Cool huh? Your beloved Chevy Bolt has crawled to a halt in the middle of a desert somewhere, but fear not, a quick tap at an app on your phone will call this flying battery out to your location. When it lands you pop in the charging lead and before you can blink, you're off on your way.
Sounds great, but there are a few tiny problems with the concept.
Capacity
The article talks about "most remote areas", so let's assume you need at least a 50 mile top-up of your battery. The original Nissan Leaf 24kWh battery pack, which gave the car just about a 100 mile range with a following wind, weighed 218kg. That's two big men. So, let's say the battery pack can get away with being "just" 100kg, that's still a huge weight for a drone. Such a payload will need a correspondingly large lifting capability and power for the drone itself. To put things in perspective, when drone nerds talk about a "heavy lift", they're usually talking about something like this:
This is the Alta UAV used for filming and it has an enormous payload. It can carry up to 9kg. Yes, nine. So for a 100kg battery pack, we'd need something 11 times beefier. I think we can safely say that the image of the volt drone at the top of the page is not realistic.
Range
This thing is supposed to come out to your car in "remote areas", right? So how far will it have to fly to find you? A typical "heavy lift" drone like the Alta above has a flight time of about 20 minutes, so unless you're supposed to fold it up and put it in your boot (or trunk), that's 10 minutes out, 10 minutes back. I couldn't find any stats on how fast these things might fly, but I doubt it'll get above 60 mph, so that's er... 10 miles. So, as long as your car runs out of juice within 10 miles of the nearest drone depot, you're set.
Landing
Your car can't move, it's got no battery power. The drone weighs about 250kg (100kg payload, 150kg structure, power, batteries, etc.). Unless the charging cable is about 10m long, that drone is going to have to land really close to your charging port, because you're not going to able to move it yourself.
Coverage
Let's be really generous and say that we can have a drone that can carry a decent charging pack, that it can fly a round trip of 200 miles and that it can pinpoint its landing position. How many drones will you need to provide a decent service in, say, Nevada? I've no idea, but it'll be a lot. Hundreds at least. In one State. Which brings us onto...
Cost
The Alta 8 in its base configuration costs $17,500. We need something 11 times bigger, with autonomous control, a 100kg battery pack, and a range of 200 miles. So let's guess that'll cost $200,000. Each.
Bases
The drones will have to live somewhere while waiting for their call-up. These bases will need to have charging facilities for the drone and their battery packs, staff to service them (unless they can be hooked up automatically by some horrendously expensive robot), a building for storage and so on. That ain't gonna be cheap either.
Let's sum up. For this idea to get off the ground (sorry), you'd need drones that cost $200k each, and you'd need base depots for the drones in a vast network across the US, with each depot probably having at least two drones.
I may not be thinking clearly, but wouldn't it be a lot simpler and probably quite a bit cheaper, just to build a vast network of stations that charged the cars?
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