Swapping Battery or Charging?

[Brian W + 78]

Just reading about NIO ramping up its EV infrastructure and building battery swap stations. One of them is even right next to a Tesla Supercharger. Several companies tried and failed at battery swapping. Even Tesla had a battery swap system but with no success. 

NIO has a very similar battery swap system, which they claim can autonomously replace a battery pack on the ES8 in about 3 minutes. They want to deploy 1,100 battery swapping stations by 2020 and one of the first ones is going up right next to a Tesla Supercharger station.  

So what is a better solution? Swapping or charging? 

 

 

Edited November 1, 2018 by Brian W

[Adam Varga + 123]

Swapping battery is much more complex than charging. There was this company Better Place which tried it but they went broke a few years back. 

https://qz.com/88871/better-place-shai-agassi-swappable-electric-car-batteries/

Tesla also offered battery swaps but in the end it was just better to expand out the supercharger network and the time it takes to supercharge a Tesla is just about right to give you time to stop for and stretch your legs. And you can put chargers literally anywhere. 

[Vlad Kovalenko + 115]

Tesla never had battery swap stations. They ran an experiment with performing battery swapping at a supercharger and found people preferred to wait to charge over paying for the swapping service. There were almost no Tesla owners who wanted to battery swap during the month they offered it. 

[BlackTortoise + 103]

I think this could be feasible but maybe if the batteries are easy to remove, which I don't think is the case, at least not yet. And it also requires some major infrastructure that I don't think is going to happen. If we get charge times down to 15 minutes for 300+ miles of range, battery swapping will be a waste. I think we'll see some other fast charging technology within  next 10 years which is probably how long it would take just to get battery swap infrastructure started. 

[Adam Varga + 123]

This idea might work for mopeds and scooters, or even large vehicles with shared infrastructure to support commercial fleets. That is where the swap idea should be focused.  But for private cars I don't think it will work. Nobody wants to give away parts of his new car and maybe get a spare battery which might be damaged. 

Edited November 1, 2018 by Adam Varga