Battery swapping is a technology that could solve one key barrier for EV adoption: consumers’ range anxiety and the long waiting time for battery charging. Wouldn’t you feel more assured on a weekend trip if you knew you could stop at a swap station and replace depleted battery packs with fully charged ones in five minutes? But this isn’t easy to do, as Tesla and Better Place’s past failures. In China, however, battery swapping has been a reality for a couple of years. How did Chinese companies like Nio make it work with 2,300 swapping stations nationwide? What can companies outside China learn from the Chinese experience?
The answer is massive government support. The cost of those stations has to be insane…imagine the inventory holding cost of those batteries
Imagine the cost of stations everywhere that would have tanker-trucks deliver fluid that you’d put in cars
This is not comparable.
The fuel is spent and sold. Gas stations usually only have a few days supply of inventory.
This is like holding engines in inventory to swap without notice on the spot. But in this case the engines cost $10k+.
The fee to swap is about $12…so you have to swap each battery about 800 times to break even. See how you’re wrong yet?
Well yeah but the comparison here should be against a typical BEV. ICE cars are already being phased out regardless.
Don’t worry, the US government will support its automakers by banning the competition.
That is, if they make totally cool and totally legal campaign contributions.
Competing is for the working class, not the 1%.
True. Over the past ten years, China has invested something like a trillion dollars into renewable energy through a combination of their state enterprises and public-private partnerships, and this is just one of the ways they’re reaping the dividends of that investment.
I think swappable batteries could be a good solution to fires and probelms seen with long term battery health. Like if batteries were smaller and you swap it out rather than charging they could be inspected before being redistributed. In an ideal situation the cost of purchasing a battery would be removed from the vehicle price and shift to a subscription/interchange system. It could help consumers if their battery goes bad by not needing to buy a completly new one and prevent fires. Unfortunately, everything is terrible and I imagine this would inevitably turn to some kind of scummy, overpriced, preditory system. I am not sure if damage caused by batteries is enough to justify such a program but I think insurance companies and governments have or will look into it.
They’ll make it illegal to charge your own battery. And enshitification will guarantee perpetually rising prices, lower and lower range batteries, or some combination of the 2.