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 :)

  • AA5B@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    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?

    • SupraMario@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      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.

        • SupraMario@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          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.

          • AA5B@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            6 months ago

            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

            • SupraMario@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              6 months ago

              Yes it’s still not enough, that’s been my whole point, all we’ve done is like if SSDs were never invented. Like we’re still stuck on spinning disk tech. We’re still lacking the charge speed and the range. Yes batteries are better than 1970s when the current design was created, but we haven’t made that jump from HDD to SSD.