Electric Car Future at CES: Unveilings, Surprises and Disappointments

CES 2018 has come to an end but the hype it has created in the world of electric cars is just starting to spread.

One of the most anticipated unveilings of this week was the debut of the new Fisker EMotion, a 4 door luxury sedan with 400 mile range and the exotic suicide butterfly doors. It is Henrik Fisker’s second go at creating an electric car after his first company Fisker Automotive has gone out of business only a couple of years after the debut of the Fisker Karma. In my interview with Mr. Fisker he has explained to me that this time around things are different simply because Fisker, Inc., the name of his new company, does not have to go into this alone.

It now has help of many suppliers and partners to create the architecture and the tech for the car. As a matter of fact, Fisker did not have its own booth at this year’s CES, but instead hosted its beautiful concept at Quanergy Systems’ booth, the maker of its lidar. Reservations are accepted now at Fisker’s website and the car is promised to be in production in 2019. Below you can see two videos from my channel E for Electric.

Even though most of the hype went to Fisker before the start of the CES, the most surprising and impressive unveiling belonged to Byton, a Chinese-based company with offices in Europe and the US. The company is only 3 years old but it has a great financial backing and solid executive core with good industry experience. The 2-door compact SUV that Byton has unveiled was full of the latest tech that we have not seen in any other concept car before.

Do you think your next car will be electric? Or not yet? Why yes and why not?

No way, no how. (1) You can't get one with a manual transmission (#1 priority when buying a car or truck). (2) I don't want to get electrocuted when I have to work on it. (3) All claims of miles/charge are BS ... especially during the dead of winter in below zero temperatures. (4) I'm not going to wait hours to recharge the thing after a few hundred miles ... what will it take to drive from NH to Florida ... 4 days?

For golf carts, fine ... for cars No Flipping Way

Swapping batteries would require a football field size warehouse to store all the batteries

Football field size? That's an exaggeration. Tesla demonstrated the process a few years ago, but gave up on it. Batteries are big, but they don't require space much larger than a warehouse about the size of a standard 4-bay suto repair station. Problem is that, perhaps all autos would have to use the same standard-size battery, no matter what the make and model, sort of like most laptop computers come with 15.6 inch monitors and similar sized batteries.

Take a look: Tesla Model S - Battery Swap

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY

Granted that, Tesla exaggerated the time to refuel the gasoline in the regular car, because it takes me no more than 1 1/2 minutes to refill my car's tank, which takes about 13 gallons, and I can easily drive about 350 miles on that fill-up, while the EV would have to get a battery swapped 2 or 3 times for that same distance.

The average large gas station serves about 1200 people per day. Probably a good 800 of those are coming to fill up their vehicle. If these were all electric cars, and you’re right that, for efficiency sake, there could only be three types of batteries for small, medium and large vehicles, even accounting for charging batteries on site, you need enough room for 400 batteries, being there on a continual basis to allow enough batteries to be available for everybody to swap out their old batteries. You might be able to store batteries on top of each other by twos, but you really can’t go higher than that for ease of operation, if you are aiming for speed times that are comparable to filling up a gas or diesel.

Trust me, when you are including a convenience store and everything else that goes into a gas station, to have the floor space for 400 batteries that are stacked by twos, you are going to need the land space that I typically taken up by a football stadium.

You make some good points. But...

You forget that, a battery swapping station would not have to stock enough batteries to serve 1200 or even 800 or even 600 vehicles.

The swapping stations would mostly be used to serve vehicles doing long-range driving, which would prevent them from being close to home or to a recharging station along the way.

Gas stations might serve 1200 or so daily, but then, they woudln't be having to serve the EVs which people can charge overnight or during the times when the vehicle is not in use.

Swapping would on be used when people are too far from home. Which means that, EV battery replacements might never by used by many people who never travel too far from home.

So, it's not a one to one, gas vs swapping equivalent. Many people may never have to visit a battery swapping station, unless it's also a convenience store.

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