trip with a full tank and need to refuel before you reached your destination? The mode answer to that question is zero. According to the Department of Energy, the average vehicle trip is just 10.1 miles. 98% of car journeys are less than 50 miles.
Battery swap technology is irrelevant and always will be. It's a great marketing move by Tesla, because it undermines one of the key arguments against electric cars, but it has little or no practical importance. The fast-charge infrastructure is what matters, because it's cheap enough to realistically become ubiquitous.
We're just very poor at translating our experience of car ownership to electric technology. There's a long thread of comments about peak demand, in which several people clearly haven't internalised the idea that you can charge your electric car at home, so you only need to use a fast-charge or battery swap facility if you've just driven 300 miles in the same day.
Well, there was that time in the last year that I drove from New York to Jackson, Wyoming and back (~2000 miles each way). If I did that in a Tesla I'd want to battery-swap once or twice a day. Um, it looks like that might be possible sometime in the next year or two. Hurray!
(right now there aren't even any supercharger stations along that route, much less battery-swapping ones. There's an interactive map of stations here: http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger )
Though there's another question about that: How do you charge overnight at a hotel? Do you stay at motels and run an extension cord out the window? Is there a special database somewhere of hotels with convenient charging stations?