A Sault and Battery

By the time you read this essay, you will be familiar with pieces like this:

When EVs take over our roads and demand for petrol dries up, what will happen to service stations?

I am here to tell you not to worry about petrol/gas stations; they will survive.

But I am here to tell you that for as long as you go on thinking of “Fill ‘er up”, you are doomed.

Here’s why I say that:-

Every human on the face of this earth has memories only of being able to “fill ‘er up”. This has certainly been true for automobiles, and was true for horses before motor cars, although in the case of horses, my understanding was that if you literally filled ‘er/’im up with oats and water, the bloated horse would be unusable for a day or two (as some racehorse owners well know), so that “fill” in this case was to a level of about 80%.

A natural consequence of this thinking is that as a new energy source comes along we substituted petrol for hay, and today we substitute electrical current for gasoline.

It is for that reason that the past ten years have seen the all-too-slow rise in places where you can plug in your electric car and have electricity flow into your car overnight. As well, the lamentations of cross-country travelers having to eat three times as much as they normally would because every two or three hours they must wait thirty minutes for the car to be filled up.

This is bad thinking.

The future will be batteries; removable batteries.

When I mention this to friends and colleagues they snort because they think ONLY of energy flowing down a flexible tube.

This too is bad thinking.

Instead, think about what could be done today with today’s technology.

A fifteen dollar hobby meter from your local hardware store can tell you just how much electrical energy, measured in amp-hours, remains in your flashlight battery. A similar meter could tell you how much energy remained in your electric vehicle car batteries.

Think of replacing your petrol tank (it sits between your rear seat and the squab at the front of your trunk/boot; you have never seen it, have you? But it is there!) with a rack of batteries that can be rolled in and out on rails.

Think of a microchip that can not only determine how much energy is in each battery, but can switch from one battery to the next as depletion brings a battery below its useable discharge level.

Pick a number between six and six.

Good.

Now imagine that instead of a three-inch diameter circular hole in the side of you car you have a twelve by twelve inch rectangular hole in the side of your car; or whatever size accommodates a standard-size electric vehicle battery,

Those batteries will be heavy, we know.

So now imagine a robotic arm that reaches out, locates your battery channel, tells you car’s microchip to roll out all its dead batteries and then replaces them with live batteries.

That should take less time than you currently take to pump gas by yourself.

Computers today can do calculations. Yes, I know, I continue to surprise you.

You pull up to the station, press enough buttons on the dashboard to say “I have another three hundred miles to go before dark” (or as newspapers love to report “I have another 482.8032 kilometres to go before dark”)

The flashing lights go click-click-whir, the robot is told how many dead or near-dead batteries to extract from your vehicle, how many batteries to insert, and away you go.

There are several advantages to this computerized accounting system.

(a) You need only lug enough dead-weight for your journey. If you drive a lot in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, or anywhere in Newfoundland, this is important.

(b) The system can measure what remains in each of your batteries, so if you still have eighty miles of “juice” in an extracted battery your account will be credited with that eighty miles.

(c) The car engine can be disabled until payment is made; no more pump-and-run.

(d) You can still plug your car into the wall when you reach your motel or friend’s home.

(e) No paint is removed from the side of your car by spilled gasoline.

(f) No more 20,000-gallon gasoline tankers exploding at the side of the road (Hooray!) whether or not you struggled to overtake them on the next hill. Silly you!

Ten years from now we ought to be getting used to growing thinner by sitting in our car while it is “topped up”, and so resist the urge to grab another bucket of fries and a mega-slurpee.

And why “sault”? Partly in recognition of Reuter’s fact-check page , and partly just a tip of the hat to the courteous people of the Île de France in 1978-80 and also 2014 and 2016.

But mainly because I like the play on words. “sault” in French refers to a jump, (think “somersault”) and I think of the batteries jumping out and in of the car chassis, but also of “jump-starting” your vehicle.

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