The Quest For an EV Fast-Charge Standard

An anonymous reader writes "This article explores one of the stumbling blocks currently facing EV adoption: 'Sure, there are already public charging stations in service, and new ones are coming online daily. But those typically take several hours to fully replenish a battery. As a result, the ability for quick battery boosts — using a compatible direct current fast charger, the Leaf can refill to 80 percent capacity in 30 minutes — could potentially become an important point of differentiation among electric models. But the availability of fast charging points has in part been held up by the lack of an agreement among automakers on a universal method for fast charging — or even on a single electrical connector.'"

Re:My solution

[hipp5]

I think some of the battery arrays should be able to pulled out of the car and swapped in with a charged battery array. This process could happen in under a minute.

Someone [betterplace.com] is working on that.

Re:My solution

[grimmjeeper]

Fortunately for the rest of the world, you're not the only one who is coming up with ideas on how to make it work. There are already pilot programs (in Tokyo I believe) where you pull into a station and a robot drops the battery pack from the bottom of the car and swaps in a new one. Works pretty well in fact. Only takes a minute or two for the swap. Each battery pack is charged at the station. They track each battery pack in service via a bar code on it. They know how many times it's been recharged, what it's expected remaining life is, etc. When one goes bad prematurely, they can just pull it out of service and recycle the contents for the next batch of batteries. For a densely populated urban center with power to spare, it's not a bad system.

Re:Electric cars are a pipe-dream

[currently_awake]

Our grid is only at/near peak capacity during parts of the day. At night it's well below half capacity. If we charge at night we're fine.