Reg Hardware

Post: It won't work

Chris Miller

It won't work 

In E-car supplier demos battery swap-shop

Clever technology, but impractical on a large scale. Even ignoring the argument raised by steogede above, what happens to the flat batteries after replacement? If they're recharged on site, then each 'filling station' will require a multi-megawatt power supply running 24 hours a day. If they're shipped off to some central site then you'll need fleets of (electric?) goods vehicles to move them around the country - compare this with a single tanker arriving (say) daily to deliver 40,000 litres of fuel - that's 1.4TJ (400,000 kWh) of energy.

The fundamental problem is that we have no technology in sight that can get within an order of magnitude of the energy density of petroleum. Until we do, electric vehicles will be confined to short commuting trips within a city.