Sir lastnail wrote on Dec 17
th, 2015 at 10:26am:
Another one of longloser's aka maria's failed predictions of never being able to recharge an electric car faster than filling up a fossil fool car. Battery swap technology has made this possible of course but here's actual proof of recharging two Tesla cars in less time than it takes to fill up a fossil fool car !! And to top it off maria wants to get involved with innovation

LOL
And how does this actually work in practice? A small petrol station can get over a 100 cars an hour, with large highway stations easily getting several hundred. This is fine when you store fuel under the ground in massive tanks and each person fills their own car. It is also fine when a modern day car will easily get 400-600 around town and 800-1000km on the highway meaning that there is a long time between refuels. But how do you do this with batteries that need to be swapped every few hundred kms?
Just a small battery swap station would need to have thousands of batteries on charge out the back at anyone time. This is because each battery takes hours to recharge (because super fast charging actually damages the battery over the long term making that an unsuitable practice), and cars will need to make a lot more stops compared to fuel. Then of course there are the real practical issues, as it will require nearly an entire army of workers at each station constantly monitoring which batteries are ready to be installed, and then moving them out front read for the charge. Of course there will then need to be more people who will have to be working in order to swap the old and new ones off the battery changing machine, and then move the old ones out back to put on charge. This means each station would requires dozens of workers just to keep the batteries ready, each station would have to be massive to have all the batteries on charge (plus have underground tunnels and rooms in order to swap the batteries), plus the power line going to the station would need to be big enough to power a small town, as their would be at anyone time at least a 1000 of these high energy batteries on charge (and probably over 10,000 at a large highway station).
How exactly is this practical? Sure it works as a concept, and yes it works if one bloke in the street has a battery swapping car. But if everyone had one of these it would be impossible to have enough stations able to keep up with need. This fast swap is only looking at one part of the recharging process. It is ignoring all the behind the scenes work that would make it impossible to use if everyone had one of these battery swapping EVs.