Kandi tried it but when the electric utility backed out, it also failed.
The first proposal was to sell the vehicle without the battery. The battery would be leased and instead of it being charged by the car owner, spent batteries would be swapped for fully charged ones using the Quick Battery Exchange (QBEX). By transferring ownership of the battery to a leasing company, the car owner would be relieved of the problems created by the battery. The batteries would be charged and maintained by an entity more capable of giving them the proper care. The EV ownership experience would be more in line with traditional car ownership.
It’s one of those great ideas that does not seem to work in practice.
Besides the other good answers…what happens when a dozen or two trucks all show up in the same hour? You still have a queue (no different than with diesel) but you eventually run out of charged batteries. Or you have to stock large quantities of them. And you still need lots of chargers. Probably better to just plug in the trucks and not have the swapping robot.
And you could have an online charger reservation system. The home base for the fleet could even manage reserving the spots and as you arrive send you a message with what charger number you are supposed to go to.
I think everyone is trying to find the perfect solution. IMO, there isn’t one, so far. BEV semi trucks are NOT going to take over in a year or two. It will take a decade or two…maybe more. They will start mostly on local routes and get recharged at home base at night. They will also be used between two points and get charged at night at each end, for example.
They won’t start out doing multi-driver coast to coast trips…it would be sort of dumb to discard all the perfectly working diesel trucks before their EOL.
That’s sort of a problem, because FCEV are pretty much EVs. The charging time is a valid issue, but mostly overblown by those who have no experience with a BEV. Yes, there are those odd cases where someone drives a bazillion miles every and who are so busy and/or disorganized that they can’t plan when to charge…they can keep their ICE for a decade after the “end of ICE” sales are allowed and it won’t make a hoot of difference in CO2.
But battery range and charging speeds just going to keep incrementally improving with small advances (and maybe one or two larger ones) leaving no room for a second new national refueling infrastructure for personal fuel cell cars and hydrogen production. <== my prediction
We’ll probably continue throwing some money at hydrogen because the fossil lobby (or somebody) keeps coming up with the same “what-if” and Plan B arguments you have.
It’s been tried before. Because it’s a mechanical operation, it turns out that it requires close human supervision … and still fails regularly. It also still requires all the batteries to be charged, so you don’t save (time or money) nearly as much as you would think.
So far all scale trials of EV battery replacement have failed. I think it would be difficult (though not impossible) to convince someone to invest the money required yet again.
Yes, good answers all but I knew all that and still say it makes a lot of sense.
I start with the observation that the inherent inefficiencies of using hydrogen (thermodynamics and chemisty) seem insurmountable, and so batteries it will be (or “Back to the Future” fusion).
There is a BIG advantage to keep BIG freight trucks in near constant motion, and that requires not wasting time on charging a huge battery. Batteries explicitly designed to be tough and readily rapidly robotically interchangeable would solve that problem.
Stopping and waiting while the battery gets charged costs down time “money” for both the battery AND the huge friggin truck and the load it is carrying sitting doing nothing!
Managing my imagined switchable battery station efficiently would require a few batteries in reserve, but mostly would require a reservation system functioning with the trucks of the fleet and the various stations recharging the batteries. Big fleets would have their own inventory of batteries along with their trucks, and some might even have their own battery exchange and charge stations. Smaller and minimal capital investment companies could contract with battery companies that would own, charge, and maintain their own inventory of batteries.
The Captain referenced an excellent artcile on how battery swapping failed in the last decade. The article misses one BIG reason for the failure of Kandi and other companies: the battery of a passenger car is most of the weight of the car! Tesla went as they went because they chose to deeply integrate the huge % mass of the battery into the structure of the car. Tesla’s are basically batteries on wheels, plus a little running gear and a cacoon for the passengers.
Trucks are extremely different. A fully loaded truck often far outweighs its ICengine or battery with running gear. You could readily rapidly stick the big, but outweighed by freight, mass of a battery into a readily accessible slide in slot behind the cab and lock it down securely.
Just curious, how far out are self-charging electric vehicles? Between regenerative braking, solar cells, and maybe even turbines that generate electricity from moving air - it seems like there’s a potential to eliminate the charging hassles.
Probably a ways out, the Flux Capacitor may be a more realistic option.
Which is a lot of people. And I would expect that most people who have a lot of experience with a BEV have access to home charging. Both of those things add up to a very robust early adopter market, but may not be enough to push BEV’s past that. We’ll see in the next few years, as subsidies recede in the big European auto markets.
True, but again not the main point. I completely agree that charging the massive batteries in a semi tractor is a big cost, since they will take even longer to charge than passenger car batteries. But battery swapping can’t make that better.
The problem is that truck batteries are too big for this to be workable. The Tesla Semi battery is about 10,000 pounds. That’s as much as an ICE semi tractor weighs. You’re not going to be able to take something like that and have a “readily accessible slide in slot” to fit it into. You’re going to need massive equipment to remove and insert something that heavy and bulky into something like a semi cab - if even it’s possible to do so.
This would not - cannot - be a simple “plug and play” type of procedure. It’s going to be a massive undertaking to remove a 10,000 pound piece out of a semi tractor and replace it with another. Especially since even minor errors could potentially be lethal - you have to make sure that the battery packs aren’t damaged in handling and that every connection is perfectly in place.
The same factors that led Tesla to integrate the battery still apply to the semi. The fully loaded trailer may have a ton of weight - but the battery is still going to make up close to half of the weight of the tractor.
And there’s no way to make the financial or legal arrangements work. PepsiCo isn’t going to maintain its own battery-swapping stations around the country, but it’s not going to let some third party company switch out the batteries it owns for other batteries. Because unlike an ICE car battery, the EV battery is a huge chunk of the value of the vehicle. The liability and insurance costs would be enormous.
I agree with all the other issues (ownership, liability, insurance, still need to change them and still need lots of chargers, etc.).
But we already have an example of moving that amount of weight…the tires on a mining dump truck can weigh up to 12,000 lbs. They change them with a forklift type device in just a few minutes (lots of lug nuts to tighten). But you still have the issue of the form factor and still fitting it (or them) without ruining the aerodynamics, center of gravity, etc.
Very good points! Just because long distance trucks cannot yet be properly powered with batteries does not mean that segments of the market than can be served should be ignored. PepsiCo has been happy with the up to 500 mile semis.
That’s the upside offset by the downside of having to have large inventories of batteries sitting on shelves. It’s a huge investment and it puts pressure on the battery supply chain.
That’s why the initial adoption is by trucks on routes that can be charged at night, local and short distance trucks. Post office, UPS, FedEx, Amazon. Coast to coast haulers will have to wait.
There is not enough surface area for solar panels with some exceptions, very light vehicles (three wheelers), and campers that can extend the roof while camping This has been in the news for quite some time.
The US government had even explicitly set a target for the cost of green hydrogen to reach $1/kg by 2031 without subsidies. And while the EU has not put an exact price target on renewable H2, it will only provide €4.5/kg ($4.78/kg) in its upcoming auction to fill in the cost gap with fossil-based hydrogen — which generally costs less than €2/kg.
Big steelmaker weighs abandoning $500M Biden climate grant https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/13/steelmaker-biden-climate-grant-00179145 In an interview with POLITICO, Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves said the Ohio-based company produces the steel with the lowest carbon emissions in the world. But he said his company cannot persuade buyers, mostly in the automobile sector, to pay the price to cover the costs of producing more environmentally friendly steel…
Goncalves’ words come amid a broader set of headwinds for private investments in low-carbon and clean-energy projects, which have seen several initiatives delayed or scrapped entirely despite the massive federal subsidies available through President Joe Biden’s climate and infrastructure laws…
The Energy Department has announced it awarded Cleveland-Cliffs two grants through those laws to reduce emissions from facilities in the Midwest: $500 million to use hydrogen instead of coal to make steel in Middletown, Ohio, and $75 million to replace two natural gas-fired furnaces in Butler, Pennsylvania…
Cleveland-Cliffs has already received an installment of the $75 million grant, but it is still negotiating the $500 million Middletown grant with DOE. Even with that grant, Goncalves said his company would still need to put up [an additional] $1.1 billion to convert its Middletown furnace to using hydrogen as the fuel instead of coal.
