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Comment by clouddrover | Hacker News Reader

Nio has implemented battery swapping in China:

https://www.topgear.com/car-news/big-reads/power-shift-batte...

I don't see it catching on. It's too much logistical hassle. Battery packs can't be delivered as easily as fuel or electrons.

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They’re not really delivered though, they’d be swapped and charged onsite ?

And then you'd have people who would try to rort the system by swapping a bad set of batteries with a good set from the station, and then sell it for a profit.

Why? If the modus operandi is to swap batteries instead of charging then you are effectively leasing the batteries and just buying the charge on them.

it's not convinient to fully disable charging at home, a lot of folks will revolt. and if you have people charging their cars at night, you always have a chance of swapping a worn out battery for a good one.

Of course. But if you know you don't really own the battery, and the swapping capability is in the price it is a non-issue. We already have something similar here, in Australia, for swapping LPG/propane gas bottles. You can refill if you want ( it is often cheaper) or swap with a full one. They are all dated so they also have "use by date"

And propane tanks are much cheaper than a large pack of litium batteries. Not worth it to steal a couple of dollars worth of metals from a propane tank, but the batteries are a large percentage of the cost of an electric car.

There would be measures in place to prevent this, of course. They'd have to be more robust than Redbox scanning for fake DVD returns, but you could sign the battery firmware, do challenge/response, etc. before allowing the swap to happen. All automatic of course. And if your battery turns out to be an elaborate fake - well, we know whose car it came from, considering they drove it to the station with a license plate attached.

> you could sign the battery firmware, do challenge/response, etc. before allowing the swap to happen

so either you're only allowed to swap batteries at these authorized stations (akin to today having a car that can only use petrol purchased from a particular brand of station), or it's trivially easy to swap it yourself (or with some easy to obtain equipment, like today's car oil change).

If it's the first case, then these cars are DRM'ed to hell and back. Not a good world for the consumer.

If it's the latter, then battery swapping will happen. It's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law applied to batteries.

You could very easily have standards in place to ensure compatibility between garages ?

Yes, exactly. The batteries from customer cars will be recharged and re-used. You'd also have a reserve of extras for peak demand.

You could even automate health check-ups on the batteries this way too, and decommission the rotten ones from the fleet.

And stored and moved around. You have to have a stack of batteries ready to swap. You need someone to manage it whereas most chargers are unattended.

And when do you swap the battery? If you have 50% left but that's not far enough to get where you're going do you swap it out then or do you charge? And if you're charging anyway what's the value of the expense of the swapping system?

There’s always going to be some necessary repositioning in this kind of a logistic system. The LA Metro Bikes have the same kind of problem.

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