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Comment by rapsey | Hacker News Reader

> In China, you can buy a Nio car without a battery. You subscribe to BaaS (Battery as a Service) and pay a monthly subscription fee. The battery stays on Nio’s balance sheet. In this case, you can upgrade the battery on demand. If you subscribe to a 75 kWh battery, you can upgrade to a 100 kWh battery for 50 yuan (7 USD) a day or 880 yuan (123 USD) a month. This would make 150 kWh an excellent option for a short upgrade when going on a long trip rather than being “a daily driver.”

That is a very interesting model.

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France had Renaults where you'd buy the car but lease the battery. No hot-swapping though. Seems like all the disadvantages of ownership with all the disadvantages of leasing.

https://www.renaultgroup.com/en/news-on-air/news/all-you-nee...

Nio's swapping works better. You can complete a swap in 6 minutes. And you can upgrade and downgrade the battery between the 75, 100, and the eventual 150 kWh options to suit what you need:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmWL1hZQmD0

If only hot swap batteries existed for buses as it would solve a huge problem with range and charging fleets at yards.

I _think_ the theory there was that it spread the cost; you’d buy the car for similar to a petrol car, and then pay X euro a month where X was probably similar to what you’d have otherwise been spending on petrol. Don’t think it was ever a particularly popular option.

There was an Israeli company that used electric Renaults and provided the battery swapping service. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company)

Tom Scott covered it https://youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w

A couple of interesting takeaways from that

* They can charge at a slower rate, because they can average it out over the day

* They offer frequency balancing to the grid

Here's a detailed analysis from The Limiting Factor I found very thorough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxtS7mjrTvo

As an aside, this is the first video where I can't tell if it's a human speaking or an AI generated voice. The phenomenon of AI voices _and_ American voices choosing to be in a "presentation mode" / "telephone voice" is disconcerting, it weirdly means I trust US voices less.

I recall hearing that Irish voices are the most trusted in Western countries, and now I wonder whether that's something to do with the high degree of authenticity in the voice.

Edit: I tried to find a source for the Irish voice thing, but it turns out that every country lists a different accent as most trusted, in India it was British, in the UK it's Northern Irish, YMMV so it is probably irrelevant which voice is most trusted. The gist that the US voice being so present in voice assistants, devices, AI voice bots, etc still directionally may indicate a lessening in trust in those accents where it's not obviously tied to a speaker on screen being obviously human.

Edit 2: Now I think future demand for video conferencing for support will increase, as people will not trust voice calls at all.

Trust for what though? I'm not going to trust a british accent for a food recipe but I might trust them for advice on hiding money.

> The phenomenon of AI voices _and_ American voices choosing to be in a "presentation mode" / "telephone voice" is disconcerting

I wonder how much of this is choice, or availability of crisp training data

I believe that in this case it is a real human voice (possibly with some processing). If you check some of the past videos on the channel, he is in shot, speaking into the camera.

I don't think it's very interesting unless you use it a lot. I generally abhor "as a service" for physical goods though.

When electrical cars first appeared on the market here in Europe leasing the battery was usually the only option. Luckily not anymore.

The hotswapping adds an interesting component to it though, that's true.

EV's have a problem with the battery being by far the most expensive part, the quickest depreciating part of the car and a huge issue for when you are trying to sell your car.

Buying the car and paying a reasonable monthly subscription to always have an available swappable battery is not bad at all.

At the end of the day though, it seems like you would be paying for the depreciation on the battery (because it does depreciate, even if you don't own it) plus the extra profit / overhead required for the "battery as a service" part of the equation. There of course could be economies of scale at work here, where the overall price could be similar/lower than owing and eventually replacing a battery, but it seems to me from my very basic understanding of economics that it would be on average more expensive over the long term.

You can swap the batteries at any time (at their stations) and it takes minutes. The depreciation is not a factor which is why it is an interesting model.

The depreciation is of course included in the leasing cost.

Sorry I do not understand can someone EIL5? The leasing of the vehicle? How are you paying for the depreciation of the battery when you never payed for it in the first place? You buy the car without the battery. To get a battery you sign up for a subscription.

> can someone ELI5?

When the battery kicks the bucket, the battery-leasing company has to buy a new one, which costs money. The battery-leasing company makes money from battery subscription. Your subscription must cover the cost of the replacement batteries.

A swappable battery is a serviceable battery. An EV with a swappable battery also has a very high resell value because the only problematic part is out of the equation.

For a new car buyer this system likely has a much better total cost of ownership.

Depends very much on how much you use it. Is it a 200km every day job? Yeah. 200km per month? Better to just get a builtin battery and take care of it (not keeping it at 100% all the time etc).

Which is why leasing almost always require you to upfront decide how many miles per month you pay for.

There are economies of scale. There’s the fact that the company can probably service the battery better between swaps extending its life. And finally, there’s the benefit of a minimum level of battery performance even after the warranty expires. However, none of this is the most interesting part for battery tech.

Why this might be a much financially better option for customers is if battery tech costs keep reducing rapidly. So instead of paying the cost of 100kw of battery tech in 2023, you will pay something like an average value of the battery tech cost from 2023 to 2027 (and if the industry is growing, like EVs are, it will be a weighted average where the cheaper newer batteries would have higher weight since they would be a larger proportion of the overall stock since more cars will be made in 2027 than 2023).

Basically with the condition that battery costs keep dropping, this could be a fantastic deal for customers since they don’t need to buy the batteries at the most expensive price they will ever be going forward.

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