Planet Better Place

[loupblanc]

Originally published at J-L Web. You can comment here or there.

Over the last few months I have become more aware of some issues that seem to drag our civilisation down a dirty black hole and so have been trying to find what other people are proposing to drag us out of it. One of these proposed solutions comes from a new company called Better Place

Comments

[armillary]

I read about this in a tech magazine recently, and was thinking about a similar method for swapping batteries a while ago. There are quite a few issues with automatic swaps though:

- Mechanical wear on the contacts. Granted, regular service should detect this, but it depends on how familiar the mechanic is with the technology. Mostly an initial problem, I would say.

- Requires precise alignment with the robot when you drive into the station.

- What happens when you goof up and end up with no charge left? With a petrol engine, you can have a spare tank or have a passer-by sell you one. Perhaps it will warn well before you run out, but most people will learn the limits and ignore the warning "for a little longer"

I still think it's a clever idea, so hopefully they'll resolve these issues.

[loupblanc]

To be fair, if some recent research turn out to be commercially viable, this may not even be an issue at all since some scientists at MIT have worked out a way to charge a battery in a matter of seconds. Now tests were only done in small-scale batteries such as those used for portable devices but if it can be expanded to car batteries, you'd only need to plug your car for as long as it takes to fill a tank with fuel and you can be on your way.

I agree with the potential issues with manpower as it's possible lots of mechanics will need re-training but it should only be a short-term issue.

As for the automated process of battery-swapping, one would hope that the system would be as reliable as the assembly line of a car factory, so not something I particularly worry about. Besides, that's why they run the program as a test first, so they can smooth out issues such as these when they arise.