Project Better Place - Page 14

JRP3 · 04-30-2009, 04:18 PM

Quote:

ECOtality’s CEO, Jonathan Read, is a critic of Better Place’s plan to offer battery swapping. “First, it’s highly unlikely you will get a unitary [ie, one size fits all] battery among all manufacturers,” he said. “Batteries are proprietary and unique selling points for the companies—it was like herding cats just to get them all to agree to a single charging receptacle. Also, people are very personal about their vehicles and want to know that the battery they purchased and cared for is still in their car.

Exactly what I've been saying all along.

doug · 05-03-2009, 07:25 PM

MP3 podcast from the Gavin Newson show... yes, that's right. The Gavin Newsom show.

Gavin Newsom 05/02/09

Quote:

From Green 960 in San Francisco - the Gavin Newsom show.

Friday, May 01, 2009 11:58 PM
Mayor Newsom talks about the future of the car industry with Shai Agassi, CEO of Better Place. Shai believes the future is electric. His company Better Place has a revolutionary idea to treat transportation as a service, much like people do today with mobile phones.

stopcrazypp · 05-13-2009, 10:27 AM

Video: Better Place's automated electric vehicle battery switch station is faster than Melvin Dummar

Project Better Place finally unveils their battery swapping station. It costs less than a hydrogen fueling station ($500k for this prototype, though if you include the costs of stocking up with batteries and then the charging equipment, it'll probably cost more) and it does swap the car in less than 2 minutes.

YouTube Video

vfx · 05-13-2009, 10:57 AM

Simple Motion Control (Robotics) will always be cheaper than a chemical transformation/gas storage station.

Watching that video makes the whole idea of battery swap stations seem so accessible. It's like big arcade or carnival machine to tinker with.

You could have a room of spare parts that would let station owners do modular swap repairs. Something highly unlikely with a high pressure hydrogen station.

TEG · 05-13-2009, 11:10 AM

US firm unveils new battery tech for electric cars - Business | DailyAdvance.com

dpeilow · 05-13-2009, 12:05 PM

Nice to see this video - it will be going into my armoury against the anti-EV and the hydrogen brigade

doug · 05-13-2009, 12:25 PM

What occurs to me in that video is the how specialized the shape of the battery pack is, and how little ground clearance the car has.

efusco · 05-13-2009, 02:13 PM

Impressive...wonder how they manage to align everything so precicely.

doug · 05-13-2009, 03:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by efusco

Impressive...wonder how they manage to align everything so precicely.

There are a variety of well established methods for precision alignment. The ones I'm familiar with are in optics and semiconductor manufacturing, but they certainly exist in many other places. It also helps to design things to be passively self aligning within certain margins.

I'd like to see how they would deal with mud and road grime.

JRP3 · 05-13-2009, 06:01 PM

Very cool machinery, but still unnecessary. The costs and space taken up to keep extra charged batteries on hand, the lack of standardized packs, and the fact that a swap station will still need high voltage lines to recharge all those packs, coupled with ever increasing pack range, will probably kill this technology before it even gets off the ground. Oh yeah, and most people will recharge at home for a lot less money than a swap. How profitable would a gas station be if most drivers left home every day with a full tank of gas, which cost a lot less than the gas at a station?