Battery-swapping EVs are all the rage in Taiwan. Will it work abroad?
restofworld.org
restofworld.org
It shouldn't have been harder, I blame Musk who wanted market advantages of not doing it.
There's a lot of bad economics expressed in batteries as if "Gresham's law" would lead to people hoarding good ones. That just doesn't apply: batteries are not money, they have a specific use value and bad batteries will be taken out of the supply chain.
Nio's doing it. Takes about six minutes:
The physical infrastructure required to do this at any scale makes it prohibitively expensive. I've rarely spent more than 15 minutes at a fast charger. Modern BEVs have a pretty impressive charging curve, and with the extensive charging network that is available, at least in Norway, you can optimize this further. I think there's a good analogy to IP over Avian Carriers. You can technically get super high bandwidth, but the latency kills you. Latency in this case being the physical battery swap stations.
Having swappable batteries on the other hand, that might have some benefit. I don't really need a 82kWh battery pack in my car for my every day needs. It just adds a lot of weight. I also think this is what Nio is aiming for. I doubt they see battery swapping as a solution to fast charging, more to let customers have some flexibility in terms of battery capacity, and to make people still nervous about battery longevity calm down a little.
Nio's deploying another 1,000 swap stations this year:
https://cnevpost.com/2023/02/21/nio-plans-to-add-1000-swap-s...
Nio is also deploying fast chargers alongside their battery swap stations, which leads me to believe that they also see the limitations with swap stations.
Why would you think it's exclusively one or the other?
It's never been exclusively swapping or charging. It's always been both swapping and charging. Nio's cars do both.
Remember your claim was "the physical infrastructure required to do this at any scale makes it prohibitively expensive". That's plainly false.
> Tesla alone has more than a thousand 150-250kW+ charging stalls in Norway alone
Yes? And? So? What? Nios can charge at those Tesla charging stalls.
Reportedly Nio is burning cash at an unprecedented rate. I would assume the complexity of making the battery removable is digging into their margins quite heavily, as well as building out this infrastructure that very few actually needs. I see it mostly as a gimmick to get people who are hellbent on thinking that battery technology will either massively increase all of a sudden or those that think batteries degrade much faster and more than they actually do.