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?

See, Apple? Even cars can do it :)

  • @[email protected]English
    9•5 months ago

    When a driver enters their automated station, the station will connect directly to the vehicle, drive and park it at the platform, have the depleted battery be dropped out from the bottom of the vehicle and replaced it with a fully charged battery while charging the user’s account — all within three minutes. The driver doesn’t even need to control or step out of the car.

    That’s really cool, although I maintain that for urban travel the scooters with the hot-swappable battery under the seat are the ideal solution.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•5 months ago

      There was a scooter sharing company that drove around, swapping the batteries. It went out of business and now there are only the Bird style scooters.

      If there were battery swapping stations, I’d definitely by me a bike.