Want an extra 100 miles of range? That's 600lbs of cargo. A person can't place that in a trunk, and a trailer would probably barely extend range due to the extra drag and efficiency loss.
I think maybe there’s some cross thread confusion.
The comparison I’m making is an external phone battery is $10. Replacing an ev battery is, hell i dunno, $10.000?
Not needing an external phone battery would be nice.
Needing external ev batteries is far more likely to be cost prohibitive. Adjacent to this thread people have raised size and weight issues as well. I didn’t even bother going that far because the straight up price puts it in a different ball park to an external phone battery.
Right, that's the discussion up to a certain spot.
Then the GP had a counterargument to EV batteries being expensive, by suggesting you could rent one for your three day trip for a pretty small amount of money.
And not only would that charge be quite small compared to everything else going on with your car, the further you drive with the extended battery the more you save by electricity being cheaper than gasoline. And that includes having to pay for depreciation.
So in the scale between $10 and $10000, it would be like renting a big piece of road equipment, not buying one.
To be clear the middle paragraph of my post was explaining why I think they said that, and the last paragraph was me adding my own commentary. I wasn't suggesting they were implying the part about gas savings, that was all me.
(Thank you Dylan16807, your interpretation is correct, and I apologize to harry8 because I didn't realize that my comment would read so cryptically when I wrote it).
> I'm struggling to see it being much cheaper than renting an ev for 2-3 days if such a thing were wished into existence.
Even if it was the same price, lots of people don't want to rent a car, and many of the reasons they have for that don't apply to renting a battery pack.
But I'd be surprised if it wasn't a lot cheaper. If I think about a non-towed battery, it costs 1/5 as much as a car, needs 1/10 as much storage space on shelves, and can be kept in service for hundreds of thousands of miles. Towed units would be harder to store and have a bit more wear but should still be a lot smaller and cheaper than cars. A small trailer that could carry a battery is only a thousand bucks retail. You'd probably want some cooling, in the end maybe it's 1/4 the cost of a car and takes up 1/6 of a parking space? Still sounds like a cheap rental.
And as for the price of "fully charged", they can have the same price per kWh as a supercharger and have massive profit margins. So that's an amount you'd have to pay anyway and not a downside to renting.
