In the case of real cars and bikes maybe as the packs become lighter and smaller, standard ‘formats’ will be adopted?
So when you roll into the ‘Zap Station’, you simply do an exchange of your ‘fuel pack’, exchanging it for one that has been recharged. This sort of battery technology already has excellent on board monitoring (capacity, performance etc.) so the ‘attendant’ can tell at a glance how much life is left in your pack, and the changeover price can be adjusted accordingly.
Achieving very short recharge times is impressive, but has always reduced the life expectancy of the batteries involved, mainly through heat related to gas production. While this system copes better than its predecessors, the on board Phoenix charger takes six hours from 220 Volts, and I suspect the pack would last longer if you didn’t use the ten minute option all the time. So maybe multiple packs held by your local recharge station could be recharged over a couple of hours, and just dropped in to get you back on the road.
Personally, I find it ridiculous and a little sad that in order to get attention, Phoenix feel the need to convert a two ton SUV. How much ‘performance’ could they get from something a little more practical?
Strange also that as the oil reserves diminish, the manufacturers and market (more so perhaps in the USA and Australia than Europe) seem to be endlessly chasing bigger, heavier and more powerful vehicles. And regardless of engine efficiency, these still use more gas than smaller vehicles.
Save fuel, get a bigger penis…

Unintended consequences are one of the neatest things about any technical innovation or advancement. If someone is trying to make a better biofuel to get away from oil imports, they may end up reducing pollution in the process. Work for better electric car batteries and electric wheelchairs end up using the same technology. Whatever gets people working in an area is a good thing, then others start to think about how to apply the technology in ways the researchers didn’t even think about. It’s all good.

I think the electric wheelchair is going to be one of the first and maybe even most obvious beneficiaries of all of this vehicle battery work going on, and that’s cool.

I have been in elec. whlchr for 5+ yrs. Chair has 2 encased batteries (32cc?) and is supposed to have a range of 10 miles round trip. This is just not so. If I get 3 and one half miles I am most lucky. Whether chair has 24 hour charge or 4 hour charge that is all there is!

Put “US” on your electric vehicle list for larger batteries and shorter charges. At that point you will have accomplished something!

Trey

You want 250kW at home? Even hooked up to the 240V lines that’s over 1000 amps. Not only is that a potentially dangerous current if mishandled, it’s the entire power consumption of an entire residential street! Thankfully, you don’t have to charge that fast at home. A few hours in the garage does the job just as nicely without melting your breaker box. Getting a fast charge on the road would almost require a direct feed off an electric substation. Even then it’s quite a sudden load to throw on the grid. The electric companies better figure out how they’re going to handle this right now or they might get blamed for killing the electric car this time around.

Maybe the right approach is just to bury an enormous battery bank under the filling station the same way they bury huge gas tanks today. A busy electric charging station might dish out over a megawatt-hour a day, mostly during rush hours. That’s several tons of battery at least!

Todd, you’d probably require a 7 or 8 kWh pack to make an electric motorcycle for your needs. The price of the new Lithium batteries is coming down rapidly, so you could probably buy enough for $2500. Most electric companies seem to charge around fifteen cents per kWh, so charging one of those electric SUVs would require $5.25 of electricity, and charging an electric motorcycle would require perhaps $1.20 worth.