The EV Trifecta + Humpyards

I've owned several stickshift cars in my life and I think that's going to make me a bit of an antique going forward. In fact, those of us who put hands on steering wheel and feet on pedals are probably going to be antiques within a couple decades. I thought for a long time that the future was a trifecta. It was autonomous, shared, electric vehicles. And that that would mean we would no longer buy individual cars, but rather we would have a fleet on call whenever we needed it. The cars would go tuck themselves away whenever they needed to recharge. They could come out at our beck and call and we could specify I need a car for six passengers, I need a car with a huge trunk space, or I need to bring furniture home from IKEA, whatever it might be, whatever special purpose. And in fact, once you no longer need a seat in front with a steering wheel facing forward, the the whatever goes on top of the chassis just winds up becoming a pod you can customize. You can do all kinds of creative things with including it could be a quiet space for work, that's easy. It could be a vaping chamber, it could be a massage salon, it could be a place to eat a meal and go end up someplace else where you can take a a lovely hike in nature and then come home in the same conveyance. Whatever it might be. You could kind of pick your platform depending on what you wanted to do and there could be a huge and flourishing design economy around what those platforms might be. I I still really like that idea and I think that cars will in fact be redesigned heavily over time. There's a second thought that I had some years ago as well, which was about battery swapping. And there's a a couple reasons that I think battery swapping might be super super powerful. Uh an entrepreneur named Shai Agassi tried this with Better Place, but he required a 20-minute stop and a forklift drop of batteries into your trunk, which was no longer a trunk space, it was now a battery space. Forget about that. It was too early in the wrong design entirely for what the possibility is of sharing batteries. Um so, imagine this. Uh a long time ago, at my first job in the world was at Mobile Oil where I was a transportation analyst. That was before they were Exxon Mobile. And I was in the transportation uh business and first doing trucking and later graduated to rail rates because they were more difficult. And I got to visit one of our repair repair yards uh in Kansas City years ago and saw what's called a hump yard. And in a hump yard, you take a a train that's coming in and you push it up a little ramp and then you detach each car in turn and let them roll down from as the as the controls cabinet is right above and you route the the rolling cars onto whatever train you're assembling to go outbound at the other end of the rail yard. Uh gravity helps you do the work. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool if you rolled a vehicle, your vehicle, into an a battery replacement spot? And we'd have to redesign the cars for this, but the car the batteries would be slapped in under the chassis. They would be firmly affixed. Uh but you could then pick how many batteries would you like to swap? How many batteries would you like to drive around with, which would make your car lighter? If you're if all you need is short range, just have a couple batteries and then swap them out whenever you need to. Um it also means that you would always be getting a fresh upgraded battery. And when the battery technology changed, you'd be getting a better battery over time. It also means you could separate the cost of a battery from the cost of an electric vehicle. And that's huge because uh the batteries are like a third of the weight and a third of the cost of a of an electric of an EV. What if you just bought the car and subscribed to power? Uh commercial airliner jet engines are not part of the jet. They're actually subscribed to as power from uh uh Rolls-Royce and General Electric. I mean it's it's kind of crazy, but what if we just subscribe to power? And then um the time it takes to charge up would drop to effectively a minute. And I think that's one of the big wins here is if you decided to go on a longer trip, you could just slap in 16 modules. And then imagine we now have, you know, A cells, B cells, AAA I mean A cells, AA and AAA cells and D cells. Uh what if we had standard sizes for all the batteries? Uh I have a feeling this would really change transportation a bunch and we would stop worrying about um how to charge everything everywhere and that the length of time for a charge and we wouldn't have to worry about the batteries getting more and more dangerously easy to charge at high speed, which is a quite the frenetic endeavor these days. But instead you could just get as much power as you need for wherever it is you want to go. And also you could get one-way power and at the destination you could just swap out and get batteries for the way back. So your range anxiety could go away as we get swapping stations instead of gas stations. And the swapping stations could be refurbishing stations, of course, recharging stations, but you'd never get a battery given to you that didn't pass a quality control test. So the failure rate should be really quite low. Um I'm no transportation analyst. The closest I ever got was that job with Mobile back in the day. But I love the topic and I think we need to be a little more creative about how this works. I'm pretty sure autonomous driving is is pretty much here already if you see Waymo cars all driving all over the place, but it's going to get more and more difficult to defend the historic methods, modes, and form factors of driving. And I'm excited and and I feel like an already given that I got rid of my Sunbeam Alpine years ago, which was a sweet dreamy little car with a little four-speed stick shift.