The Electric Car Charging Infrastructure Is Nowhere Near Ready But I Have An Idea. Tesla has 5. 00,0. Model 3, Chevy has a $3. Europe have set timelines to eliminate the sale of new combustion cars, and electric vehicles may end up being cheaper to build than dead- dinosaur- sauce- burning cars. It sure seems like electric cars are here to stay, but the truth is they’re still a pain in the ass to use when it comes to charging.

I think I may have a workable stopgap solution. The latest generation of electric cars have defined a 2. Being able to drive 2. The range for many electric cars is finally where it needs to be, but, like all good things, that range does eventually run out, and that’s where the problems begin. The charging infrastructure, while at least in some way extant, can in no way compete with the convenience of the robust gasoline- refueling infrastructure drivers are used to, and that’s going to be a problem for widespread adoption.

For most owners, charging is done every night, at home, and the cars, like the plot of a shitty sitcom, always end up back where they started once the day’s adventures are over. This works fine for many people, but if you’re one of the millions of Americans who live in apartments without EV charging facilities, or if you just want to take a long road trip, the limitations of the current charging infrastructure become very, very clear. As of June of this year, there were around 1. EV charging stations with about 4.

United States. That seems like a decent number, but most of those seem to be slow Level 2 charging stations, with the fast DC charging stations, like the Tesla Superchargers, only numbering 2,1. It’s these fast DC stations that are most suitable to long- distance travel, since they don’t take 6 or 8 hours to get your car back to a usuable charge. Now, for comparison, there’s about 1. United States, with each station having.. These numbers vary wildly, from tiny stations with 2 or 4 to huge truck stops with 3.

We’ll guess conservatively that an average station has 1. U. S. That’s a hell of a lot more. Gas stations are, as we all know, everywhere. So, here’s where we are: electric cars are finally becoming affordable and practical enough to make sense to use, but if you want to do any significant traveling in one, it’s still a colossal ass- pain.

But I think I have a decent stop- gap solution. The key here is that to make a viable electric car charging infrastructure, we’ll need to piggyback on an existing infrastructure, and the most logical one to use is the gas station network. Trying to wire all gas stations or even one given chain of gas stations with the hardware needed for fast DC chargers would be expensive and slow. That type of network will need to come one day, but in the short term we need something fast and good enough. That’s where Trunk Batteries come in. Here’s what needs to happen: one (or more) of the major gas station franchises needs to partner with a hypothetical company that produces modular, rechargeable, swappable battery packs that can be placed into an electric car’s trunk, connect to the car’s charging system, and give the car a decent enough amount of range to be useful.

It’d work like this: you’re taking your Model 3 or Bolt or Model S or whatever on a road trip, and you see you’re running out of battery power. Instead of hunting around to desperately find a charging station in range, you take the next exit, stop at a normal gas station, and back (or drive up, if you have a front trunk) up to the Trunk Battery kiosk. Once there, you open your trunk and a forklift- like device places the ~2. The battery pack has a place to hold your hood or hatch nearly closed while allowing a cable room to snake out and plug into your car’s charging port.

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You plug it in, check your range and see you have around 1. When you exhaust the Trunk Battery, you stop at the next Trunk Battery- licensed gas station, and either drop off the battery or have it swapped for a fresh one. Easy! Thanks to the Tesla Model 3's new 2.

EV trunks with a range of around 9. Here, I’ll walk you through the math: each 2. Wh, and weighs 6. If we get 1. 50. 0 of these cells together, that makes a nearly 3. Wh battery pack with 2. Most sources say that you can expect an average of about 3 miles per k. Wh, so our 3. 2 k.

Wh battery pack should provide about 9. If we package these 1.

If we factor in wiring and cooling devices and housing, we can probably end up with a ~2. Watch The Tender Hook Streaming. Tesla Model S, and should fit in the hatch or trunk area of pretty much any major EV available for sale.

Any gas station franchise that decides to deal in Trunk Batteries would need a bit of equipment: a self- contained kiosk that stores and recharges battery packs, along with a lift/drop system for getting them easily into and out of car trunks. These would take a bit of design and engineering work, but it’s by no means all that complicated. Additionally, since the Trunk Battery system is, essentially, a third- party battery swapping system, the viability and benefits of a battery swapping solution would be made very clear.

If Trunk Batteries became popular, carmakers may start including auxiliary charging ports right inside their trunks, or, even better, manufacturers would eventually agree on a standardized battery format and connector system to make all of the car’s batteries easily swappable by design, and without eating up precious luggage space. A solution like Trunk Batteries isn’t a long- term solution; it’s a stopgap that provides a way to leverage the existing robust gas station infrastructure in a quick- and- dirty way. Using a Trunk Battery means giving up a good chunk of your storage volume, and, at only about 1. Even so, it would at least make an impromptu road trip possible, and allow for EVs to be used generally the same way combustion cars get used, without the route limitations and obsessive planning that’s usually required for any EV road trip.

Right now, though, I think a solution like Trunk Batteries is the most likely way the coming boom of electric car ownership will be served while a real charging infrastructure is slowly built. It’s a solution that should only be needed for about a decade or so, but, without it, EVs may not even be able to sell in the numbers needed to have a full charging network make sense. As always, investors are welcome to contact me here. Is ‘Sparky’ too obvious a name for the talking battery pack mascot?