Technical
Street / Non Garage Parking
With 250 million passenger vehicles in the USA and only 70 million garages, even assuming all are two car garages, over 100 million vehicles are parked outside overnight. This has a duel impact:
1) How will REPs provide overnight connections for residential street parking
2) Will the electrical grid be affected by the lack or late availability of these connections considering that capacity and usage estimates for FEV's rely on overnight charging.
Interlocks.
I am confidant this has been addressed.
Removal of the power connection will recycle the connection procedure preventing a near parked car from using an extension adapter and stealing a charge off another's plan.
Note: The J1772 Spec provides a serial connection from charge spot to the vehicle to facilitate the tracking of car, wattage and plan usage. Additional methods to verify connections could be:
1) Sending signals on top of the DC charge.
2) Communicating via local wireless (Blue Tooth, etc.). This methodology opens the door for the creation of piracy devices. An adaptive encryption, such as in use with cable providers/ receivers, should be secure.
Will the connection be locked as the car is locked preventing spirited teens from disconnecting cars for fun ?
Mobile Charging / Replacement
A certain percentage of drivers will, undoubtedly, run out of charge on the road. The AAA / Roadside Assistance network will need to have the ability to recharge vehicles that died on the road. If access for battery replacement is under carriage only, a field swap would be unlikely.
Fast Charge Abilities
Being in the infancy of technology presents an abyss of unknowns. A personal concern is the development and price reduction of fast-charge batteries. It is not a large leap to go from charging large battery packs slowly to rapidly charging a series of hundreds or thousands of cells directly. Instead of having the bottle-neck of the surface area / conductivity of a few cathodes, having a thousand small cells with individual cathodes would produce a fast charge battery pack (Toshiba SCib for example) even if only to 90% capacity.
The impact is not the ability to be in a position to provide a fast charge, but the ability and cost of upgrading existing charging points to handle the current required for a fast-charge. 1500 amps at 480V for a five minute charge would require a bundle of three 4/0 wires, 35mm diameter per contact to conform to the National Electrical Code. In essence, the larger the connector now, the less cost later and the better ability to provide quicker charges.
Perhaps the intentions are to provide specialized fast-charge bays at the battery swap locations. This would make sense.
Battery Placement
The concept of a vehicle rolling over an exchange pit while the old battery is dropped out and a new battery is installed would be ideal for the consumer but a challenge for automakers.
My personal concept of replaceable batteries is to have brief case sized packs that would 'snap' in and out of docks potentially located anywhere around the car. This gives the auto designer the flexibility to determine the best place for the packs with regard to safety, performance, handling etc. Additionally, my personal experience with robotic machinery leads me to believe that robotic arms could locate, extract and replace battery packs located around the vehicle in a short time frame with low production cost. The only burden on car manufacturers would be to stay within certain guidelines of access.
Snap in packs would also allow 'topping-off' where only depleted packs would be replaced. They would also facilitate initial infra-structure roll-out in that battery pack swaps could be performed by technicians at existing 'lube stop' locations nationwide. A draft beer salesman would consider a five 150lb keg exchange an easy stop. |
