Consider: your car can charge at some maximum rate. Let’s call it 200kw. That means you can add so many miles of range per minute of charging. Is it really that important whether that charging occurs during one thirty-minute stop or two fifteen-minute stops?
When you make the battery really big, you increase the weight of the car. The number of miles of range per kWh goes down.
Actually, it’s not optimal to use the entire range between each stop, because the battery car charge faster between (very roughly) 20% and 80%.
The most important thing is to have a lot of charging stations in spots that you can very quickly access from the highway. Then you can stop when optimal and minimize the amount of wasted time (your car’s navigation should tell you when).
At some point, putting even more batteries in the car will not get you there faster. Barring some big breakthrough in battery tech (or swaps), gas cars will have the advantage in miles per minute added during fueling.
There are cars with 400 mile range, but think hard about whether that is really what you want. It’ll cost you more to buy and charge, and the utility you get may not be worth it.
One of the real-world problems right now is that there are lots of places where it's not easy, practical, convenient, fun or even possible to charge. We have had an EV for four years and there are some trips where you end up standing at some boring industrial area because you can't make it to a better charger (one with for example decent food, or a playground). Or you have two choices: stop here now, queueing for 30 minutes because 4 out of 8 chargers are offline, or drive a bit further on fumes to get where you would really want to charge but, because there is only a single charger at that place, be prepared to call the towing company because if that charger is broken then you're not getting anywhere else today.
And while you're making those calculations in your head, carefully weighing each % of remaining charge against factors such as wind, rain and speed, you drive past tens of not hundreds of dino-soup stations that you cannot stop at because they don't have a power outlet you can plug into.
> Barring some big breakthrough in battery tech (or swaps)
Nio's cars can swap 100 kWh packs in 6 minutes. The swap station charges the packs to 90% so the swap is equivalent to charging the car at 900 kW for 6 minutes:
For swaps, the tech exists, and manufacturers just need to make it happen. I read a convincing article claiming that Tesla spiked the ball on their swap system because it was just a compliance program.
The problem of swapping is that it makes no sense at scale: you need to stock enough charged batteries at swap stations that you can do the swaps, with the equipment.
And batteries are not interchangeable, because they’re structural and to maximise packing. So you need to stock batteries for every car brand if not model at every station. And in the right capacities do you don’t downgrade users (or upgrade them).
Battery swaps make sense on scooters because the cell packing is a lot less critical, so you can have a standard which is resilient and easy to manipulate and eat the loss of cell volume. The same might happen with trucks. If manufacturers can settle on standards in order to maintain travel rates.
> The problem of swapping is that it makes no sense at scale
They only have to scale to the number of cars that want to swap at a given point in time at a given location. EVs with swappable packs can also charge as normal. It's not exclusively swapping or charging, it's both swapping and charging.
> And batteries are not interchangeable, because they’re structural and to maximise packing.
When you make the battery really big, you increase the weight of the car. The number of miles of range per kWh goes down.
Actually, it’s not optimal to use the entire range between each stop, because the battery car charge faster between (very roughly) 20% and 80%.
The most important thing is to have a lot of charging stations in spots that you can very quickly access from the highway. Then you can stop when optimal and minimize the amount of wasted time (your car’s navigation should tell you when).
At some point, putting even more batteries in the car will not get you there faster. Barring some big breakthrough in battery tech (or swaps), gas cars will have the advantage in miles per minute added during fueling.
There are cars with 400 mile range, but think hard about whether that is really what you want. It’ll cost you more to buy and charge, and the utility you get may not be worth it.