EV charging on an off-grid system in Botswana

[TrueSeeker]

Yup which is pretty much why it wasn't popular until after the 1920s when petrol became cheaper and you didn't need to hand crank them. Electric and steam vehicles were more popular up until the 1920s with only 22% of cars being petrol. In the US that is.
For electric cars they would have places you'd actually swap your battery out instead of charging, so you'd go there get a new or recharged battery and continue onwards, the place would then charge your battery and do it to others.

Still... "cheaper". Not cheap in reality. For anybody.

 

[Lupus]

Still... "cheaper". Not cheap in reality. For anybody.

Well much cheaper than it was for other means and was one of the reasons it took off more. Cheaper and you didn't have to swap a battery every 100miles .

 

[TrueSeeker]

Well much cheaper than it was for other means and was one of the reasons it took off more. Cheaper and you didn't have to swap a battery every 100miles .

It must be said. Battery swapping is a perfectly viable and convenient solution. As long as it's accessible enough. A purely logistical matter. Not even technological. No need for that to be expensive. The lead acids commonly used back then are rechargeable after all. As well as rapidly and cheaply recyclable. There's no reason for them to be expensive, since the materials are ridiculously abundant, and the manufacturing simple. It only lacked economy of scale.

All in all EVs were perfectly viable. There's nothing to suggest that they would not have enjoyed a lowering in price and rapid technological improvement, had they remained top. Both NiCad and NiFe were around since the turn of the previous century. Exactly because there was active R&D into better options at the time. So even high-end high-performance EVs were possible way back then. Admittedly for fewer who could afford it, but . Is that really that big a deal? Affordable performance motoring would have still happened. Just slightly delayed.

Would having to swap a battery in a minute or two after every 160km driven truly been so terrible a solution for the average family? If there were battery swapping stations on every block and every town? For pennies? Let's say every 250km by the 50s... Considering that with reasonable levels of battery investment continuing as it had, one could expect that range to increase substantially every decade. Along with power density performance. And, even now, I think most people stop and rest during most trips long before that.

Really... Petro transport only eked out a victory during a very narrow window of time, in my opinion. 20-30 years later, and it'd have nothing meaningful on EVs. It managed to reach the steep part of the transition S-curve only slightly before EVs could otherwise have managed to.

• Flight could have continued as is. The Wright brothers flew before the first big battle between EVs and ICE. And for that purpose alone, oil could have lasted millennia.
• Nearly half of global shipping is to move oil. Without the rest we would have skipped the petro powered globalization we got, and countries would have developed more self-sufficiently and more sustainably. A vastly better paradigm on that front.
• Plastics? Perfectly doable, with much less wasteful economics, without petroleum.
• Warfare? I need not say any more on that.

The undeniable technological and social advancement extracted from petro-transport is not absolute. It's marginal, given the alternative. In the long term the net benefit, to the world, all things considered, will be negative. Something that would have become readily apparent to informed and conscientious long term thinkers and planners, long before ICE became advanced enough to really set back the advent of EVs as the de facto superior (performance - and even that has not lasted) option. i.e. the 50s.

 

[wingnut771]

Is this mybb yt channel?