Will EV battery swapping be the future for us?

[goldbrick]

I think that we'll see a class for it in EV racing. They'll be swapping packs in 30 seconds, rather than wait 5 minutes for 1600 volt recharging.

That actually makes sense. I never thought of that use case but I could see that working out. The rest of it.....not so much, especially as range and charging speed are probably going to increase in the future

 

[Ortiznnhiasdn]

OP: do you actually have experience with driving an EV on a day-to-day basis?

I see 1 post only by OP till date and no further interaction on their own thread despite a number of valuable responses from forum community. I imagine this might be yet another passerby / spammer in the making or something like that. This thread is dead to me!

PS. No offense OP if you are legit and turnaround to comeback into your own thread and contribute. All the best

Thanks for your comments. Maybe I don't have much to contribute to the forum, but your comments to my post are still read and thanks a lot.

 

[OldManCan]

Thanks for your comments. Maybe I don't have much to contribute to the forum, but your comments to my post are still read and thanks a lot.

Sorry for my doubting post. Glad to see you're back and benefiting from the contributions. All the best

 

[DaveinOlyWA]

Sure, anything is possible and you can look at this thread and accept the informed opinion of the group conscious or not. Insanely rich people don't listen to others so... what do you have in mind?

Ok, well let me give you some more informed opinion.

Subscription services won't work. Better Place tried that and failed. A bit too early really and today would have likely been a better chance to do it but the need is not as great but start up costs are still extremely high. So why didn't it work?

It simply didn't provide the level of convenience. Battery swaps promised to take less than 10 minutes took much longer and guess what? Lines made it worse. Sometimes stations simply didn't have a charged pack to give you. Subscription costs made it pretty expensive ALL the time putting it nearly on par with gasoline. There was also no certainty in the model. You never owned the car, you never owned the battery pack and "buy in" level was nowhere near as low as typical leases.

Now, what could work? Model it after the rental car biz. You are taking a trip so you start with where you will be dropping off the pack YOU OWN. Appointments are needed of course. The trip also includes each stop you will make for a swap and the return trip, you will pick up your pack which was charged just before your expected arrival time (an app from the rental agency will make sure of that) and you are back home.

Why it works for you;

Now, you have full control of the costs. You only pay for it when you need it. Like any car rental, it won't be cheap. I have done the rental thing more than a few times and can't remember when I didn't use a coupon, discount or something with the exception of business trips (with logistics handled by the office)

Why it works for the business;

Still have that large startup cost but realize this is a business that replaces its entire fleet every 2 years. THAT is also a pretty big budget item. But like any business, its all about providing the convenience at a price the customer is willing to put up with.

When you should start that journey to insane wealth.

Well, got a few more years to go for that. There simply isn't enough demand. The biggest EV driver segment on the road today is more adventuresome, a bigger risk taker, and quite frankly still exploring more ways to make their EV work better. With the big infrastructure plan cranking up here shortly, that will extend your launch a few more years but that is when the realization that battery swapping is a viable reality. It also will have been long enough that most would have forgotten about Better Place if they ever knew about them in the first place.

 

[Nubo]

If anybody could make it work it would be Tesla. They announced such a program to great fanfare, built a swapping station, and it died with a whimper.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY[/youtube]

 

[Ortiznnhiasdn]

Now you just need to convince the car manufacturers

There is no such thing as easy

 

[HughesJohn123]

The EVs market is fk heating up right now. Who knows who will be the leader in the next 5 years

 

[alozzy]

Now you just need to convince the car manufacturers

There is no such thing as easy

Call me cynical, but what I was hinting at is that proprietary = profit. Having a unique battery pack ensures that EV owners have to purchase a new pack from the OEM.

So, while a standard pack design, with easily swappable modules (or even entire pack swaps), would be amazing for owners, EV manufacturers will almost certainly balk at the idea. Hopefully I'm just cynical and they prove me wrong

 

[DaveinOlyWA]

Now you just need to convince the car manufacturers

There is no such thing as easy

Call me cynical, but what I was hinting at is that proprietary = profit. Having a unique battery pack ensures that EV owners have to purchase a new pack from the OEM.

So, while a standard pack design, with easily swappable modules (or even entire pack swaps), would be amazing for owners, EV manufacturers will almost certainly balk at the idea. Hopefully I'm just cynical and they prove me wrong

Proprietary will never leave us. The real market will be 3rd party installers and the secret sauce that OEM's hold so dearly to their breast is starting to leak out between their fingers. Right now, the only thing holding anyone back is simply cells...or lack of. The technology by and large has already been resolved. A few niggles here and there but we won't be subsisting on salvage packs exclusively much longer.

 

[alozzy]

There is no such thing as easy

Call me cynical, but what I was hinting at is that proprietary = profit...

Proprietary will never leave us...

I don't disagree, but for context I was responding to this comment by @Ortiznnhiasdn:

Here what I think: automakers make fully charged batteries available to their clients wherever they go. Same car brand, same battery technology. No issue. No need of charging stations.

Swap your Tesla battery at a Tesla swapping station.
Swap your Chevy battery at a Chevy swapping station...

Which is why I commented that OEMs wouldn't be interested in that.

 

[AndrewsSmith1245]

This makes sense. I've thought this is the way to get rid of range anxiety for EVs for a long time.

 

[oxothuk]

Leftie nailed the real use case for this - EV racing. That's a situation where recharging speed is essential, cost is secondary, and there is no need for cross-brand interoperability.

For suburban daily driving there's hardly even a a need for DCFC, much less battery swapping.

So the only use case left is road-tripping. I can't see that ever being a big enough market to sustain a business like battery swapping.

 

[GenevieveMoore56]

I'd rather own my battery. That said, when the battery is worn out after 8-10 years, I'd like to swap it for a new one for a reasonable price. I hope this is possible. It would also be nice if, 4 or so years down the line, a battery with much better range came out, and you wanted to upgrade to that.

 

[LouisaRachel]

This is a service all EV companies should have. Instead of pushing the latest model car on you, they should swap your battery pack, extending the life of your EV and keeping fewer models just sitting around.

 

[BrookoverShane]

I'd rather own my battery. That said, when the battery is worn out after 8-10 years, I'd like to swap it for a new one for a reasonable price. I hope this is possible. It would also be nice if, 4 or so years down the line, a battery with much better range came out, and you wanted to upgrade to that.

Well, doing a few seconds of research on your opinion, I found VinFast, a new EV brand from Viet Nam that allows you to rent the battery with two subscription plans.

"Flexible" will allow 300 miles (500 km) per month under a certain fee with extra cost for extra miles, while "Fixed" will have unlimited miles. In both of them, the cost of driving a VinFast EV is "approximately equal to gasoline costs in each market," with the company covering all expenses on battery maintenance, including free battery replacement once charging/discharging capacity falls below 70%.

You can read more here: https://vinfastauto.eu/en/reservations

 

[kaiat]

Yep, that's the one. I kept wanting to write that, but decided I might be thinking of "The Good Place."

Is the company talking about battery swapping in Norway "Kandi"? If so, I wouldn't get my hopes up. https://hindenburgresearch.com/kandi/

No, the company is NIO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9I34J3aIEQ

 

[WetEV]

Interesting the number of one post members in this topic.

 

[goldbrick]

^ I was thinking the exact same thing.

 

[Nubo]

Interesting the number of one post members in this topic.

OldManCan's post summoned them :lol:

 

[OldManCan]

OldManCan's post summoned them :lol:

I scare myself sometimes... :lol: