Let’s Rethink Our Model For Powering Electric Vehicles

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A couple years ago I got a plugin hybrid car, which has a small 26-mile battery. I plug the car in every night in my garage, into a regular 110 outlet, and out of my ~20,000 miles driven on the car, around 5,000 has been on the gas engine. This is August, and I think I’ve put gas in my car twice so far this year, and it was only a half-tank each time. I started thinking about how seldom I actually switch over to gas, even with only a 26-mile battery. The only times I really use the gas engine is when I take a trip out of town. That made me think about how people are having “range anxiety” at the thought of getting an electric vehicle, acting afraid to get a vehicle that has a range under 300 miles, and yet in daily driving they will rarely ever need more than 50 miles of range. We are strip-mining in places all over the planet to find lots of exotic materials like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and more to make giant batteries which drive up the price of the cars, all for a range that we almost never need. Highways are really the only place that kind of range is even needed.

For my regular driving, a 50-mile battery would certainly handle any local driving, and anything over that is really a waste 99% of the time. However, I readily admit that when I want to take a trip somewhere I want an easy way to do it that doesn’t involve renting another vehicle. I want to be able to take my vehicle. Obviously my plugin hybrid is a good solution for now, but if we ever hope to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels and move to emissions free transportation we’re eventually going to need another option. What if we didn’t put all of that unnecessary capacity in vehicles? What if cars just came standard with just a 50-mile range battery, or 100-miles at the most? The most immediate effect of that would be that it would make the vehicles much much less expensive, as the batteries are by FAR the most expensive component of electric vehicles. Right now an entry-level electric vehicle can run $30k-60k, which can be a big barrier to mass adoption of a young technology that few have any experience with. Now imagine the adoption rate of a $15k-20k electric vehicle!  Now I’m sure you’re thinking, “Yeah that’s great, but nobody is going to want a vehicle that you have to stop and charge every 50 miles on the highway” and you’d be absolutely right. I wouldn’t want one either. But the 50-mile battery is just the standard onboard battery, and doesn’t mean that’s all the battery capacity the vehicle can hold. The idea is to stop wasting a huge battery capacity on everyday driving around town when we don’t need it, and be able to access it when we do. Let’s make the battery capacity of a vehicle modular and expandable, so a vehicle has a standard onboard battery, and then it has extra battery slots where batteries can be added whenever you are needing to take a trip. You are heading out of town, just stop at a station, just like you stop for gas now, and you  open a compartment, swipe your credit card to grab a few fresh battery packs, slide them into the expansion slots, and get back on the road. Now instead of a 50-mile range you have a 250 or 350-mile range. If it is a long trip and you use up all of that capacity, you just stop off at another station, open the compartment, slide the dead packs out and plug them into the charging station, grab some new ones that are showing fully charged and pop them into the expansion slots. You’ll spend more time stretching your legs and using the restroom than it took you to swap out the battery packs. You can pull over to a charging station to top off your onboard battery if you really need to, but if not you’re back on the road in just a few minutes.

This kind of model solves both the range anxiety and the high cost of electric vehicles at the same time. In addition we can use far less of the lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other materials overall, and the capacity will be concentrated on the highways where it is actually needed, and not wasting away in garages and parking lots 99% of the time. Another benefit of this kind of model is that it can help with another fear of electric vehicles, which is the lifespan of the battery. Currently, if the battery goes bad and you need to replace it you are probably talking $10-20k, and as the expected battery life is currently 10-20 years, that can be very expensive if it happens closer to 10 years. In this model, when your onboard battery starts to die you can simply stop at a filling station and pop a battery into an expansion slot. You could keep the vehicle running for years that way without ever fixing the onboard battery, and even if/when you do get the onboard fixed, it would be far cheaper since it is only a small 50-mile battery. If you live in a big city and don’t have a garage or other place to plug in your vehicle regularly, maybe they can have a model that doesn’t have an onboard battery at all, just expansion slots. You would never have to worry about charging your car at all, you would simply stop at a filling station and swap out batteries whenever you need. I personally think it’s likely that cities will have charging cables in most parking spots in the future and charging won’t be a problem, but it might still be easier to swap out batteries anyway, and would be great to have the option.

 Another benefit is that as battery technology evolves and improves, replacing these stocks of expansion batteries for better ones would be much faster and easier than replacing millions of vehicles with permanent onboard batteries. As long as they design the new batteries to be backwards compatible with older vehicles, keeping to standard sizes and connections, then upgrades could be frequent. The newest versions would always be making their way out into the network of stations, with the older ones slowly being retired, refurbished, recycled, etc.

Obviously this idea could be very complicated and difficult to implement. Many vehicle manufacturers would have to agree on sizes and connection types, and large amounts of filling stations would need to be able to stock and recharge these battery packs in order for it to be easy and commonplace. Those are definitely tall challenges, but there are a lot of benefits to the idea. Car manufacturers could greatly increase sales and maybe profit margins if they didn’t need to include huge expensive batteries. Also, they could either 1) get out of battery development altogether and let third party companies spend the billions on development to tackle that challenge, while they just focus on making their cars easy to make and inexpensive to sell, OR 2) they could leverage their battery technology to become one of the main suppliers for the filling stations and fleets of batteries along highways and in cities. Eventually there could be large fleets of semi-trucks with swappable battery packs as well. Filling stations would have equipment to remove and replace these large heavy battery packs for all of the large trucks on the highways. 

Another interesting idea that came to me is, as many homes will have storage batteries for power usage, vehicle expansion battery packs could be designed as part of that home energy storage system. Normally the battery packs would just be plugged in as part of your home power storage, but when you’re going to take a trip, you could just unplug them from the home power system and install them in your car. When you’re on your trip you’re unlikely to need the excess capacity at home anyway, and when you get back home, remove the battery packs from your car and plug them back into your home power system. This idea might be a ideal way for these vehicles to start up, since there wouldn’t be many filling stations with fresh battery packs available at first. The car manufacturer could sell the vehicle in combination with a home energy storage system. Normally these battery packs would help power your home, but are always available when you need them. You’d still have to stop and charge when you’re out on the road, but this would save quite a bit, since you’d only be buying one set of batteries for both your vehicle and home power needs.

There are a ton of things that would need to be figured out for this to work, and the challenges facing it would be pretty steep to climb, but who imagined at the very beginning of the 20th century that soon there would be stations every few miles on virtually every highway in the world to fill up your car with gasoline? There are enough benefits to this idea that it is at least worth a serious study. After coming up with this model I even saw a video about franchises of electric motor scooters in cities in China where you can just stop by a fully automated battery station and just swap out your battery for a fresh one whenever it gets low. It’s pretty much the same model as this, only on a small scale.

What are your thoughts on this type of model? What do you like about it? What improvements can you think of?

by Eric Sparks, 2024