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?
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.
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?
Ah, so you’re wanting to transport tons and tons of batteries back to a centralized facility to be inspected and have testing done?
It’s not a gov problem, it’s a logistics issue.
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.
Yea gas is a one way trip, and then it’s into the end customer. It’s not an unprecedented logistics problem, it’s just a logistics problem that ends up requiring a ton of more energy. Batteries need to be able to charge way quicker and hold a longer charge, that’s the problem that should be getting worked, not a how to transport battery packs around.
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?
The issue is we haven’t had real breakthroughs in battery tech since the 70s, we’ve gotten slightly better improvements but we’re still using the same base. We’ve had tons of promises in the lab but nothing has actually made it out. Hopefully there will be a breakthrough but so far there hasn’t been.
Maybe you should take a look at some these charts, especially power density and cost
There have been huge improvements
They got heavier to hold more charge. Nothing in any of these charts proves the tech has advanced drastically since the 70s. Seriously the 2nd chart just says they got cheaper basically for how much you get. That’s like saying HDDs are cheaper now more than ever, but still use a spinning disk technology… it’s like we never leaped to SSDs. That’s the jump we need.
Did you notice the charts showing Wh/kg? Since 1991, the charge a battery can hold per weight has gone up 500%, even while prices have dropped a similar percentage. That’s huge, and that’s what makes EVs (and even smartphones) so practical now, but not back then. We have made that jump
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
I’m expecting drones to take a ton of the short space deliveries sooner than EV trucks.
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?
I looked more into fires and battery replacement and agree with your stats, much appreciated for the info.
However, I never said it swappable would be faster for expanding. I said it was safer and allow for battery integrity evaluation. I agree the ideal solution would be chargers in homes as long as battery health and saftey are reasonable which they already reaching that point.
I see alot of talk in these threads about how bad it would be to make infrastructure and need to invest. But our current infrastructure didn’t just show up. I bet when the first cars came out people with horses said the same thing. Thinking how much it would cost to build all these gas stations and refineries. Investment will have to happen and EV is the future. Obviously home chargers are cheaper and again the ideal solution as technology advances and the grid can keep up.
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.
So each swap station is going to have batteries techs that know what the fuck they’re doing, checking on every battery that comes in?
What world do you live in? People fuck with their houses all the time, its why you get an inspection when you buy a home(even if most inspectors only find the shit on the surface).
Again so you’re going to have ever charge station have basically certified battery engineers that can check out battery systems that come in? Are you also planning on forcing the EV makers into standardized battery packs?
Cool, when is the last time you saw an empty beer bottle truck catch fire because roger fucked with his miller lite?
Ah so only in good ol EU do you guys not have car crashes and house fires because regulation has solved that shit.
Cool, whataboutism got it…the real problem you should be talking about is how quickly you can charge a battery and how long it’ll last on said charge…not let’s re-invent the wheel…