Better Place demos their fancy battery swapping station

May 14th, 2009 • environmentalism
Tags: better place, electric car, ev

I just read about Better Place and their special EV cars and battery packs, along with their plans to gleefully roll out charging/swapping stations across the world (hopefully) in the latest GOOD Magazine (GOOD015). While the entire plan was very optimistic, from the article, that’s all it had going for it: optimism. And possibly butterflies. But one thing that stood out to me in the article was that they had no working prototypes at the time. That has now changed as they have a single working prototype out in the wild in Yokohama, Japan. Green Inc over at NYT (amongst places) has the newly released YouTube video from Better Place along with a nice write up about the whole process.

However, the video brought up more questions than it answered for me. Originally, I suspected that the charging stations would just do a battery pack swap, which is still what they do. But what I had not anticipated was that Better Place is essentially swapping out the entire electric drivetrain of the vehicle for one that’s fully charged. If you ask me, that’s highly inefficient and certainly lends itself to a longer swap time. What I had envisioned was simply dropping the butt out of the vehicle and replacing it since that is where the batteries resides in other EVs/hybrids (OK, they’re in the trunk but I think butt is more descriptive). This would certainly be smaller than what they’re doing now and could certainly be done more quickly. A quicker turnaround time would save everybody both time and money.

What is going to be done to keep the cost down? Currently, each station costs a cool half a million dollars. And does that price include the station, charging bays, and batteries or will extra batteries incur an extra cost? Will any of the charging technology be used to feed back into the grid in order to lower monthly utilities bills? Really, I could probably think of a dozen more questions but then my coworkers may start to wonder why I’m not working instead.

I like Better Place’s idea, it’s been bandied around for years but nothing has really come of it and with the West’s new found enthusiasm about caring about the environment, it may actually come to fruition and sweep the globe. We’ll know much more in 2012 or 2013 after their Israeli test stations work out the bugs.