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Some Chinese cars come without their own battery. The batteries are designed for quick exchange and leased to the vehicle owner, who pops in for a quick substitution of a fully charged fresh pack when necessary. It takes moments apparently and is competitive on price. I can see this becoming popular, especially as the battery supply network expands. The only negative that springs to mind is battery theft may be too easy.
You're doing a long journey in your EV, running short of power but no worries there's a service station en route with fast chargers. You get there but they are all in use and there's a queue.
Now what do you do? You can't just go in for a bite to eat and a coffee as when someone finishes charging someone else will take the charger. So you have to sit in your car in the queue waiting.
Now you're late for whatever it was you were travelling to - maybe a job interview or a sales appointment or something equally important to you.
I agree most journeys are short but when they aren't I can see it being an additional ball-ache that people don't want or need.
Another scenario - you are tootling down the M6 and run into a traffic jam. You did have enough power but the jam lasts for hours, you are edging forward so still using power even if you switch off the radio and the air con. Maybe it is dark so you still need the lights.
Now you run out of power and that's it. Not like you can walk down the hard shoulder to a service station and get a can of electricity.
Later you find out the tailback was caused by some other EV running out of power...
there will be times when it becomes damned inconvienient. but most trips(well over 90%) are of under 30 miles each way, so its not going to cause an issue for most of time. There are cars that do over 400 miles now too. that will increase too. outwith winter i will likely get close to 300; maybe more.
Deffo need more rapid/ex rapid chargers tho. You at moment just have to plan your long trip, and make sure you have several options if first is not working etc. Ive never gone anywhere far enough to try it out tho lol
Thats an interesting one which has been tested. The car will not run out of leccy just sitting or crawling etc. there is a surprising amount of power in those big batteries. THink they did a several hr test and it used less than 5%.Quote:
Originally Posted by Macca
with air con on all time it obviously used more. i might add but still it wasnt an issue.
edit... was looking there and an average american home uses 30kwh of power a day, so an average uk car battery would last 2 days give or take.. thats a lot, and shows how much power is in a battery.
For some users it will be fine but I think you are under-estimating the amount of long journeys many people have to make on a regular basis. What about reps doing 2000 miles a week?
Really the ICE was what made cars desirable to begin with. The earliest cars were electric, it didn't catch on.
It's not the range that is the real problem with an EV , it's the time it takes to refuel when you reach the limit. Maybe if service stations had a charger for every single parking space you might cover it, but even then it's half an hour wait just to get an extra 75 miles? Plus it's a captive audience so they can charge what they like, as they already do in the restaurants, filling station and shop.
This is before we address the question of how all this extra electric power requirement is going to be generated in the first place. Nuclear is the only answer currently on the table and people don't want that either.
I don't get that. If you are using power it will eventually run out. Even if you still have some left by the time the hold up is cleared, is it enough to get you to the next charging point? Which of course will be full of people waiting to charge who have also burned most of their power going no-where.Quote:
Originally Posted by struth
for now, sure the ice still has a part to play until charging and battery tech improves; which it will. the lith ion battery already has its gravestone picked out.Quote:
Originally Posted by Macca
I've got one of those battery-power hoovers, very handy but when it runs out it takes hours for the battery to re-charge. Needless to say it often runs out of power when you are half-way through the job.
Obviously not as big a ball-ache as being stuck with no power on the M6 at 11 o'clock at night, but still a pain that we didn't used to have to endure.
The consumer watchdog sat in a stationary EV to simulate a traffic jam, with lights, temperature and air-con left on, music and video playing and a charger plugged in. In just over an hour and 15 minutes, it discovered the vehicle had lost just 2% of battery from a 77kWh battery – the equivalent of only 8 miles' range.13 Aug 2021Quote:
Originally Posted by Macca