I wrote this letter to the Guardian; unfortunately they didn’t publish it.
19th July 2023
To The Editor, The Guardian
FOR PUBLICATION
Dear Editor
Re: Guardian Cars 19.07.2023 “Jaguar Land Rover owner confirms £4bn Somerset gigafactory plans” (Julia Kollewe & Jasper Jolly)
Whilst hydrogen fuel cells offer many advantages for powering transport most builders are, like JLR, committed to battery electric cars: unfortunately the typical design approach, with a built-in battery, couldn’t be worse for the consumer, or from the power supply point of view.
When electric cars were first discussed, many favoured the cassette battery idea. A common user module, compatible with every make of car and indeed useable in farm vehicles, construction machinery, boats, anything anywhere. Either you slowly recharge it in situ without overloading the grid or, on long journeys, en route you visit a fast-swap station where it is automatically changed for another which has been pre-charged, quite possibly off-peak.
Key consumer attractions? Cassettes remain someone else’s responsibility: you don’t own a battery, you just pay rent. Attractive, when the battery represents 40% of a new electric car’s value! For all-town driving, you can choose a lower capacity and therefore lighter cassette. No worries about where you park; no need to rewire every street with massive cables to provide charging points. Larger vehicles have multiple cassettes; in remote areas, you take extra cassettes: “electric jerry cans”. Rental and charge prices should be kept low by competition; similarly, reliability has to be exceptional from every outlet. As battery technology improves, everyone gets better cassettes. Also, with constant cassette monitoring, all cars maintain their as-new range. All cassettes guaranteed 100% recycled at end of life. Vehicle rescue organisations take cassettes to “conked” cars, have them on their way again in no time.
As for grid operators: imagine outlets offering lower cassette swap rates for people who “fill up” outside busy system periods, helping with load management. Thus avoided, the instantaneous demand spike from rapid chargers everywhere on a winter Friday evening: so many people on the move, plus the nation’s households wanting huge quantities of cooking and heating power…
Why was the cassette battery concept abandoned?