Electric cars are a great idea until you need to drive beyond the range of your battery. What then? A company named Better Place unveiled their solution to the problem, a battery swap station.
The $US500,000 system works a lot like a car wash, with your vehicle placed on tracks while machines remove and replace your battery. (The raised platform is only in this prototype for demonstration effect.) And it could get you back on the road a lot faster than plugging into a wall.
Of course, there are several reasons why such a station isn’t feasible within today’s infrastructure—namely that different manufacturers have different shape/size/capacity standards. Also, manufacturers haven’t really designed hybrid/electric cars to have their batteries constantly removed. Should these issues be ironed out, we could see a future in the battery swap station. But hopefully, we’ll get a battery technology that charges faster before we rip up our entire fuel infrastructure. [Wired]
Jed
Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 10:39 AMIf you haven’t done it already then you must watch Shai Agasi (CEO of Better Place) talk at TED (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html)
This is the single most important project of the next decade, this will be what the internet was to this decade, what the mobile phone was to the 90′s and what commercial aviation was to the 40′s.
Jed
Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 11:23 AMhere is the link to the video:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html
Please watch before you comment, this IS happening in Israel, Denmark & Australia with infrastructure work already started or about to start. Once again the US is getting left behind, once a nation of leaders the US is falling further and further behind the rest of the world.
Bob
Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 2:27 PMFingers crossed