Are We Making Electric Vehicles Wrong?

A big problem with the current generation of electric vehicles is the range. This whole issue is currently hindering mass adoption of electric vehicles and has been for some time. I think there's a way to solve the range issue and by doing so, also the issue of expensive individual battery replacements.

Tesla's new model 3 can only go 354 km (220 miles)¹. That will get you from London to York or at a stretch from New York to Washington DC. This is fine for probably most journeys done by car, but what if this Tesla is your only vehicle and you regularly need to go long distances. You're not going to buy a Tesla, are you? Once you've hit that range according to Tesla you have to "plug in when you arrive and your Tesla will be charged by morning". Even using their limited scattering of superchargers you'll have to be waiting a minimum of 30 minutes². This simply isn’t practical.

_{Tesla Model 3: not practical?}

Compare this to the current setup where fuelling your car takes a matter of minutes and there are hundreds of thousands of places you can do it in the world. As of December 2016 there were 769 Tesla supercharger stations globally³. There are currently about 8,500 petrol stations in the UK alone⁴. Tesla has a long way to go. Does this also mean every other car company is also going to install their own branded charging stations? That seems to me like an expensive exercise.

_{Expensive and unnecessary?}

Surely a better way would be to use the existing fuelling infrastructure and adapt that to power the next generation of vehicles. But it's currently not possible the way these cars are designed.

I propose that at the existing fuelling stations the car batteries should be replaced by fully charged ones.

Petrol stations will adapt to be charging hubs where they are storing, servicing and charging thousands of batteries each day. A customer will pull up, the batteries will slot out of the front, back or side and a new fully charged one slotted in. Kind of like a Formula 1 pit stop. It costs about £6 ($7.85) to charge a Tesla at a residential property overnight in the UK⁵. How about everyone pays double that to swap the battery. Worth it for the time saving don’t you think? That’s still considerably cheaper than filling up with fuel and you’re on your way within minutes.

The batteries dropped off at the ‘battery stations’ will now be checked, charged and reused and any that are now no longer efficient can be taken out of the market and replaced. The charging markup taken at the station will be used to pay for the overheads and to buy new batteries to put into the system.

With this system individuals are no longer burdened with expensive batteries to replace; existing petrol stations can survive; electric car companies don’t need to spend time and money building charging stations and everyone can keep on driving.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Could this actually work?

References:

1. https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/by-the-numbers-tesla-model-3-vs-chevrolet-bolt-ev/
2. https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/supercharger
3. https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/supercharger
4. https://www.statista.com/statistics/312331/number-of-petrol-stations-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/
5. https://pod-point.com/landing-pages/tesla-charging