Comment Re:Let's eat Grandma, shoots, and leaves. (Score 1) 168
It would be quite a challenge to build a car with a 1000 Km long rigid battery.
One solution would be to mount the battery vertically. It would cause problems with aviation and satellites, and would require abolishing all underpasses and removing overhead cables. It should have a ligthning port a few Km from the ground, for free fast charging during thunderstorms. Balancing this battery so it doesn't tip over would be tricky, but if Segways can be balanced, so should this. It would have to be a cutting edge battery with no wind resistance.
The geometrical problems with mounting such a battery horizontally are formidable. The battery should be curved to the curvature of the earth, otherwise the ends would have a 20 Km altitude difference from the middle. City blocks would need to be at least 1000 Km long, and would fit only one car on each side for street parking. A car could avoid making U-turns by having its cabin rotate 180 degrees, instead of turning the whole car. It could also slide on rails along the length of battery, so as to avoid moving the whole battery for short trips down the street (less than 1000 Km). If we continue thinking along these lines, out of the box, we could embed the batteries in the streets, and have the cars move around freely on top, getting power from the batteries on the fly.
If the batteries are not rigid, then we have a lot of flexibility. A 1000 Km flexible thin battery could be coiled up to fit anywhere.