Oh no. Battery swapping carries the greatest number of problems of all electric car charging solutions. It means all cars need to have a standardized battery size, technology, and connector, and even a standardized bay if you want to load them in any hurry. This will slow EV development from a sprint to a crawl as every car will now carry legacy technology that will have to be accounted for.

This will also have big ramifications in car design. Right now, most cars have a bespoke gas tank for their sub-model (a great example I've learned about the hard way is the AE90-series Corolla. 2-door, 4-door, and wagon tanks are different. Carbed and EFI tanks are different. And then there are two EFI tank variants with different ports on top just to make things interesting. So you're looking at 6+ different tanks for a line of cars that would seem to be mostly very similar). Same thing with EVs and battery pack designs. Lots of space will be needed to shoehorn standardized batteries into the cars with a nice accessible swapping bay.

And then after you've gone and kneecapped EV development and made every car look like it's smuggling a bulk-pack of cigarettes through an airport, you might one day receive a dud old battery and get stranded on the side of the road anyway, because each battery will have a unique operating history you don't know about. Mission accomplished!

Why not have capacitors (or batteries like these) that can slowly charge up from the grid and then quickly discharge to quick-charge a car? Multiple banks of them could allow a few cars to quick-charge in sequence without leaving the next customer SOL.

+1 easily the most entertaining /. interview I've ever read.

Agree, if it's a *delay* it does nothing. If it's an *interval* it would help. And I think a 5sec interval would be good. That would eliminate all technological competition, putting the servers in the exchange basements with hot-swappable, consumable CPUs and bleeding-edge network gear on par with a RasPi on the other side of the planet.

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Planck

That's the long form of his more famous quote, "Science advances one funeral at a time."

Agreed. It wouldn't be a big deal at all. I really wish it would, for the lulz, but it won't. :-(

Class-D personnel?

I don't think anyone was saying CVTs have a single fixed ratio.

I wonder if he was talking about living in virtual realities - a lot of economists are into that stuff, since it's the only hope of allowing infinite growth in a finite world.

Most creatures don't stand a chance of adapting to climate change:

http://news.discovery.com/eart...

It's still not a "gear change," it just feels like one. The fixed ratios are still going through the CVT mechanism, it just moves the cones in big steps.

No it's fine now that cars are loaded with a thousand pounds of airbags, electro-nannies and tank-like structural reinforcement.

Richard Hammond has many American cars. But Jeremy Clarkson hates them almost as much as EVs and the reality of climate change.

Jeremy Clarkson is like Eric Cartman. He's a horrible person, but very entertaining to watch.

Waiting is a thing I hate with the force of a thousand suns, and I'm far from rich!