Lightning's £120,000 all-electric sports car unveilled in London, uses world-first lithium titanate battery technology that its makers claim will recharge "in minutes," although this needs three-phase industrial level electrical power.


Okay, I have a serious question here.

Concerning electric cars: the biggest problem is that they're less convenient than gas cars. A gasoline car can be filled up in minutes anywhere, but an electric car needs to be plugged into a powerful outlet for at least 6 hours for any typical model from the Reva to the Tesla Roadster. Even if you could have "charging stations" like gas stations, the problem again is that the charge takes a third of a day, not several minutes.

So here's my question, and it's not rhetorical: why not have a swappable battery pack, so what you do instead is pull out the rechargable battery altogether when it's empty and put in a charged one, while the drained one gets plugged in to recharge or whatever? That way your electric car's good to go. Granted there are probably some practical problems with this, but isn't it still more practical than driving your car home and plugging it in overnight every night?

Seriously, what's the reason no one's thought of this? I can't be the first person to come up with this. This system's already being used in hi power radio controlled toys, these battery packs that you remove to plug into the wall to charge. If the battery pack runs out you could swap the drained one for a fresh optional extra pack and keep playing. Why not apply this to the real thing?

Also on Engadget:

GM teams up with utilities to develop electric car charging infrastructure (which kind of triggered this post).

Electric Mini hitting U.S. streets in Summer 2009.