At a certain point of EV adoption, selling gas won’t be a very profitable business, because fewer and fewer cars will need it. But there will still be some cars that need gas, that final, say, 30% of ICE cars that are still on the road. But if all or most gas stations shut down at roughly the same time, because they operate under the same business conditions, then those last few ICE drivers will be pretty out of luck, no?
To be clear, this is not an argument that we shouldn’t electrify and decarbonize as fast as possible. I’m more interested in the logistics of managing that transition. And I’m sure that gas stations are not the only case of this phenomenon.
I know they have been demoing this tech in China, but if you have at home charging a major advantage of electric vehicles is that you don’t need worry about refuling during normal usage. So I think battery-swap technology is going to be limited to long distance trips (which are kind of only a major thing in the US & China due to the way both isolate their workers from their homes to prevent them from organizing).
I was going to say if people are comfortable renting the battery in their car, they might as well be comfortable renting a space in a larger vehicle such as a train, but I think Americans do regularly rent their cars (or at least only pay interest on the loans they take out to purchase the cars), so maybe it’s not so crazy, but I personally wouldn’t let anyone swap the battery in the phone or laptop for one that is likely less well taken care of.
We already have those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification
Tyres are a major source of microplastics that doesn’t stop when they go electric: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5664766/
This sounds cool though