On Mar 17, 2015, at 3:21 PM, Jorg Brown via EV <[email protected]> wrote:
> Fundamentally the problem is economics: in a car you have a $100 tank > that you're filling up with $50 of fuel. But in an EV, you have a $40,000 > pack that you're filling up with $5 of fuel. That's...that's an excellent observation that puts it in a perspective I've never thought about before. And you're right. Battery swaps likely won't make economic sense until traction batteries cost as much as today's starter batteries...but, by the time that comes to pass we'll have long since solved any recharging problems without resorting to battery swaps. Tesla's robot-swappable batteries would make perfect sense for professional racing. Instead of a pit stop to fill with gas, you have a pit stop to swap batteries. And, presumably, change tires and whatever else needs to be done. It likely also makes the mechanic's job much easier. If they've taken similar approaches to other major components, they could conceivably use labor with minimal technical skills (and, of course, this being Tesla, high-powered people skills) in service stations. Something's worng with the car? Get it to the official Tesla shop, the mechanic plugs in to read where the problem is...undoes some fasteners, positions the magic robot, and a few minutes later the forward motor has been replaced with the defective unit sent to the factory for overhaul and / or salvage. But it's difficult to imagine an economically-effectie model for widespread adoption of battery swaps, once you realize, as you observed, that you can practically buy an entire car for the cost of the battery you're swapping. b& -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 801 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20150317/540b9387/attachment.pgp> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
