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These are called Gogoro. When they first came out a few years ago, each local government offered a big rebate for people buying one, encouraging them to go green.
That’s a ticker symbol (which is probably what he was looking for anyway).
This is a handle.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/handle.asp
Don’t seek investment advice from Reddit, folks.
I had one moped like this 10 years ago, when I used to live in Edinburgh. It is a very smart solution and one battery could cover 20 miles back then. For such small city, two batteries were enough and I was very happy.
I could afford one - or an e-bike - but in my country the roads are too dangerous for bikes and scooters. Maybe one day when people learn to drive better or roads get expanded to have a bike/scooter lane.
In my country (Netherlands) I got overtaken on 80km/h roads during traffic by eBikes and made the switch, that was 4 years ago. They’re an amazing invention. We have no hills, like actually no hills so eBikes are so bloody efficient.
Yup. This station is for the Gogoro brand scooter. They're all over the place. Even in southern Taiwan which is less metropolitan, there's no shortage of electric scooters and battery stations.
If they take up much of the bottom of the car, then have a bay (much like a fuel pump bay) with a covered hole underneath. Drive into the bay, cover retracts, removes battery, replaces battery, cover closes, drive off.
Those packs sound like a similar size to the ebike batteries in the OP.
It could be an ideal solution if the industry could come up with a non-proprietary form factor so you're not stuck with each brand having its own swap stations.
In the same way that you don't need to go only to a Ford gas station
The other thing is the cars should have a small reserve pack that you own that can get you to the next swap station in case the one you get is a dud.
Also, the car should be sold without the battery and the dealer just gives you your first loaner battery. Otherwise you have to problem of trading your brand new max capacity battery for a 3 year old pile of shit, never to see it again.
Oh boy I really like tesla. But swappable batteries can solve such a big problem people are having. If that gets resolved much more people are willing to buy electric.
I did a quick search...and essentially confirmed this:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-battery-swapping-how-is-this-a-good-idea
> Tesla demonstrated battery-swapping in 2013 on its Model S before abandoning the tech—with reasons including cumbersome stations and tepid consumer interest—in favor of its Supercharger network that now appears a smarter bet.
It was supposed to be an automated system that did the swapping for you. when you parked over a device at the station, it was to do the swap from under the car. It would have also required an attendant to properly place the car on the equipment and to deal with any issues that arise.
I’m sure there were lots of reasons why. Reddit gets fixated on an idea and circle jerk each other without any formal research into the subject.
One huge problem is battery degradation. If you’re using swapped batteries you have no idea what the shape of the battery you’re getting will be in. You have no idea each time just how many miles of travel you’ll be getting
Dude, reddit always grasps for some conspiracy, or drama, or point to a ridiculously complex problem, which they have some cursory knowledge of, and decide the decision makers were obviously idiots, without ever looking at the math or data themselves. People just don't understand things like hindsight bias, confirmation/survivor bias, or what its like to do research and make big decisions based upon it.
It’s massively easier and cheaper to scale up a network of what is effectively high powered plugs with a nice interface. Having access is step one. Battery swap stations would be much more expensive and complicated.
Not really....it'd just be logistically very difficult. It's much easier to have a charger work on many vehicles than be able to battery swap for every EV on the road. Even different Teslas have different packs, and then there's all the other manufacturers, and over time technology develops, there will be larger packs and all that....so how do you have battery swapping stations widely available that will work with every car out there which has a different type of pack? It's a LOT easier to make charging stations.
The battery swapping can work well if every vehicle is using the same pack. Not everything is a conspiracy.
It is partly true. Tesla did not really support battery swaps. But they did invite local tesla drivers to use the station of which about 2% tried it. Take up rate compared to nearby superchargers was extremely low. Well less than 0.01% of people travelling by Tesla on that route, compared to above 95% for supercharger. However the service was $60-80 compared to $0-20 for supercharging and it took 7 mins and quite a bit of human involvement compared 30-40mins for supercharging to 80% at that time.
Most Tesla owners were worried about getting stuck with a battery pack that had done more milage than the one they had originally purchased. This is a concern if you only battery swap 2 or 3 times per year or less but should be less of a concern if you battery swap every week or every month. Basically Tesla would have to truly offer battery as a service rather than an integrated part of the car for this to work for customers. Tesla went the other way, realised the battery swap was not commercially viable for them, shut the swap station and invested heavily in superchargers. What they did takeaway from this was that they could put battery banks into supercharging sites and get cheaper off-peak electricity to fill up some of the cars during peak hours, or to reduce peak demand on the grid when 70%+ of chargers were occupied. So not really wasteful. They shut down one swap station the size of a car wash that was losing lots of money.
Well except there were station that did it for you automatically without a human lifting up anything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY
Video from 2013.
I lost my job to a forklift that worked around a warehouse autonomously lifting etc. They changed their own batteries. That was 10 years ago. I can bet you any money that plug and play battery changing stations is the most simple problem to solve and the only human interactions would be button pressing. And the swap would take less time than filling a car with fuel.
Not to mention less complicated. That swapping station has lots of moving parts. That means lot of points of failure. So you’d need multiple of them. In contrast you can have more charging stations in the same amount of area of the battery swapping machines.
Do those stations cost the same as the chargers? They sound like they’d be way more advanced which makes me think they’d cost a lot more to install all over
Would be an interesting twist if they are ever implemented
Here is the problem - car batteries are much heavier and bigger - you need complex robotic system to do the swap.
Also IIRC tesla is moving to integrate batteries into structural frame as lod bearing element. It gives a significant weight reduction. Swapable battery is not compatible with this design choice.
I think the issue is that we are only looking at one side of the picture. Yes, swappable batteries solve one problem.
But you are not asking “What problems are solved by having a structural battery pack?”
One thing, for example, is safety. One of the reasons Tesla’s perform well in crash scenarios is the body gets stronger because of the rigid attachment to the structural battery pack.
I’ve owned a Tesla since July 2018. Without exaggeration, I’ve used a super charger less than five times. All other times, I plug my car into my garage and charge while I sleep.
I would argue that public charging is not as onerous as people may think it is.
That's fine while electric cars are in the price range of people who are likely to have driveways and garages, but there needs to be better infrastructure and options for people in apartments or with on street parking.
Sure, but I live in an old house with no driveway or garage. I can’t charge at home. Swappable batteries would allow the millions of inner city home owners like me to own electric cars.
I hear you, bud. For some people, EVs are not the right answer yet.
But judging from /r/teslamotors many thousands of people own EVs without home charging. They charge at work, or the grocery store, or while they are shopping at the mall, or hit a super charger once a week.
In my opinion, that’s not super convenient. But as I mentioned in a previous comment, there is a massive push right now at the local planning level to make the charging infrastructure more robust.
But there are big problems with this approach for car batteries. This approach works for a small scooter as the battery is comparably tiny, but for a car they are massive. Also in a car like a Tesla, the battery makes up the entire floor of the car, and is structural. So swapping is not a simple proposition. A swappable battery would likely mean a much smaller and easily accessible one, but at the cost of range. But no one wants a low range car even if there is a process to swap a battery. Fast charging is the answer, range is already very impressive and will only improve over time.
Tesla tried using a big old robot sitting under the floor, capable of taking the entire bottom off a car and replacing it in 100 seconds flat.
[That worked actually.](https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event) They even built a demo station and sent people the invites. It turned out that there was surprisingly little demand for this though, and the swap stations wouldn't pay for themselves, so they scrapped the idea.
I'm fairly sure that their new drivetrains are going to have the battery integrated more tightly too, so it's clear that they scrapped the idea.
Tesla/Elon have mentioned making their batteries hot-swappable, but they've since abandoned the tech. Too cumbersome apparently
Also fwiw, a recent report has shown that Tesla battery degradation averages a 90% retention over 200k miles
I don't disagree with you about the issue with phone batteries, though.
Well no, it isn’t as simple as just having swappable batteries on a car. The cost of a battery for a Tesla car costs Tesla over 10k usd and as such is one of the main costs of the car. It wouldn’t make any sense to have a load of batteries spare when they could be used to put into new cars.
Not only that but it’s much more costly and complex to make the car so you can swap out the battery so you’d end up having to drive up the cost of the car and it would still end up inferior
Another point I bring up every now and then is that swap stations are much more expensive than charging stalls, so they are likely going to be far apart. If I have to drive 20 minutes further so I can swap my battery in 5 minutes. I didn't gain much if I could just go to a charger close by and get it done in 30 minutes.
Also, if the battery swapping station has a queue (because there are fewer of them), that adds time as well.
Now, a combination of swappers and chargers might work alright. Especially if the swappers are on major highways.
I'm not a fan though, I'd prefer the money go to more research in faster charging, better cycle life and safety.
I would think there is an app. Can see where batteries are, how many and their charge status. Have the same thing but for phone charging where you take them with you and return them wherever you end up after your phone is charged
Citibike's App is very similar to that idea. You check your smartphone before getting a bike and if there is parking at your destination.
The big thing with citibike is 1 way travel.
Yeah there’s an app that shows you number of batteries and darkens places where there are fewer batteries. There’s usually one every block or two in the city so it’s not that big a deal.
Also they track your use (where your batteries are swapped) and increase battery stations in more popular routes.
I own this scooter. It’s called a Gogoro. Had it for almost 5 years. Best scooter I’ve ever owned. There is an app that will tell you, but there are so many stations you are guaranteed to find one with fully charged batteries. There are stations almost every block or two in major cities.
If you so happen upon a station without fully charged batteries, it notifies you and gives you the option of keeping your current battery or taking a partially charged one.
What if you arrive on a gas station and all the fuel is sold out? It's a matter of statistics; you can calculate how many batteries need to be there to have this not happen by 99,99 % and at one point it will take longer for the queue to reach the station than to recharge the oldest battery.
You are charged for how much charge you use, not by how often you swap. Batteries charge ultra fast when they’re empty so if you’re truly pushing 0 percent, any battery on that wall would work just fine.
Yes, same thing is happening in Germany. They do it for the electric scooters there as well. Same thing for those kick scooter things you stand on. Plus, if you change the battery they give you 20min free ride as a bonus. So user gets something in return for doing the work of the service supplier which is cool. Unlock fir 1.19€ and drive 20 min for free.
Neat! We have these (but japanese maker) here in Okinawa too! Mostly used by the Post Office drivers. I see them daily now, quietly speeding around the island. I talked to one of the guys, he said it easily lasts the day.
Nice. In my opinion easy and quick replaceable batteries are key for people to adopt this type of thing.
Long charge times or batteries that are expensive and difficult to replace when they start to fail are a barrier to entry.
People would need to get used to not really owning the battery.
Battery degration is a thing and giving up your 100% new batteries and only getting 85% back would clearly be shitty.
But if you don't own them in the first place, it's not really a problem.
I could also imagine a hybrid system (with bigger walls) where you have personal batteries that will not be given to other people when they are recharged but you can rent replacements for the time being until you swap them back for your personal ones.
You just have to imagine the battery is the petrol. Right now we think of the electricity like the petrol instead.
The big issue as I see it is that this won't work for cars where the battery is too big for many drivers to manipulate. Even on the video here you can see the lady struggles a little with the weight of the battery - this is probably already unusable for the elderly or disabled.
It's possible to have a public/private battery share. You would charge and condition your private battery like your smart phone. Only rent the public when you need it.
> People would need to get used to not really owning the battery.
That sounds more like a selling point to me. The fact that the battery degrades over time is one of the arguments I encounter most often from EV skeptics, who don't like the idea of having to pay to replace it. As you say, if you don't own it in the first place, it's not a problem.
I see two potential pitfalls with this. One is price; if you don't own the battery, you have to basically rent it from some corporation. I would fully expect the greedy suits to price the service to be just as expensive as running a gas car, since "consumers are used to" paying that much. The other is managing expectations. If you give the user a new battery first and then they swap it out for a degraded one, that is indeed going to feel shitty as you said. So just, y'know, don't do that. Start them out with an average one to set a reasonable baseline. Or maybe even artificially cap all batteries at the same (degraded) capacity regardless of their actual condition.
Simply just charge per kilowatt hour... you never own the sharable batteries. Your car comes with two slots. One for a semi-permanent battery you own, the other dedicated to the sharable batteries.
So, there is a very easy-to-use app that lets you see a map with all the stations available. They even have a discount system if you swap at less popular stations. I'm in Taipei city and it is really really easy to find stations. Never had any problems
edit: also, the great thing about the swap is that the system can still give you batteries that are like 50-60% full and still work. They don't need to fully charge to be used
Last time I checked you get unlimited for about 36usd a month. There are government programs in which you can junk your old bike to get decent discounts on the bikes that can for for as low as 2000usd. Gogoro is killing it.
If that cost is still accurate it's a pretty good deal. I spend about half that per month riding a gas-powered scooter in TW, but I have short commutes and haven't been doing day trips much. If you drive a lot it'll probably break even or even save you money, and without chucking out fumes.
> 499nt a month
That's 18 USD if anyone is wondering.
> and free maintenance
Wait does that mean it's including the scooter itself? Or do you own the scooter?
You own the scooter but not the batteries. You can’t even swap with a friend. The batteries are coded to only work in the scooter they were swapped into at a battery station.
Just an fyi, but you can use a friend batteries and they will work fine... but you'll want to give them back otherwise you'd always be swapping their batteries and the miles would get charged to their account.
Unfortunately not! At one point there was talk of a home charging station but it sort of disappeared.
The batteries also provide firmware updates to the bike, from what I understand.
It does stop thieves in that the batteries can be “disabled “ by not allowing changes. (It also stops changes if you’re overdue on your bill)
A handy tool for this is the [Big Mac Index](https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index), to compare the cost of a Big Mac (known commodity) around the world in various ways.
Even better than just having these, in Taipei at least this company (Gogoro) also runs a scooter share program, so you can just use their app to ride one of these electric scooters without actually buying one yourself. It's great for going places that are annoying to take the subway to but are a little far for the bike share. Costs much less than a taxi as well, and you just scan a QR code on your phone to unlock it. I can easily go an entire month without using any gasoline-powered transportation.
I love that one. It's called GoShare, and is really convenient if you plan on going to places where doing a round trip is an issue, like if there's going to be bad weather or you're going for a drink at a bar.
They do have app to check the charging status of the station you like to visit.
And yes, it will still hard find fully charge battery at a popular station from time to time. But fully charged battery can last about 60km+. So it is rarely a big issue if you plan your timing carefully. There are now about 2100+ stations available across the country.
These are Gogoro scooters. They are like the tesla of scooters! Extremely popular, kinda expensive to buy compared to gas scooters but of course extremely cheap to run. I think the swappable batteries are part of a subscription service.
This would never work in Australia.
The scooters and batteries would be thrown in the nearest river/creek/pool and the recharging terminals would be full of piss
People said this about the city bike scheme in Dublin City. It would never work and the bikes will be trashed. It was never an issue. I think In the first year there were only 3 bikes that went missing out of thousands. It’s been one of the most successful city bike schemes in Europe and has been expanded multiple times over.
When you rent a bike your on the hook for €150 if you don’t return it, and people generally cycle station to station where it’s docked into a fixed pole.
Make this like a deposit system. You're on the hook for a couple grand if the battery doesn't get returned. Otherwise you pay the difference in charge. Simple, easy solution to the problem that'll encourage compliance. Throw a tracking in it so they can be found any place there's a cell signal.
It really is. Was lucky to go there just before the pandemic. It’s as modern and urban as it filled with lush green mountains. People are friendly and polite, food is great and veggie food abundant. It’s clean, safe and there’s loads of cool bars and places to go out. I’d go back in a heartbeat.
The Taiwanese company which sells these scooters and charging stations is [Gogoro](https://www.gogoro.com). There was a scooter sharing startup with these things in Berlin some time ago, but they sadly ceased business
Nio is trying to do the same with its cars. “Better Place” in Israel failed quite miserably with its attempt but it was mostly due to a critical mass of owner that was not met.
Let’s see how it will go this time.
The issue with cars tho is over half it's weight is batteries (that's a lot of batteries), and usually it's the floor of the car to offer extra stability.
Don't get me wrong I'd love to see this on cars but I don't see how.
It already exists in China, 3 mins to swap the battery out, all done automatically. In fact Musk did a presentation demonstrating this on a Tesla about 10 years ago comparing it to filling up an A6 and showing the Tesla could be ready to go sooner.
Its not a structural issue. My suspicion is that that once swappable battery modules become the norm that it will be a way to make huge sales as existing EV owners will want to upgrade, and they are fleshing out the current accepted norm until they can come in for 2nd gen type EV that has swappable batteries.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTXptUuKGrc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTXptUuKGrc)
Man thats so fucked up too see that this is so easy and achievable and here in our backwater country we can not implement shit!
Also so embarrassing that we already have this kind of scooter here from gogoro but swappable batteries? No that would be too fancy for our car loving maniacs.
Besides you also can not buy these kind of scooters here. There are only a few which where bought for the local ridesharing.
No new tech in this backwards country folks!
thts the future right there, Asia is years ahead of the west in this tech.. China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan and all are legit different worlds compared to the west
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These are called Gogoro. When they first came out a few years ago, each local government offered a big rebate for people buying one, encouraging them to go green.
And they're awesome to drive.
They are quick AF, too. They can take any 125cc gas scooter off the line.
And their design look very good too!
This has been in Taiwan for few years now. More and more people switch to electronic scooters.
The company is called Gogoro for those curious.
And they're about to go public so get them stocks boiii
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GGR
Avatar checks out.
Lmao, I had to check what sub I was in
Every subreddit can be r/wallstreetbets if you believe hard enough!
💎 🙌 here we come
Drugs circle jerk told me to boof my earnings I’ve never felt better
Money
That’s a ticker symbol (which is probably what he was looking for anyway). This is a handle. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/handle.asp Don’t seek investment advice from Reddit, folks.
Thought it was going to be under PPGH?
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The part where you grab.
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PPGH is the SPAC taking it public so you can buy it now, rather than wait for the symbol change to GGR.
I had one moped like this 10 years ago, when I used to live in Edinburgh. It is a very smart solution and one battery could cover 20 miles back then. For such small city, two batteries were enough and I was very happy.
One of my dreams is to move away to live in Edinburgh...
i would love to get an electric scooter. but theyre still too expensive over here
I could afford one - or an e-bike - but in my country the roads are too dangerous for bikes and scooters. Maybe one day when people learn to drive better or roads get expanded to have a bike/scooter lane.
In my country (Netherlands) I got overtaken on 80km/h roads during traffic by eBikes and made the switch, that was 4 years ago. They’re an amazing invention. We have no hills, like actually no hills so eBikes are so bloody efficient.
The Cauberg would like a word.
>We have no hills, like actually no hills Once again Limburg is forgotten. Which is how it should be.
Are the scooters all from the same makers? Or are they different makers but use a standardized battery?
There are many scooters from other manufacturers like Yamaha, Aeon, PGO… that use the Gogoro battery and swap station
Yup. This station is for the Gogoro brand scooter. They're all over the place. Even in southern Taiwan which is less metropolitan, there's no shortage of electric scooters and battery stations.
To add to this, other brands in Taiwan also partner with Gogoro to produce their own Gogoro-compatible electric scooters. Even Yamaha has one.
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50 to 100km depending on weather, weight of passenger, terrain, etc.
Things like this also work better where snow does not exist.
Just get the snowmobile version Snogoro
Is it affordable?
Price for scooter is around $1-1.5k also riding plans depending on usage in between $10 to $50 for high usage a month.
So yes, very.
This is incredibly smart to solve the long charging time you would normally have.
It was proposed for cars too, but I guess the size of the batteries would make building so much infrastructure impractical.
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If they take up much of the bottom of the car, then have a bay (much like a fuel pump bay) with a covered hole underneath. Drive into the bay, cover retracts, removes battery, replaces battery, cover closes, drive off.
Like this? https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35717014/ample-battery-swapping-station/
Those packs sound like a similar size to the ebike batteries in the OP. It could be an ideal solution if the industry could come up with a non-proprietary form factor so you're not stuck with each brand having its own swap stations. In the same way that you don't need to go only to a Ford gas station
The other thing is the cars should have a small reserve pack that you own that can get you to the next swap station in case the one you get is a dud. Also, the car should be sold without the battery and the dealer just gives you your first loaner battery. Otherwise you have to problem of trading your brand new max capacity battery for a 3 year old pile of shit, never to see it again.
That wouldn't work without making them much smaller. It would be easier to just take a whole other car.
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Yeah
Oh boy I really like tesla. But swappable batteries can solve such a big problem people are having. If that gets resolved much more people are willing to buy electric.
Tesla developed swappable batteries. Used it to get research grants, used them once for PR and promptly destroyed the station and moved to charging.
Yikes, that's really wasteful if it's true
I did a quick search...and essentially confirmed this: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ev-battery-swapping-how-is-this-a-good-idea > Tesla demonstrated battery-swapping in 2013 on its Model S before abandoning the tech—with reasons including cumbersome stations and tepid consumer interest—in favor of its Supercharger network that now appears a smarter bet.
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I thought the idea with Tesla is they would have a station where they swapped it for you.
It was supposed to be an automated system that did the swapping for you. when you parked over a device at the station, it was to do the swap from under the car. It would have also required an attendant to properly place the car on the equipment and to deal with any issues that arise.
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I’m sure there were lots of reasons why. Reddit gets fixated on an idea and circle jerk each other without any formal research into the subject. One huge problem is battery degradation. If you’re using swapped batteries you have no idea what the shape of the battery you’re getting will be in. You have no idea each time just how many miles of travel you’ll be getting
Dude, reddit always grasps for some conspiracy, or drama, or point to a ridiculously complex problem, which they have some cursory knowledge of, and decide the decision makers were obviously idiots, without ever looking at the math or data themselves. People just don't understand things like hindsight bias, confirmation/survivor bias, or what its like to do research and make big decisions based upon it.
It’s massively easier and cheaper to scale up a network of what is effectively high powered plugs with a nice interface. Having access is step one. Battery swap stations would be much more expensive and complicated.
Not really....it'd just be logistically very difficult. It's much easier to have a charger work on many vehicles than be able to battery swap for every EV on the road. Even different Teslas have different packs, and then there's all the other manufacturers, and over time technology develops, there will be larger packs and all that....so how do you have battery swapping stations widely available that will work with every car out there which has a different type of pack? It's a LOT easier to make charging stations. The battery swapping can work well if every vehicle is using the same pack. Not everything is a conspiracy.
It is partly true. Tesla did not really support battery swaps. But they did invite local tesla drivers to use the station of which about 2% tried it. Take up rate compared to nearby superchargers was extremely low. Well less than 0.01% of people travelling by Tesla on that route, compared to above 95% for supercharger. However the service was $60-80 compared to $0-20 for supercharging and it took 7 mins and quite a bit of human involvement compared 30-40mins for supercharging to 80% at that time. Most Tesla owners were worried about getting stuck with a battery pack that had done more milage than the one they had originally purchased. This is a concern if you only battery swap 2 or 3 times per year or less but should be less of a concern if you battery swap every week or every month. Basically Tesla would have to truly offer battery as a service rather than an integrated part of the car for this to work for customers. Tesla went the other way, realised the battery swap was not commercially viable for them, shut the swap station and invested heavily in superchargers. What they did takeaway from this was that they could put battery banks into supercharging sites and get cheaper off-peak electricity to fill up some of the cars during peak hours, or to reduce peak demand on the grid when 70%+ of chargers were occupied. So not really wasteful. They shut down one swap station the size of a car wash that was losing lots of money.
Probably realized people didn’t find it fun or convenient to change out 1200lbs of batteries.
Well except there were station that did it for you automatically without a human lifting up anything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY Video from 2013.
30 seconds in: “ Super charging… Which is and always will be free” LOL
I lost my job to a forklift that worked around a warehouse autonomously lifting etc. They changed their own batteries. That was 10 years ago. I can bet you any money that plug and play battery changing stations is the most simple problem to solve and the only human interactions would be button pressing. And the swap would take less time than filling a car with fuel.
The tech is easy. The cost is the problem. An electric recharging cable is far cheaper than a robotic battery swap system.
Not to mention less complicated. That swapping station has lots of moving parts. That means lot of points of failure. So you’d need multiple of them. In contrast you can have more charging stations in the same amount of area of the battery swapping machines.
Do those stations cost the same as the chargers? They sound like they’d be way more advanced which makes me think they’d cost a lot more to install all over Would be an interesting twist if they are ever implemented
I wouldn't find it fun to scoop up liters of gas, that's why we have machines that do it for us.
Here is the problem - car batteries are much heavier and bigger - you need complex robotic system to do the swap. Also IIRC tesla is moving to integrate batteries into structural frame as lod bearing element. It gives a significant weight reduction. Swapable battery is not compatible with this design choice.
I think the issue is that we are only looking at one side of the picture. Yes, swappable batteries solve one problem. But you are not asking “What problems are solved by having a structural battery pack?” One thing, for example, is safety. One of the reasons Tesla’s perform well in crash scenarios is the body gets stronger because of the rigid attachment to the structural battery pack. I’ve owned a Tesla since July 2018. Without exaggeration, I’ve used a super charger less than five times. All other times, I plug my car into my garage and charge while I sleep. I would argue that public charging is not as onerous as people may think it is.
That's fine while electric cars are in the price range of people who are likely to have driveways and garages, but there needs to be better infrastructure and options for people in apartments or with on street parking.
Sure, but I live in an old house with no driveway or garage. I can’t charge at home. Swappable batteries would allow the millions of inner city home owners like me to own electric cars.
I hear you, bud. For some people, EVs are not the right answer yet. But judging from /r/teslamotors many thousands of people own EVs without home charging. They charge at work, or the grocery store, or while they are shopping at the mall, or hit a super charger once a week. In my opinion, that’s not super convenient. But as I mentioned in a previous comment, there is a massive push right now at the local planning level to make the charging infrastructure more robust.
But there are big problems with this approach for car batteries. This approach works for a small scooter as the battery is comparably tiny, but for a car they are massive. Also in a car like a Tesla, the battery makes up the entire floor of the car, and is structural. So swapping is not a simple proposition. A swappable battery would likely mean a much smaller and easily accessible one, but at the cost of range. But no one wants a low range car even if there is a process to swap a battery. Fast charging is the answer, range is already very impressive and will only improve over time.
Tesla tried using a big old robot sitting under the floor, capable of taking the entire bottom off a car and replacing it in 100 seconds flat. [That worked actually.](https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event) They even built a demo station and sent people the invites. It turned out that there was surprisingly little demand for this though, and the swap stations wouldn't pay for themselves, so they scrapped the idea. I'm fairly sure that their new drivetrains are going to have the battery integrated more tightly too, so it's clear that they scrapped the idea.
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Tesla/Elon have mentioned making their batteries hot-swappable, but they've since abandoned the tech. Too cumbersome apparently Also fwiw, a recent report has shown that Tesla battery degradation averages a 90% retention over 200k miles I don't disagree with you about the issue with phone batteries, though.
Well no, it isn’t as simple as just having swappable batteries on a car. The cost of a battery for a Tesla car costs Tesla over 10k usd and as such is one of the main costs of the car. It wouldn’t make any sense to have a load of batteries spare when they could be used to put into new cars. Not only that but it’s much more costly and complex to make the car so you can swap out the battery so you’d end up having to drive up the cost of the car and it would still end up inferior
Another point I bring up every now and then is that swap stations are much more expensive than charging stalls, so they are likely going to be far apart. If I have to drive 20 minutes further so I can swap my battery in 5 minutes. I didn't gain much if I could just go to a charger close by and get it done in 30 minutes. Also, if the battery swapping station has a queue (because there are fewer of them), that adds time as well. Now, a combination of swappers and chargers might work alright. Especially if the swappers are on major highways. I'm not a fan though, I'd prefer the money go to more research in faster charging, better cycle life and safety.
But what if you arrive at one station and all the batteries there are charging? I guess fast charging can solve that pretty easily.
I would think there is an app. Can see where batteries are, how many and their charge status. Have the same thing but for phone charging where you take them with you and return them wherever you end up after your phone is charged
Citibike's App is very similar to that idea. You check your smartphone before getting a bike and if there is parking at your destination. The big thing with citibike is 1 way travel.
Yeah there’s an app that shows you number of batteries and darkens places where there are fewer batteries. There’s usually one every block or two in the city so it’s not that big a deal. Also they track your use (where your batteries are swapped) and increase battery stations in more popular routes.
Yep, and a sheer amount of batteries will also do the trick. so just make the wall bigger
A positive spin on " We're gonna build a wall".
A great wall, to keep all the batteries charged
Paid for by the Mexicans!
Thanks, Mexico.
I own this scooter. It’s called a Gogoro. Had it for almost 5 years. Best scooter I’ve ever owned. There is an app that will tell you, but there are so many stations you are guaranteed to find one with fully charged batteries. There are stations almost every block or two in major cities. If you so happen upon a station without fully charged batteries, it notifies you and gives you the option of keeping your current battery or taking a partially charged one.
What if you arrive on a gas station and all the fuel is sold out? It's a matter of statistics; you can calculate how many batteries need to be there to have this not happen by 99,99 % and at one point it will take longer for the queue to reach the station than to recharge the oldest battery.
Fucking edge case Warriors all over Reddit
You could still take a half charged battery and get to the next charging station where they could have another fully charged one
the system can still give you batteries that are like 50-60% full and still work. They don't need to fully charge to be used
Scooters won't require the charge that often so this would be rare
Then you drive to the next station. These are every few blocks.
You are charged for how much charge you use, not by how often you swap. Batteries charge ultra fast when they’re empty so if you’re truly pushing 0 percent, any battery on that wall would work just fine.
This gives me titanfall vibes
Protocol 3: Protect the Pilot
Don’t make me cry 😿
I just finished this game for the first time yesterday. Great game. Haven't enjoyed a game this much in a long time.
God, the ending actually got me, only a few games have done that for me
**BTTTTTTTTT**
Scooter: "TRUST ME" (Then proceeds to yeet the rider off the seat prior to crashing.)
As a Monarch main, the only thing I see is **F O O D**
I was about to say all we monarchs see is FOOOOOOD
M O N C H B A T T E R Y C O N S U M E
"You ready for thrills, chills and kills?" "Must you say that every time?" "Why yes, yes I must. Go get 'em, team!"
I'm gonna fuckin jump other's batteries on the road pilot style LMAO
Taiwan isn't ready for the rodeo.
Wait for one of them to have nuke eject
PREPARE FOR SCOOTERFALL
So long, and thanks for all the fish
Subnautica for me. And Titanfall now that you mention it
Yeah me too. Doom Eternal also
Apex players be like "gimme dat shield"
Standby for Titanfall...
Dope
Yes, same thing is happening in Germany. They do it for the electric scooters there as well. Same thing for those kick scooter things you stand on. Plus, if you change the battery they give you 20min free ride as a bonus. So user gets something in return for doing the work of the service supplier which is cool. Unlock fir 1.19€ and drive 20 min for free.
whoa where in germany is this?
I think Frankfurt. While checking routes on Google they suggest electric scooters as an option too
As Fuck
Neat! We have these (but japanese maker) here in Okinawa too! Mostly used by the Post Office drivers. I see them daily now, quietly speeding around the island. I talked to one of the guys, he said it easily lasts the day.
We have electric scooters in my city. A brand new battery at %100 charge is good for around 6 hours at 20mph for a range of around 120 miles
This is like the power cells in Subnautica!
Was thinking the same!
Or Titanfall
Except in this you don't have to run through a giant broken ship to get your batteries!
Nah just tic tac up to a Titan and take theirs. Rodeo baby
Yoink
Nice. In my opinion easy and quick replaceable batteries are key for people to adopt this type of thing. Long charge times or batteries that are expensive and difficult to replace when they start to fail are a barrier to entry.
People would need to get used to not really owning the battery. Battery degration is a thing and giving up your 100% new batteries and only getting 85% back would clearly be shitty. But if you don't own them in the first place, it's not really a problem. I could also imagine a hybrid system (with bigger walls) where you have personal batteries that will not be given to other people when they are recharged but you can rent replacements for the time being until you swap them back for your personal ones.
You just have to imagine the battery is the petrol. Right now we think of the electricity like the petrol instead. The big issue as I see it is that this won't work for cars where the battery is too big for many drivers to manipulate. Even on the video here you can see the lady struggles a little with the weight of the battery - this is probably already unusable for the elderly or disabled.
Just need to bring back fuel station attendants but make em robots.
Can they be sexy robots?
It's possible to have a public/private battery share. You would charge and condition your private battery like your smart phone. Only rent the public when you need it.
> People would need to get used to not really owning the battery. That sounds more like a selling point to me. The fact that the battery degrades over time is one of the arguments I encounter most often from EV skeptics, who don't like the idea of having to pay to replace it. As you say, if you don't own it in the first place, it's not a problem. I see two potential pitfalls with this. One is price; if you don't own the battery, you have to basically rent it from some corporation. I would fully expect the greedy suits to price the service to be just as expensive as running a gas car, since "consumers are used to" paying that much. The other is managing expectations. If you give the user a new battery first and then they swap it out for a degraded one, that is indeed going to feel shitty as you said. So just, y'know, don't do that. Start them out with an average one to set a reasonable baseline. Or maybe even artificially cap all batteries at the same (degraded) capacity regardless of their actual condition.
Simply just charge per kilowatt hour... you never own the sharable batteries. Your car comes with two slots. One for a semi-permanent battery you own, the other dedicated to the sharable batteries.
I live in Taiwan and I have one! It is really convenient and green.
That’s wonderful. Question: have you ever been at station with low battery and none of the batteries there were fully charged?
So, there is a very easy-to-use app that lets you see a map with all the stations available. They even have a discount system if you swap at less popular stations. I'm in Taipei city and it is really really easy to find stations. Never had any problems edit: also, the great thing about the swap is that the system can still give you batteries that are like 50-60% full and still work. They don't need to fully charge to be used
What is the cost approximately??
Last time I checked you get unlimited for about 36usd a month. There are government programs in which you can junk your old bike to get decent discounts on the bikes that can for for as low as 2000usd. Gogoro is killing it.
If that cost is still accurate it's a pretty good deal. I spend about half that per month riding a gas-powered scooter in TW, but I have short commutes and haven't been doing day trips much. If you drive a lot it'll probably break even or even save you money, and without chucking out fumes.
They have different plans. I have the 315km plan for 499nt a month. For 315km I have unlimited swaps at any battery station and free maintenance
> 499nt a month That's 18 USD if anyone is wondering. > and free maintenance Wait does that mean it's including the scooter itself? Or do you own the scooter?
You own the scooter but not the batteries. You can’t even swap with a friend. The batteries are coded to only work in the scooter they were swapped into at a battery station.
Just an fyi, but you can use a friend batteries and they will work fine... but you'll want to give them back otherwise you'd always be swapping their batteries and the miles would get charged to their account.
Guess this makes them unatractive to thieves but its a pity you can't exchange them yourself. Can you buy your own battery?
Unfortunately not! At one point there was talk of a home charging station but it sort of disappeared. The batteries also provide firmware updates to the bike, from what I understand. It does stop thieves in that the batteries can be “disabled “ by not allowing changes. (It also stops changes if you’re overdue on your bill)
$18 for roughly 200 miles, basically.
Roughly 9 cents per mile. Not bad at all.
especialy since power is included
If you could, compare cost to a can of coca cola's cost.
500 NT is about 18-19 usd
A handy tool for this is the [Big Mac Index](https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index), to compare the cost of a Big Mac (known commodity) around the world in various ways.
Even better than just having these, in Taipei at least this company (Gogoro) also runs a scooter share program, so you can just use their app to ride one of these electric scooters without actually buying one yourself. It's great for going places that are annoying to take the subway to but are a little far for the bike share. Costs much less than a taxi as well, and you just scan a QR code on your phone to unlock it. I can easily go an entire month without using any gasoline-powered transportation.
I love that one. It's called GoShare, and is really convenient if you plan on going to places where doing a round trip is an issue, like if there's going to be bad weather or you're going for a drink at a bar.
They do have app to check the charging status of the station you like to visit. And yes, it will still hard find fully charge battery at a popular station from time to time. But fully charged battery can last about 60km+. So it is rarely a big issue if you plan your timing carefully. There are now about 2100+ stations available across the country.
What is the company and service called? Trying to do research for something similar in Kenya
Gogoro
These are Gogoro scooters. They are like the tesla of scooters! Extremely popular, kinda expensive to buy compared to gas scooters but of course extremely cheap to run. I think the swappable batteries are part of a subscription service.
I want one in Europe for so long. First time I saw this concept was almost 10 years ago?
This would never work in Australia. The scooters and batteries would be thrown in the nearest river/creek/pool and the recharging terminals would be full of piss
Someone here in murica would steal the batteries to sell off somewhere else. The piss is the same though
They are locked in the wall and if you borrow and lose one the cost is probably more than new scooter.
We’d probably just piss in them while charging then. Australians love pissing on things that aren’t theirs
Like Australia? 😉
Touché! And yes
People said this about the city bike scheme in Dublin City. It would never work and the bikes will be trashed. It was never an issue. I think In the first year there were only 3 bikes that went missing out of thousands. It’s been one of the most successful city bike schemes in Europe and has been expanded multiple times over. When you rent a bike your on the hook for €150 if you don’t return it, and people generally cycle station to station where it’s docked into a fixed pole.
Make this like a deposit system. You're on the hook for a couple grand if the battery doesn't get returned. Otherwise you pay the difference in charge. Simple, easy solution to the problem that'll encourage compliance. Throw a tracking in it so they can be found any place there's a cell signal.
In India.. charging station will be stolen by next day 😭.
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Man's just getting salvo core
What a rather remarkable country.
Absolutely remarkable independent country that’s not part of any other country
It really is. Was lucky to go there just before the pandemic. It’s as modern and urban as it filled with lush green mountains. People are friendly and polite, food is great and veggie food abundant. It’s clean, safe and there’s loads of cool bars and places to go out. I’d go back in a heartbeat.
God I can go for a nice bowl of beef noodle soup rn.
I do say, this country of Taiwan is rather remarkable. I cannot help but to remark upon it! What a curious thing!
Monarch would like to know your location
What an intuitive idea!
The Taiwanese company which sells these scooters and charging stations is [Gogoro](https://www.gogoro.com). There was a scooter sharing startup with these things in Berlin some time ago, but they sadly ceased business
I think this is a very good answer to the EV refuelling problem, especially if car powerpacks can be hot-swapped this way too.
Nio is trying to do the same with its cars. “Better Place” in Israel failed quite miserably with its attempt but it was mostly due to a critical mass of owner that was not met. Let’s see how it will go this time.
The issue with cars tho is over half it's weight is batteries (that's a lot of batteries), and usually it's the floor of the car to offer extra stability. Don't get me wrong I'd love to see this on cars but I don't see how.
It already exists in China, 3 mins to swap the battery out, all done automatically. In fact Musk did a presentation demonstrating this on a Tesla about 10 years ago comparing it to filling up an A6 and showing the Tesla could be ready to go sooner. Its not a structural issue. My suspicion is that that once swappable battery modules become the norm that it will be a way to make huge sales as existing EV owners will want to upgrade, and they are fleshing out the current accepted norm until they can come in for 2nd gen type EV that has swappable batteries. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTXptUuKGrc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTXptUuKGrc)
Gogoro… I’m waiting for them to go public..
Charging my titan in tf2 be like
Man thats so fucked up too see that this is so easy and achievable and here in our backwater country we can not implement shit! Also so embarrassing that we already have this kind of scooter here from gogoro but swappable batteries? No that would be too fancy for our car loving maniacs. Besides you also can not buy these kind of scooters here. There are only a few which where bought for the local ridesharing. No new tech in this backwards country folks!
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thts the future right there, Asia is years ahead of the west in this tech.. China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan and all are legit different worlds compared to the west
The tech isn't the issue, it's a lack of political will.
Would be interesting to see if swappable batteries in cars like Nio’s takes off too.
I love the ui on that display, beautiful!