The way I foresee it panning out is - power density is likely to win out over recharge time. At the end of the day - literally - people are generally going to return home, and that's where they're going to want to recharge, for the cheapest electricity, and they've got all night to do it. I think this would lead to fast chargers being positioned as things to help you go on long journeys, so we'll see large banks of them popping up on motorways, and substations to distribute the colossal power requirements to them. If people are generally going to either overnight charge or expensively fast-charge on trunk roads then we're likely to see a general desire for an increased overall range to avoid the relative hassle of a charge stop in the first place. "Slow" AC chargers are going to stagnate out-and-about because there's little use-case for them - because they mean a car takes up a bay for a long time they just can't get the throughput they need from them, so they'll likely all become "destination" chargers where people are going to actually stop rather than just somewhere along a route.
Tesla is more or less directly pursuing this strategy, with every battery update storing more power in the same volume, and the supercharger network taking direct care of long-range customers.
Solid state is the Great Saviour but it won't be ready in time for the 2030 ICE ban in the UK (for example), and in the meantime "normal" battery tech advances slowly and incrementally; I predict a 33% increase in range for the same volume and weight over the next 10 years or so, though that will largely be irrelevant to cars and of more interest to PTWs which are the backbone of personal transport for most of the world.
Cas
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Topic: KTM considering swappable batteries (Read 3461 times)