▲ 34 points
back
65 comments
Battery swapping is much faster, 6 second swap: https://www.gogoro.com/gogoro-network/
With more than 450 million battery swaps globally, Gogoro’s 6-second Swap & Go battery swapping have set the standard for urban two-wheel refuelling by eliminating the traditional EV charging challenges of finding places to charge and then waiting to charge.
Now doing a pilot in India: https://www.gogoro.com/news/india-pilot/
Nice, but you're totally on the mercy of a maintained battery swap network.
With standardization -- how is a battery swapping network any different from a gas station network?
Our entire society is based on these kinds of things. "Electricity?!" -- what if they stop producing that...then what? No, I'll stay with my steam powered...
>With standardization -- how is a battery swapping network any different from a gas station network?
Because if one bad actor screws you over (e.g. a faulty battery that lies about its charge status), then you're potentially out thousands of dollars. Saying "with standardization" glosses over possible decades of cracking down on every dipshit that passes off dodgy batteries and makes thousands of dollars a day.
Also, you need lots of extra batteries everywhere, to swap with. Hopefully everyone has the exact same form-factor of battery too, vehicle design flexibility be damned, because otherwise you'll need multiple stockpiles of batteries.
Also, making batteries modular is expensive and adds weight, which reduces practical range.
Battery swapping also doesn"t have a good path to adoption, since it's capex-heavy and at first is operating in a world where nobody uses it. In contrast, EV charging infrastructure is everywhere as long as there's a power socket.
Also, adding a charger for your swappable-battery car costs pennies, so lots of people won't even use their car's battery a swapping feature (which is really bad for battery swapping outlets). If most people only use the battery-swap at Christmas and $HOLIDAY, then the networks could be underprovisioned during those spikes and overprovisioned in the other 363 days of the year.
So even though there would be incredible benefits -- we just should not try according to this position.
I mean hasn't every great engineering achievement in human history basically been about overcoming a litany of "it can't be done because"? We would still be in caves with this approach you suggest.
The trouble is that power outlets are mostly installed indoors. Many parking lots aren't wired at all, even for lighting.
the supply chain.
nobody puts gas into the gas station but the delivery tanker. nobody puts electricity into your mains but the grid operator.
when you get electricity from the grid or gas from a gas station, you have a pretty solid expectation that the service knows where it came from, and nobody else has had access to it.
at a battery swap station, you are receiving a high energy object of essentially unknowable provenance, to which many people have had private unsupervised access.
a lot can be done to mitigate this but you can't make it not true, and by nature of the service it is a very lucrative vulnerability to exploit.
Battery swap stations don't take random batteries of unknown provenance -- they only take known batteries with known, tracked histories from one or more manufacturers who have set up to participate, and they're not going to take damaged ones.
> by nature of the service it is a very lucrative vulnerability to exploit
I'm having a hard time imagining what the lucrative vulnerability is here?
The only thing I can imagine is for someone to take a new battery, swap its insides with a 10-year-old or otherwise damaged battery and put that into circulation, so that they now have a new battery almost for free.
But there are so many safeguards you can implement against that -- even if you manage to bypass all manner of physical anti-tampering and cryptographically signed hardware attestation, the swap is going to be detected during the next charging cycle (you can't fake receiving electricity the way fraudulent 32 MB flash drives can fake having 128 GB written to them), and you can go arrest the culprits for stolen goods and/or fraud and/or whatever.
I'm having an extremely difficult time seeing any viable "lucrative" criminal enterprise here at all. Sure, someone can tamper with or damage a battery the same way they could with a gas grill propane canister, but there's no money to be made in that.
The big difference is battery life. Every time you use a battery the lifespan shortens a little bit. Abuse it and it is shortened a lot. If you have a swap network you no longer care if you take good care of your battery, and if you do - your nice month fresh battery gets swapped for an abused beat up battery. For sure for my car I wouldn’t want someone else’s abused battery, I spend a fair bit of effort to baby mine.
Batteries are not a natural resource though. I have no information how it works currently, but presumedly vendors lock in the devices to only work with certain types of batteries. Please correct me if I'm wrong in this case.
You are just dependant on coal network.
And you are currently at the mercy of a maintained gas distribution and sales network. (I spent time in the Congo, I've seen what happens when it doesn't work).
People around Detroit have seen what happens when the water network is not well maintained also.
Yes, many parts of everyday life rely on certain things existing and being maintained. That is perfectly fine.
batteries are not a natural resource though. I have no information how it works, but presumedly vendors lock in the devices to only work with certain types of batteries. Please correct me if I'm wrong in this case.
Though not exactly the same thing, in the US swapping NG tanks is very common. These usually aren't used for transport though the swap stations are located at gas stations, in addition to grocery stores, home improvement stores, and many other common shopping locations.
It's pretty shocking how the market has failed so roundly to do basic cooperation. There have been some battery swapping alliances/consortiums formed in Japan and Europe, but afaik there's no infrastructure to support it like Gogoro. With some basic self monitoring, Gogoro seems to be more than enough, a "just works" system that more than proves the concept.
That said, all of these systems seem to target pretty low power mopeds. Gogoro's top end models are 10 HP/7.5kW. The bike here can deliver 23kW and peak at 40kW (53 HP). All these pack designs are 48V models, which clearly isn't targeting high power applications. It'd be great to see a bigger battery spec that was built for higher power, using a 200V+ architecture. The bike here has a mild-ish 7kWh capacity - that's like 2-3 gogoro packs - but is 320v architecture; that's how it makes (and takes) power.
> The company hasn’t shared a range figure yet
Ah, there's the rub.
But it is nice to see things advancing so quickly. Fast-charging really needs to be a thing. I am deeply pessimistic about battery-swapping. I don't think it would work.
> Ah, there's the rub.
It'll have a range of ~90 miles. Since motorcycles all have pretty similar weight and aerodynamics (specifically: very bad), you can compare different models with the same power pretty reasonably.
The efficiency of the battery, electronics, and motor are all >>80%. If they were lower, they'd be on fire. The difference between 80% and 90% efficient is only 12.5% extra power to the wheels. The actual energy lost is all in the drag and the speed you ride- even the weight doesn't matter much because the tires don't deform nearly as much as car tires, while the air drag is actually about the same as a sedan.
For comparison a gas motorcycle will get 150-200 miles on a tank, but even that is very very dependent on how you're riding.
Actually I think battery swapping works really well on two-wheel form factors like motorcycles.
The battery for a 50 mile e-bike barely weighs a couple pounds, that is ultra portable and ultra swappable. Not sure how heavy a electric motorcycles battery would be, possibly 100 lbs? That's a lot harder. 50 lbs would be a one person job for a wide range of consumers.
Of course, the big problem with small EV transportation is that the batteries are largely being implemented in the same way. The batteries are being implemented for power tools. It's all the same cells underneath it, but each tool maker has their own special form. Factor/ plastic molding and plug interface.
We _really_ need standards around this.
Edit: a 150km range battery on a motorcycle is about 60kg currently. Of course if solid state and sulfur chemistries ever get commercialized, that could drop by 40-60% which is a lot different.
Would also work on cars. It's the only way to retain the convenience of gasoline-powered cars of driving to a gas station, filling up real quick and then continuing your trip vs. having to wait for the car to "fast" charge for half an hour.
Gas stations would turn into massive storage facilities to store replacement batteries, but is that any less feasible than massive parking lots for charging cars simultaneously? Not to mention the massive peak current that needs to be supported, which could be spread out evenly over 24 hours if the batteries were in storage.
The skeptic in me worries about the opportunities this would open for bad actors.
Imagine a "cartel" that buys low-value batteries (many charge cycles), swaps them out, and resells the new one. Or gas stations that do the same in reverse, give you a poorer battery in return for a good one, and then sells the good one.
It would require aligned interests and strong regulation to work, I think.
They used to have that in Israel. You drove your car to a swap station and it just swapped your battery for a charged one. They went belly up though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company)
The increase in weight and complexity to the car kind of kills this.
> 50 lbs would be a one person job for a wide range of consumers
That may be doable by a wide range of consumers, but I think it certainly would rule out a significant portion of them. 50 pounds is about 23kg, and https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-6-2008-7096_...:
“Scientific studies have led the American National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) to conclude that 23 kg is the maximum weight which may be lifted manually under optimal conditions if health risks are to be avoided”
https://www.first4lawyers.com/personal-injury/resources-and-...:
“According to the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), a man shouldn’t lift anything heavier than 25kg, while the safe lifting weight for a woman is no heavier than 16kg. But the HSE has explained that these are broad guidelines, rather than safe limits for lifting. It added that lifting weights under these amounts results in a low risk of injury.
These amounts are also the highest recommended weights for men and women. There are different recommended limits depending on how high you are lifting the load.”
It really depends on the size and shape of the object. The 25kg guideline includes all manner of things like big fridges etc.
Most people can at least pick up 80kg + without injury, we can hoist each other up by the waist for example (the elderly and fat excluded).
What you want to do is make the battery swap use optimal movement patterns. Few people are lifting 50+ kg at a weird angle or above their head for example.
> Not sure how heavy a electric motorcycles battery would be, possibly 100 lbs? That's a lot harder. 50 lbs would be a one person job for a wide range of consumers.
A 6.4 kWh (80-100 miles) battery like the one in the OP is ~60 lbs at the lightest. A larger battery like the 17.3 kWh (160-180 miles) one in a high-end Zero weighs 160+ lbs.
For 18v, something IP related expired for the Ryobi One Plus, so there are tons of batteries and some DC adapters.
I keep waiting for ultracheap eGo batteries.
Actually I keep waiting for ultracheap lithium ion batteries, period. They are simply not being migrated to the consumer segment in proportion with the cost cuts that the auto manufacturers are getting.
Like, where are my LFP and sodium ion batteries that should be dirt cheap?
This mirrors a frustration I have with consumer solar cells which are far too expensive compared to the deals utilities get.
This isn't just being cheap, there's lots of small scale stuff that consumer-level volumes can help with decarbonization. Yes, I understand that utility/industrial level price points are a special thing, but the consumer pricing is like 3x what the industrial pricing is. That means there is highway robbery.
Battery swapping already works. Hundreds of thousands of delivery vehicles the world over user it daily, as well as countless ride sharing services.
Yeah, but they have dedicated swap stations.
Once you have any old knucklehead that can open a station, you can have a lot of issues.
Around here, the gas stations are basically run by a couple of "cartels," for lack of a better term. Their stations are often in notoriously bad shape, but the fuel delivery systems are all under state seal. It would be hard for them to substitute bad gas.
Not so, batteries. They would have a big open pile of them, ready to go. Determining the provenance of said pile, could be an interesting thought exercise.
I don't really find that convincing. Sneaking in a bad battery is an issue, but why couldn't the government get involved there just like for gas?
It already does. In some places at least.
So how do they deal with rogue swap-station owners that substitute defective/fake batteries?
I think what might actually work would be have part of the price of selling the charged battery price-in an insurance policy for its operation. Fuel stations would take on battery failure risk and have a replacement delivery service, with a rating of how often it gets used.
Battery verification using a proof of work or physically unique function (PUF) could be interesting, but subject to the same problems of attestation and verification existing systems have today. If we solved it for batteries, we'd have solved it for everything, so I don't see that happening.
How do you deal with rogue petrol station owners that sell bad fuel?
I think we all know it's going to be on-battery DRM.
Jail?⁰
Credit card chargebacks?
This excites me but I have a few thoughts about some of the unique constraints that come into play when riding a motorcycle vs driving a car. One big one: transmission.
As an American, I'd had the occasion of driving a manual transmission car a handful of times in my teens. Outside of that, everything has been automatic.
The vast majority of motorcycles are manual[0]. A few things become apparent when you start using a motorcycle for a long commute. The first is that you're going to have a few incidents that you can only conclude "you could easily have died if you'd done something differently". You have to be paying attention to escape paths, especially during rush hour, and you're subconsciously focused deeply on what gear you're in and how the bike will respond to the throttle given those conditions.
I've found most of the time, choosing acceleration over braking is the safest approach. For the most part, while a bike's stopping power can be less than a car, a bike can out accelerate almost any car on the road and has the advantage of size. One commute home a driver completely blew a red light at a point where braking to avoid him would have been impossible; I hadn't thought to brake, though, because I knew I could accelerate across the road before he could hit me and given the gear I was in, I could tweak my speed in both directions very easily with my right (throttle) hand (ready to brake if needed, but it wasn't).
Engine braking to control a turn is kind of how you manage the turn[1]. It becomes muscle memory, including adjusting given the gear/speed. Electric vehicles don't (usually?) have "gears" and I'm guessing those that do wouldn't behave the way that ICE transmissions do owing to the different motor characteristics.
Bikers really care about this stuff. I can't think of anything more controversial in the motorcycle world than "ABS" and "Combined Braking" -- both safety features, but both of which take some control away from the driver and alter "how the bike behaves."
I found it a little funny that they point out the top speed ... it's far more important to know how well it accelerates (and it seems to handle that just fine).
[0] I remember there was one automatic model available (in 2011) "that wasn't a scooter" except it was a scooter. I think it was a BMW bike and I have no idea if it's still made.
[1] If you're not a rider and equating it to riding a bike ... you'll get a surprise your first time. Turning, for new riders, is a challenge (with the general rule being "look at the place you want to go, not the ground, dummy!")
I think there are companies working to make regen feel exactly like engine braking (because that's really what it is). Overall I agree with your points tho.
I think the more interesting application for electric motorcycles is getting people out of their cars, at which point refining the product to fit existing motorcyclists' expectations is moot.
I've got my motorbike license but (for private reasons) I never bought a motorbike, so maybe I am making a stupid comment here. However, do experienced motorbikers really use the engine braking to through a turn? I use engine braking in my car but I've never learnt to use engine braking on a motorbike, and also I've always been thaught to never take a corner without gas. Obviously not full throttle, but take a corner while very slowly increasing your speed because it is easier.
To answer your question, and I'm trying to translate something that happens "automatically" for me, now, but it all hinges on: more throttle makes the bike stand up/go straight in a turn. The first part of the turn involves slowing down.
If you want to make a quick turn, you can keep a higher speed up to the turn, engine brake through the first 1/2 (by angle), ease off and apply throttle by the 3/4 point.
Done correctly, the bike will make a graceful turn with a somewhat rapid "dip" in the middle. On a winding road in minimal traffic, you'll spend most of the time in the same gear, hand/foot off the brake, tweaking your right angle to control speed through the curves.
Here’s the BMW “scooter”. Saw one in Paris >20 years ago.
I dont want either of those features. They're both super dangerous.
What I do want is a quality bike that can go up to the speed limit, and charge safely and reliability for 10 years.
Charging lithium batteries at their limit is simply not safe and not worth the risk IMO.
Meanwhile, I'm holding out for the 100 mph model.
But seriously, how do you know this one isn't high quality? And perhaps you can slow-charge it 95% of the time.
In my experience companies that advertise their stuff at the edge of its capabilities aren't the ones that make long term reliable products.
It's like with audio amplifiers, you can buy cheap amps that advertise insane power levels but at really weird conditions, or there is the quality stuff thats very conservatively rated in terms of its specs because they know their customers are buying it for other reasons, like quality or reputation, not just numbers in an advertisement.
Ultimately I don't think charging bikes fast is an issue, the batteries are relatively small compared to cars so they already charge relatively faster, and if you really need quick swaps like in a race or something swapping out the battery pack is a far better approach.
Ultimately I know nothing about this bike, I'm just poking at their advertising really.
They specifically say it’s an LFP battery which I understand will be safer.
And Yadea Yadea Yadea it charges in 10 minutes