The EV Trifecta + Humpyards
Some thoughts on our transportation future.
Often our visions of the future are constrained by the limitations of our present. For example, even as we talk about autonomous vehicles, it’s hard to shake the vision of a driver in a seat that faces forward, holding a steering wheel with feet on pedals.
Yet take a Waymo ride, and after you get used to the ride, the steering wheel turning by itself plus the suddenly off-limits driver’s seat seem odd. Something’s off about this picture.
Those things are not necessary. Once you shake them out of your head and realize there also doesn’t have to be a large engine compartment connected to a transmission lump in the middle of the passenger space, you can start to play with more radical new designs.
In this post, I play with three different dreams I’ve had about the way I’d love to see the future of transportation play out. The first doesn’t require a radical redesign of vehicles; the other two do.
They are:
- The EV Trifecta: Autonomous, Electric, Shared.
- Passenger compartments as flexible, designable pods.
- Battery swapping, done better.
The Trifecta
My Trifecta is an older wish. It’s been surpassed by the Transportation Quad: Autonomous, Connected, Electric, and Shared/Service, which conveniently spells ACES (or CASE if you change the order).
Adding Connected brings in fleet intelligence, local vehicle coordination, and more. I love the addition. But in this video, I describe my early Trifecta wish.
Pods
As EV platforms become flat “sleds” with few distinguishing characteristics, a future of designer pods seems very attractive. It would also change how we see transit time. We could exchange inching forward in frustration for study time, quiet writing or a maxed-out video cabin.
Swaps
Finally, the humpyard story is my inspiration for fast battery swapping. I’m not suggesting every battery-swap station feature such a hump, but instead asking why battery swaps can’t be nearly instantaneous.
As long as we’re redesigning the chassis to be a sled, make the batteries modular, standardized, and extremely easy to swap securely.
Then, importantly, separate the batteries from the car at the point of sale. That removes possibly a third of the cost and weight. Yes, you’ll pick up some of the weight shortly, but why all the weight of more range than you typically need? Why schlep batteries with 250 miles of range when you usually go about 40 miles?
Then you subscribe to power, just the way commercial airliners subscribe to power from Rolls Royce, GE, and Pratt & Whitney. They call it Power By the Hour; this is Batteries as a Service.
Battery swapping is already successful with scooters in Asia, which is of course a simpler scenario.
With cars, it’s been a struggle that may be turning a corner: The battery-swap startup Ample went bankrupt in 2015, but NIO is racking up the swaps, and the Chinese government seems to be aiming in this direction.
10x
Often a new technology becomes compelling when it offers a tenfold improvement in something.
These days, innovators are vying to create batteries that recharge the fastest, which is a bit of a dangerous game due to all the energy involved, and still has trouble dropping wait times to convenient levels. Imagine if it just took two minutes. Compared to the time spent filling a gas tank, never mind a car battery recharge, that’s a big improvement.
And if swapping stations were ubiquitous — a big if — range anxiety would disappear. Another big win.
Plenty of analysts have presented ifs that seem like insurmountable barriers, from unreliable batteries, to the extra cost and weight of making swapping easy, to the costs of building out sufficient swapping stations and more, making my dream scenarios a very long shot.
But it’s always fun to dream, and sometimes barriers tumble all of a sudden.
This article is cross-posted on Substack here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.