Why Battery Swapping Is A BAD Idea

as a nio car owner in china, here's how things actually done. a typical 2nd gen nio battery swap station tipically houses 10-13 batteries. and the whole station takes up 3 standard parking spots. and it can swap battries at around 5min per viechel. and one empty battry takes 50-60mins to charge to full. so the idea is that, say if you are the first one to swap, by the time the 10th person is swapping, your old battery that you swaped 50min ago, is now full again and ready to be swaped to the next person. by doing this, nio has achived non-stop battery swap, using minimum resources. i've been a nio es6 driver in shenzhen china for two years now, there are around 30 swap station in my city and i've done almost 200 swaps. best of all its free of charge. i relally find it easy and coivent.

I think this video forgot to mention when you have a swappable battery platform you have 2 options, either you can charge the battery or use a swapping station.

I didn't listen to a word he said. I was in a state of shock from his hoodie

There are several misconceptions in this video, the main of which is that battery swapping is just an alternative to chargers. Its purposes are varied: 1) Alleviates range anxiety for those long trips (you can still use chargers for regular city use). 2) Under the BaaS (Battery as a Service) model customers can actually switch out batteries for newer and longer-distance ones, they are not tied to a single battery for the entire car's life cycle. If a new battery is released, it's made available to the pre-existing cars. So if you just bought a car with a 100 kw battery and NIO comes out with a 200 KW battery, it just takes 3 minutes to upgrade to it. 3) No battery wastage. Your precious Tesla is junk after a few years or you have to pay like 20k for a battery replacement - absolute bonkers. With the BaaS model your battery is always in good condition. 4) You can actually swap your battery for a larger one just for a long trip, and then switch back to your usual (cheaper) size for daily use. 5) When autonomous driving kicks in, companies with swap station infrastructure will be ready for fully automatic recharging, while Tesla owners will still have to fiddle around with charging cables and wait for an hour for the car to charge - hardly a seamless experience. I could go on and on.

Battery swapping makes a lot of sense for heavy duty vehicles. Lorries can have much smaller batteries, possibly 200 miles will be sufficient, allowing more goods to be carried. Most batteries can also be charged when demand for electricity is low, saving renewables that would otherwise be wasted.

Maybe while hotswapping is not the best idea, the concept of universal batteries could work by giving owners of EVs alternatives for when their current battery dies...

You really did minimal work before come to a conclusion battery swapping is a bad idea. Apparently it’s working and working very good in every places now.

The world agreed on domestic battery standards, why not vehicle battery standards? No need for mechanised swap stations, and if the batteries made smaller and modular, any bad cells can be isolated and sent back to manufacturer easily. If you have ever played with Radio controlled vehicles in your life you'd know a removable batteries is a godsend. Nobody got time to wait for a charge.

Battery swapping has additional benefit that was under the radar.. Quick charging batteries degrade them faster. We will need physically less resources to sustain such system (resources for new batteries) (although bigger investment of resources on start)

I believe India are implementing standard battery formats so they can be swapped across multiple vehicle types. Granted it is only light vehicles like scooters, bikes & them tuk tuk thingymajigs but if they are actually mandating the change to any new vehicles it's a bloody good start - I'm not 100% on the details. Smaller format battery packs would then be able to be used on a lot of bigger vehicles too i.e. 1 pack for a scooter, 2 for a motorbike, 4 for a tuk tuk, 8 for a small car, 16 for a large one - you get the idea. You could pay more for the convenience of swapping out batteries for fully charged ones instantly, or simply recharge them yourself if you aren't in a rush. The rest of the world should follow suit so any battery pack will fit any car in the future. The only stumbling block is economics to make it viable & value for money compared to how it is done now as there are many variables to consider. Apologies if any of this is covered in the video, I haven't watched it yet lol ;p

I thought manufacturers were now making the battery an integral part of the structure of the car to save weight - this would imply it’s difficult for such a battery to be made replaceable at all?

Another problem is battery production volume; it's very limited. So all the batteries going into a car is paid by the customer UPFRONT! Whereas sitting there in the charging station takes time to get the money worth.

This may have a spot in transport where you have fast turnaround for a delivery truck and the depot has a swap station i.e. something on a more or less set route - a bit like having a hydrogen pump at the depot.

I always forget that one can still charge their Nio, it's not swapping only.

Fast charging has got so good that swapping no longer makes much sense. If it takes roughly the same amount of time to do, I would much rather not taking apart my car every time I need to go some extra miles

It honestly seems like a standardization and upgrade nightmare. First you need all the car makers to agree on a small number of standards. Multiple standards for different sizes of battery will increase the number of spare batteries the swapping stations need to keep on hand. They have to support big cars, small cars, low power cars, high power cars, all with the same standards. And then as the tech improves with higher energy density or higher power density, it sounds like a nightmare to roll out new versions. They'd have to roll out a set of the new batteries to every swap station very soon after launch. And you'll still need to support the old standards for ~20 years until the old cars are phased out. Are the swapping stations prepared to support 10 different standards between different use cases and legacy cars? Charging standards don't really have this issue. Aside from Tesla dragging its heels, the plugs are standard and will work up to 350kw. And if changes are needed for higher power, it's much easier to make backward and forward compatible plugs than entire battery packs. Or to create adapters if more drastic changes are needed. I could see it for fleets like busses, semis, or mail trucks. But those would require fewer standards and they'd have more control over phasing out old standards.

For delivery vehicles and taxis, it could be a great option, so a driver can get quickly back on the road, especially if a company only have the same vehicles. But, not only because we offer home chargers, but because it makes more sense, charging is the future of EVs, matching your home or public charger with solar panels is the sustainability winner! Great video! Thank you for sharing 🔌⚡🚘

You would have to create a universal battery standard. I think for HD Trucks, it would be a great service to have them scattered near mountain. Maybe just a Kicker battery that is mounted in addition to the everyday battery. Just for extended range on big loads. Big project!

Some people are held back from buying EVs because they are afraid of their battery going bad or becoming obsolete with better tech. Battery swapping can alleviate that fear. It can also alleviate the high up-front cost of buying an EV. Catl is pioneering sodium ion batteries. Sodium is 1000x more abundant than lithium and is easily recycled. Sodium ion is better in almost every way than lithium batteries except for density. But you could have a low range sodium ion battery as a daily driver and swap it for a high range battery for long trips. Also you could just charge your batteries as always and just swap them if it made sense for your life style or immediate need.

Some years ago I saw the video of the battery swap 'Supercharging' stations that Tesla were planning. I was amazed.