I reckon the majority of the car weight is batteries, but this could lead to cheaper cars, perhaps with shorter range but able to “recharge” faster than a gas pump, and takes away the range anxiety of an aging battery you can’t easily replace.
Probably not factoring in some very obvious drawbacks here, of course.
People broke the model with what-if games. It never got to critical mass. So it's basically VHS vs beta, for swappable vs integrated and swappable lost, on pretty specious grounds.
Integrated is good because strength and weight. Swappable was good on speed. Swappable is alive and well in e-scooters and probably works for trucks.
Battery swap did not advantage Tesla in the marketplace and possibly disadvantaged Tesla which had 2x range for most competitors. A viable battery swap economy ends range anxiety, at the density of swap shops. Tesla wouldn't have had a compelling story in swap.
Maybe for freight trains too, since you can build the battery into a battery tender carriage, and railways have 150+ years experience at swapping carriages on and off trains.
- the usage pattern does not justify the investment of electrification
- the company owning the trains is not in control of the railway and does not have any leverage over the railway owner.
- for some edge technical reason the line can not be electrified.
Forklifts, and possibly rubbish trucks which do frequent depot trips anyway as a function of their job
See https://thedriven.io/2021/11/16/nio-installs-first-battery-s..., https://electriccarsreport.com/2021/09/nio-launches-nio-es8-...
Swap stations would also be far more expensive to build and manage inventory for, and would carry higher liability for whatever automated mechanism moved the thousand pound pack packs around when it e.g. went out of alignment and crushed somebody’s car frame.
https://www.tesla.com/videos/battery-swap-event
No idea though how they thought they’d handle battery degradation.
Also, it is a logistic pain since all battery exchange stations need a stock of batteries to charge, the size of which will depend on a lot of parameters.
Also this requires standardising the battery. Turning it into a "API". Tesla is a very fast company and introduces changes constantly to their process, unlike others whould wait for the launch of a new model. Standardising on battery model is incompatible with the Tasla mindset.
But a model like this is plausible. You would no longer care about the battery. You would no longer own the battery. If batteries were standardised, the infrastructure (not necessarily one company) would take care of the entire lifecycle of batteries (production, charging, maintenance, reuse, recycling). It could work but it is too early and technology is moving too fast.
NIO and Gogoro are doing it.
4 million swaps for NIO: https://www.carscoops.com/2021/09/nio-customers-have-perform...
200 million for Gogoro: https://www.gogoro.com/news/400k-gogoro-network-subscribers/
I would say that they are right, because right now battery tech is advancing and standardisation would impose a cost to progress. NIO doing their thing is not standardisation. But it does show that it can be done and that is important.
In the future we should definitely push to get to the point where EV battery swaps are routine.
Another approach is to use non-rechargeable batteries. A few years ago a company demoed an EV using a non-rechargeable aluminum air battery with a range for something like 1000 miles.
Aluminum air batteries are not rechargeable but can be recycled. With this approach when you do a swap you'd be getting a new fully charged battery, and your old battery would be recycled to recover the aluminum.
A $10k surcharge to swap to a much newer battery also means you could have a $10k discount on buying an EV then slowly pay to swap to higher and higher battery grades.
What if we just swapped a part of it? The 85 kWh battery pack of the Model S, which weighs 1,200 lb, gets you about 400 miles. If you decided to make a part of it swappable, what size would be appropriate, and where would it fit? If we assumed there were a 50 pound battery you could just pop in and out (that would be pretty difficult to handle, but let's assume), that would only get you another 16 miles. Good for an emergency, yes, but not a replacement for a charging station, and that's a pretty big architectural shift, and requires battery stations everywhere, all for just another 16 miles.