I feel there is also a room for mobile superchargers. They can come to your house and fully charge your car in half an hour, rather than waiting for hours on home voltage.
I considered this, but nothing beats hydrocarbon energy density. It seems more practical to swap out pre-charged cells like some electric scooter companies do, which would require an interchangeable format that might be obsoleted by newer tech every 5 years.
Once we have supercapacitors and room temperature superconductors, a lot of these problems go away, though.
They did a demo for the Model S and there was an Israeli EV company that had a similar model, but died.
There are a few problems with the swapping idea:
- People like to have ownership over their batteries (and the battery capacity)
- Logistics around swapping availability and costs
But the biggest one is:
- Charging continues to get faster and capacity continues to increase.
Whatever small amount of time is currently saved by swapping will be irrelevant by the time anyone could overcome the current obstacles to get something off the ground - it's a bad strategic bet.
