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BAIC's C71 EV has hot-swappable battery packs and a questionable sense of style
Electric cars hold the potential to eliminate your monthly gasoline bill, but if you want to go more than 100 miles or so at this point you'd better plan to make a bunch of lengthy pit-stops along the way. There are various solutions, like the Volt's on-board generator or Nissan's offer to replace your Leaf with something a little more traditional for long weekend trips into the country. But, to us, battery swapping seems like the best plan. Better Place is the leader in this space but BAIC, the Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Company, is showing off its own solution, the charmingly named C71 EV that looks like what might happen if a SAAB and a Toyota spent a crazy night together in Shanghai. It's a $45,000 car with a 60Ah floor-mounted battery pack that can be swapped in just five minutes, each delivering 150km (93 miles) of range and can naturally be charged by more traditional means (a plug) should you not be in such a hurry. The car is said to be available sometime next year, but we've heard that one before.
Nokia N8 gets a 32GB model hint, nearly user-replaceable battery
Nokia's N8 might not be for sale but it's certainly out in the internet wilds. A few, presumably pre-production, units have already made their way onto some Arabic sites for dissection and lustful right-to-left analysis. SaudiMac had the good fortune to see some early retail packaging with "N8-00 / 32GB" printed (and later Photoshopped out) directly on the box. While that could indicate the N8's support for 32GB microSD cards, we're guessing (hoping?) it's an unannounced model sporting 32GB of fixed internal flash memory to accompany the 16GB model already announced. We've also got a user from the ArabNokia forums demonstrating the removal of the N8's battery -- a simple operation requiring the removal of two screws to slide the battery out of the chassis' bottom similar to the HTC Legend. The whole procedure is so simple that we have to wonder why Nokia didn't take the industrial design a step further and make the standard 1,200mAh Nokia BL-4D battery (used in the N97 mini) user replaceable in the first place. Regardless, it's good to know that you can swap the Li-Ion battery in a pinch or whenever you finally hit the lifetime recharge cap -- you didn't need that warranty anyway, right? [Thanks, Ali F.]
