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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading an article somewhere which explained why this was an impractical issue. I forget the details, but I think issues like weight, ending up with a battery pack that doesn’t hold its charge well, etc. were all big concerns. Weight seems like it would be a huge problem given that the battery is the largest component of the EV drive train and it’s usually kept along the floor of the EV for weight distribution.

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Impractical? Nio is already doing battery swaps at scale in China.

https://hbr.org/2024/05/how-one-chinese-ev-company-made-batt...

Dictatorships don't care if things are practical.

Battery swapping isn't some top-down authoritarian decision made by the CCP and forced into the Chinese society.

Nio is just a company that's providing a much needed solution to this problem.

I agree, but there are aggressive subsidies around electric vehicles and general graft. Similar things happen in most countries but in dictatorships things can go to absurd levels when it aligns with the current policy.

Those subsidies can be more easily justified by climate change. Also I don't think they approach the historic, multi-decade subsidies to fossil fuels

They also have 2% ev marketshare in China, because its still an expensive and complex feature that has downsides that the previous comment mentioned. Like these high energy batteries are dangerous as the can burn quite spectacularly, so I personally would not want to take and remove one from my car every charge hen I can wait a few minutes at a regular charging station that is much more common than a replacing station.

I don't think a battery swap is more dangerous than the current fuel stations where you can just use your lighter and set everything on fire

I think swappable batteries may be a more practical solution for heavy trucks rather than cars. They have the advantage that they are already built to carry heavy things loaded by forklift, unlike cars.

There's an Australian company https://www.januselectric.com.au/ doing them. They do electric conversions on existing trucks.

That is a harsh characterisation of the work done by Tesla.

America is now also a dictatorship according to many foreigners (all but russia maybe ).

Working on it but there are still elections scheduled.

Russia, China, Iran and North Korea all have elections too. I don’t know if there’s a single contemporary dictatorship which doesn’t have elections.

The movement has been towards making batteries structurally integral to the vehicle to save weight in the frame.

CATL trying it supposedly next year with a rollout of swap stations

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