...you would definitely need a nation-wide network of intercity trains, no? Because the cars couldn't do long-distance travel.

>So if everyone had an electric hypercar you would definitely need a nation-wide network of intercity trains, no? Because the cars couldn't do long-distance travel.

Unless gas stations started adding electric charging stations which could charge batteries in 15 minutes -- true.

However PHEV electric cars (and with  a 140 mile range they really are predominantly electric) have an unlimited range, because when the batteries are a bit less than 85% discharged you start using the gasoline engine. When the tank near is empty you stop at a gas  station and refuel it. But we need trains anyway.  Trains require less infrastructure the automobiles per passenger mile. They relieve congestion. A decent train system light cybertran would a more convenient way to travel for all sorts of purposes. Heck that is even true of comparatively primitive light rail like the Maxx. When I lived in Beaverton Oregon, I never wanted to hassle of taking a car to Portland. I'd normally take the Max  as close to my destination as it went, then walk or bus the rest of the day. This was a matter of convenience. I mean ecological impact crossed my mind,but mainly I was avoiding a hassle.

Takes heavy tanks to store it, and heavy fuel cells to convert it to electricity to drive the car.No not as heavy as batteries - but the overall thermodynamic efficiency of battery driven cars has been demonstrated. Even the overpowered and not very aerodynamic Tesla get the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon. A car built for travel rather than racing can easily do better than a 200 mpg equivalent with a renewable grid.  The problem with batteries is not inefficiency but cost and range. So if the numbers I gave add up that answers that objection.

I've heard proposals like this before. The advantage of PHEV especially  mostly electric PHEVs are that they work with existing infrastructure, and existing technology. In way the "third rail for cars" is harder to implement than Cybertran. With a system like that you would be putting up infrastructure for cars that don't exist. If you built the cars first you would be building cars needing an infrastructure that does not exist. With trains, at least you have a way of getting from point A to B when done.

The advantage of PHEV is that  once you get cars with an electric component, you now have incentive for gas stations to put in charging stations (which should be cheaper to install than gas pumps.) Once you have significant numbers of quick charge stations, the need for a backup gas tank is reduced. Also the demand for BEV quality batteries, PHEV creates could help increase production and bring down the price of BEV quality batteries. At any rate a  PHEV Hypercar seems to be practical now.

I still think in the long run we can shift a lot of traffic automated ultra-light rail.  A lot of journeys are from the same point to the same point every day. For a high percent of the population being able to sit and read the paper on the way to and from work would be enough incentive to give up driving there and back - especially if they guaranteed a seat, and were available 24 hours. And rail is one of the best ways to attact the development style that creates walkable, bike-able cities.

...it might make sense to have some train cars that carry automobiles, I believe they do this on the cross-english channel train.  Then it's easier for people to go long distance without driving their car, so less need for gasoline.  It seems to me that if automobiles aren't going long distance, as I suggested in a previous comment, you might need several spokes of rail lines coming out from the center of a city so that people from the suburban rings could easily get to a rail station.

The big thing I see on MEVs (mostly electric vehicles) is that they are a transitional step that cold reduce energy use very quickly. That is I think they could be on sale very quickly - maybe within 5 to 7 years, and could be the majority of automobile traffic within 12 or 14 years. In contrast, a train network would take ten or twelve years to get off the ground. If you wanted to deploy next generation trains, you would need a beta test of some of the systems in various cities (and even that is long making the decisions, picking routes, actual construction.) And then once the beta tests were done and you knew the pluses and minuses of various sytems in real world deployment, then you have to go through the process again on a large scale. It would take 15 or 20 years until a majority of people had acess to a decent transit system even if we started today.  You could short cut it a bit on an emergency basis by plotting routes and accquiring while testing systems (because route requirements are the same for most feasible systems) . But it would still be ten or twelve years before most systems were in place.   And the time from that to people actually using them.

Gar, I have mentioned several times in several threads in which you have participated that the basic technology for quickly swapping out electric car batteries was patented so long ago that it is (or is about to be) public domain.  All that is missing is the initiative to standardize battery packages so that recharging stations can be built to quickly remove and replace them when long distance drivers are ready for more juice.  Why do you cling to the notion that recharging stations that require people to wait at least 15 minutes for a rapid charge are the way to go?

[Jon - I have been offline and have not had a chance to follow up on our last exchange.  Busy looking for options to relocate the family and business at the moment, so not much play time.  Mo' later.]

You have a point about swapping stations. I guess the thing is for most people that if you are traveling a 100 miles a day or less, and you know stop to sleep sometimes, charging overnight will work most of the time. Given that charging on the go will be a rare thing, I suspect the lower capital costs of a charging station will make more sense than swapping batteries on the go. There are all sorts of implications with a batter swapping stations. For example do you pay extra if the battery to you get has fewer cycles than the one you take. Do you get a refund of the battery you get has consumed more cycles of its life than the battery you swap.

I think the most common charge for electric vehicles will be overnight from the dedicated parking space while you sleep, or from some on street coin operated electric meters.

Not to worry! Been there, done that, it's a total time hog.

I've always suspected a good place to introduce plug-in hybrids would be in Minnesota and the Dakotas -- places where people are already in the habit of plugging in their cars during the winter months to keep their engines from freezing.

Ken Duble

That's the way to beat the cost problem.  lightweight a conventional used economy car.  With plastic and aluminum parts replacing steel.

Get one weith a bad engine then convert to electric with a 40 mile range.  Add a diesel backup generator.  When tyhe batteries get depleted, run the driving electric motor off the generator.  Recharge the batteries with reghenerative braking energy.

This efficiency scheme is hard to beat.  And the cost would be around 10k for the parts.  Not bad.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Gar, I agree that most of the time, most of the people will not need to swap their battery to keep on motoring along.  However, given that most people will on occasion want to drive 250+ miles in a day at least once in a while, the limited range and relatively slow refueling (recharging) times of electric vehicles have been very effective arguments to kill the true electric cars and come back with wasteful hybrids that perpetuate the petrol economy.  I think it is important to point out that there is a simple and reasonable way to address the issue head on without any added inconvenience or risk to the would be electric car owners and operators.  Standardized battery swapping stations would do the trick.

Yes, it would make sense to have some standardized smart technology on each battery that provides a record of how it has been used and how it is holding up.  That information, along with a quick estimate of the remaining charge in the battery being turned in for a new one should go into figuring the appropriate price of a given exchange.  And when a battery seems well past its prime, it should be retired and recycled.  I should think that making it painless and quick for the driver to address such matters, rather than being stuck with a major expense and complicated decision making process about where, when, and how to get rid of a dying battery would be another major selling point over the present situation.

Finally, Gar, I think you are very much underestimating the perceived cost of having to wait 15 minutes or more for a recharge on the go.  Consider the risks people will routinely take by speeding to shave what turns out to be ten or fifteen minutes of a trip of two or three hours.  Now consider the implications of waiting for a few cars in front of you to finish their 15 minute or more charging cycles before you can even begin on a busy holiday weekend when most people are most likely to want to charge up on the go.  A quick and easy battery swap would solve that problem and others, as noted.  I think it is an idea worth pushing, for it can be done and it pretty much puts to rest the few remaining arguments against an immediate shift to electric cars with their much better energy efficiency, even without going to the lengths necessary to create hypercars.  We need to find ways to get this show on the road, so to speak, instead of endlessly dreaming and jaw boning about what might be possible to begin ten years from now, which looks to me to be a part of the strategy of Toyota and others that do just enough to look serious about true electric vehicles in mass production while reinforcing the standard arguments about why consumers won't be happy with what can be done today.  Let's not help them out by pretending that relatively slow recharging and waiting is a given for electric vehicle operators.  It just ain't so.

PHEVs will be a lot more likely than either of those solutions. Since the infrastructure already exists.

Main reason battery swap-out stuff won't happen is safety and liability concerns.

I can't imagine how a swapout system like that would survive any federal crash test.

Until we get a LOT of PHEVs out there, there's not going to be enough demand to create EITHER a quickcharge or a battery swapout infrastructure.

Whats even more likely is that batteries will just get cheap enough that you can't possibly drive that far in one day.

Second Greyfcn on Battery Exchange Stations. Tesla had to bury their batteries so deep for safety reasons that it takes longer to change batteries than to charge the all-electric car. While that may not always be needed, a battery swapping system might be hard to make save. I used to strongly prefer all-electrics too - until a I realized that a plug-in Hypercar with a really long range,  anything over 100 miles essentially reduced emissions for practical purposes as much as an all-electric. With a 100 mile range,your fleet gets over 95% of its mile from electricity. If the remaining 5% comes from burning electricity reasonably efficiently you have reduced automobile carbon emissions by more than 95% per mile. You still have to avoid mileage per capita rising, as it does in the current trend, but you would need to do that with all electric cars too.  In my example I chose a really long electric range of 140 miles because it seems to be the sweet spot with reasonably priced batteries. A longer range costs too much in batteries. A shorter range burns up the cycles too fast, so you end spending thousands on batteries per year.  

The day you can buy an Altairno battery pack for $500 per kWh the sweet spot will be in at the 90-100 mile range. (And only that high to minimize emissions - from a pure cost standpoint, it will be more like 75 miles.)

There are other batteries that may beat the Altairno to market. But I'm pretty sure we will have 1k-2k cycle lightweight batteries in $300-$500 dollar range eventually. The point is we know how to do this with batteries you can buy to today at a reasonable price. And one of the reasons this is true is the breakthrough Tesla has  made by building a decent BEV pack out commodity lithium batteries.

Well either way ya slice it.

PHEVs aren't perfect, but we're gonna have to have a LOT of electric demand before we even start to see a couple quickcharge electric stations.

All we really need to know is that the option is out there, and that we can build towards that target.

_

Or basically that the one competative advantage of hydrogen no longer exists, and we can forget that vapor ware.