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?
It’s not just that, its what happens if you get a battery from a guy named roger who said he knows what he’s doing and fucked with it?
Battery swapping sounds great, until you put it into a real world scenario.
There are already plenty of shady car mechanics named roger who can swindle you out there…
Yea, sure but that doesn’t effect me because I have the chance to know who’s working on my car, you don’t if you habe battery swapping going on.
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.
I can already hear a mile away lobbyist paid by the manufactures rubbing their hands arguing standardization “limits innovations” and “slow developments.”
How does this solve the issue of roger fucking with his battery and then you ending up with it during a battery swap? You do realize how many states with counties have no inspections right?
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.
Exactly, this is the equivalent of tire swaps…my tires I take care of and rotate and replace when the tread is worn down, the hell do I want someone’s else batteries being in my car that could end up having a short lift or explode on me.
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.
Ok, roger shows up dumps his shit battery or ticking time bomb and gets a free battery out of it. Do you plan on requiring everyone to show ID and get a face scan?
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.
What stops people from messing with their leased batteries?
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.
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.
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?