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?
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Government regulation and standardization is the answer.
You know, like fossil fuels also are. For example fuelpumps have to be legally calibrated so that they measure accurately, and there are a myriad of quality standards and ratings regarding what 98 octane or 95 octane or diesel fuel or whatever can contain.
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Quality control on batteries that go out to customers, and make the stations legally liable.
For example: I once pumped petrol in my diesel car due to human error by the gas station’s supply company (they put petrol in the diesel tanks). They found out about the error as I was filling up and stopped me halfway, so luckily I had no engine damage, but they had to pay for the tow and to get my tank emptied.
Sounds more like a “your government is shit” problem than a “this scheme can’t work” problem.
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Gas gets to the gas station somehow. Obviously it isn’t the same as transporting batteries back and forth but it’s bad faith to say this is completely unprecedented logistics problem. I am under the impression that battery health could be screened at the swap facility and would require a small subset to be returned to a hub for additional inspection or repair.
To me, this is the biggest argument against battery swapping.
We have this huge industry for refining, storing, distributing, distributing ending gasoline that we can entirely dismantle with EVs. All that pollution: gone. All that wasted land: gone. All those unnecessary levels of profit-seeking: gone. Now you want to choose a technology that requires rebuilding all that, except two way? You want to force the new technology to conform to old infrastructure ideas?
How can we not prefer the alternative of “just plug it in wherever you are”? How can we not prefer the rare opportunity of simplifying something? How can we not forgo all those unnecessary profit seekers?
At the moment my two biggest fears against buying an EV is it catching fire in my garage and it dying after 5 years then having to buy a 30k battery. Once technology advances that doesn’t happen I will buy and I would love your plan. Why can’t this be a stop gap?
It already doesn’t happen.
Swappable batteries can’t be a stop gap because it would require a huge infrastructure buildout over many years that would become a lost investment, versus technology that’s already here and improving every year. Starting from scratch with swap stations, vehicle design, industry standards, vs hundreds of thousands of charging stations already deployed.
If you think chargers aren’t available enough or expanding enough, consider that they’re known technology, relatively cheap, installable by any electrician, using a national power infrastructure that already exists. Installing a level 2 charger at my house was equivalent to a new stove circuit. I mean I agree we need to speed up the buildout, but think how cheap and easy these are compared to developing an entire new infrastructure from scratch. How simple a ”plug” is compared to a robot that can handle a one ton battery. How long it took to standardize an effing plug, compared to standardizing entire battery packs. How can anyone think this would go faster?
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And that is being worked on. Billions of dollars has been going there. We have solid state batteries in the lab that can charge much faster and safer, and all sorts of companies promising to bring them to production in a couple of years. Do people really think we’re farther from that being reality than from building out an entirely new global infrastructure that will become obsolete before it’s completed?
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Truck still has to go somewhere. Obviously it’s lighter but it doesn’t blip out of existence. Amazon trucks to back to hub after delivery, FedEx, USPS. Both technologies can advance simultaneously and mutually.
Edit: some wording
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No, that’s just something new you invented to shoot down the idea.
Batteries can have a tamperproof seal so that customers can’t easily mess with it, just like you normally don’t mess with the electricity, gas or water meter in your home. QC and charging can be done on site where you swap, and can mostly be automated. The only thing that needs to be transported back and forth regularly are defective and replacement batteries. Just like gas stations at the end of the day or week need to order replenishment for the fuel they’ve dispensed.
We already do this kind of swapping with other stuff as well: from crates with empty beer bottles and office water cooler bottles to refilling propane and butane bottles.
The lack of government oversight that you brought up, and which this was in reply to, is literally a government issue. Regulation and inspection works fine in most of the civilized world, the fact that it doesn’t in Backwater USA is no argument.
Fossil fuel distribution already is a huge logistics issue, we have to dig it up in the middle east, transport it in oil tankers, refine it at some central locations, then distribute it again with tanker trucks to millions of gas stations so that finally you can put it in your car and use it to drive somewhere, but somehow we have been making that work for over a century.
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As opposed to quality control from the manufacturer, once for the life of the vehicle, before you even buy, and with a long warranty?
…… that already exists?
With my EV I follow recommended practice to ensure longevity of the battery. I rarely charge it more than halfway as I don’t need to for my regular usage, and I avoid letting it run down entirely. Once you engage in battery swapping, where’s the incentive to take care of it well? After my first swap my brand new excellent condition battery is replaced by who knows what.
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The charger would have some inspection capability. Maybe not physical integrity of the casing but certainly the voltag and current outputs and connectivity of cells which could would correlate to health.
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That is why they make you lease the battery. You cannot swap out your old battery, just the battery you are leasing. Your lease payments include the cost of them replacing batteries.
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So now we’re tacking on government regulation and certifications, an independent reaction regime? On top of building out a global infrastructure carrying around batteries that each way a ton, supporting robotics to manipulate those batteries, getting everyone to agree to use the same batteries, etc? Compared to “plug it in wherever you are”?
Battery swapping is a cool idea and there may be equipment that needs it, but it would just make personal vehicles more complicated and expensive with little gain
I can already hear a mile away lobbyist paid by the manufactures rubbing their hands arguing standardization “limits innovations” and “slow developments.”
There are already plenty of shady car mechanics named roger who can swindle you out there…
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