Volvo unveils electric excavator

[dan_b]

Ooh, this looks awesome - and totally puts it at odds with JCBs "heavy plant needs hydrogen" strategy.

A 23 ton excavator with 250kWh of batteries on board.

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/05/04/vo ... excavator/

[Countrypaul]

I am surprised that they have not taken a lead from our Australian colleagues and used or at least provide the option for swappable power packs.

[Ken]

I think swappable batts is the real answer to a lot of problems. It is being widely used in poor countries where bikes are used as taxis and general transport and the whole things run like the mobile phone contracts.

Australian home built trucks have been built for the large distances involved with large replaceable batts. A bit like the stage coaches of old.

Even though this provides for lower upfront costs with no batt or smaller batt and a huge cost saving on providing chargeing infrastructure i dont think it applies to cars but does to some heavy uses like trucks and buses.

Swappable batts are not allowed in aircraft which is a real usage case.

[Paul_F]

Swappable batts are not allowed in aircraft which is a real usage case.

You might want to have a word with Pipistrel then, they've had a certified aircraft with swappable battery packs for a few years now.

The reality is that for most of the current use cases you can charge faster than you can swap the batteries - typical charge rates end up being equivalent to charging a Tesla car at 1MW sustained for reasons unrelated to charging, and for any useful-sized aircraft you would need a lot of mechanical handling equipment to change batteries. Pipistrel works because the battery modules are so small and the utilisation rate pretty low - neither really applies to commercial applications.