Battery swapping is a technology that could solve one key barrier for EV adoption: consumers’ range anxiety and the long waiting time for battery charging. Wouldn’t you feel more assured on a weekend trip if you knew you could stop at a swap station and replace depleted battery packs with fully charged ones in five minutes? But this isn’t easy to do, as Tesla and Better Place’s past failures. In China, however, battery swapping has been a reality for a couple of years. How did Chinese companies like Nio make it work with 2,300 swapping stations nationwide? What can companies outside China learn from the Chinese experience?
So now we’re tacking on government regulation and certifications, an independent reaction regime? On top of building out a global infrastructure carrying around batteries that each way a ton, supporting robotics to manipulate those batteries, getting everyone to agree to use the same batteries, etc? Compared to “plug it in wherever you are”?
Battery swapping is a cool idea and there may be equipment that needs it, but it would just make personal vehicles more complicated and expensive with little gain