Battles with Integrity

It's not about comparing minutes to batteries, but comparing minutes to miles.

He's not really selling miles, though. He's selling amps. Some of those amps are in an unpalatable form factor, others are just being resold from the power company. There's no real innovation there.

Yes, batteries are expensive, heavy and inefficient, so what if someone else was handling the battery issue, and all you had to do was drive the car.

If "someone else" has to handle the battery issue, they have to do it in a way that's environmentally sound *and* cost-effective or else it's just a big waste of time and money -- and if it's here in California, it'll be my tax money in some proposition like we saw this past election. :-P

If you could, for example, pay X pennies per mile and exchange your car battery anytime you need to for a fresh battery (because the infrastructure is already there, because the battery switch takes 60 seconds, and because it's included in your mileage plan), and X was a smaller number than you pay for your gas car, would it still be crazy talk?

I just can't handwave away the creation of that kind of infrastructure. The only way to come close to an "anytime exchange" model is to replace every gas station with a battery-replacement station and it's just too expensive. As for the sixty-second hardware swap, I work in hardware, I don't see that really being possible for something the size, weight, and awkwardness of a battery which stored enough zots to do anything useful.

If it were possible to somehow solve the infrastructure problem and the battery swap problem and have it be cheaper than I'm currently paying for gas? Sure. Am I gonna let the government increase the cost of my gasoline back up to four bucks a gallon to pay for it? Hell no.