Why Battery Swapping Is A BAD Idea

as a nio car owner in china, here's how things actually done. a typical 2nd gen nio battery swap station tipically houses 10-13 batteries. and the whole station takes up 3 standard parking spots. and it can swap battries at around 5min per viechel. and one empty battry takes 50-60mins to charge to full. so the idea is that, say if you are the first one to swap, by the time the 10th person is swapping, your old battery that you swaped 50min ago, is now full again and ready to be swaped to the next person. by doing this, nio has achived non-stop battery swap, using minimum resources. i've been a nio es6 driver in shenzhen china for two years now, there are around 30 swap station in my city and i've done almost 200 swaps. best of all its free of charge. i relally find it easy and coivent.

I think this video forgot to mention when you have a swappable battery platform you have 2 options, either you can charge the battery or use a swapping station.

I didn't listen to a word he said. I was in a state of shock from his hoodie

There are several misconceptions in this video, the main of which is that battery swapping is just an alternative to chargers. Its purposes are varied: 1) Alleviates range anxiety for those long trips (you can still use chargers for regular city use). 2) Under the BaaS (Battery as a Service) model customers can actually switch out batteries for newer and longer-distance ones, they are not tied to a single battery for the entire car's life cycle. If a new battery is released, it's made available to the pre-existing cars. So if you just bought a car with a 100 kw battery and NIO comes out with a 200 KW battery, it just takes 3 minutes to upgrade to it. 3) No battery wastage. Your precious Tesla is junk after a few years or you have to pay like 20k for a battery replacement - absolute bonkers. With the BaaS model your battery is always in good condition. 4) You can actually swap your battery for a larger one just for a long trip, and then switch back to your usual (cheaper) size for daily use. 5) When autonomous driving kicks in, companies with swap station infrastructure will be ready for fully automatic recharging, while Tesla owners will still have to fiddle around with charging cables and wait for an hour for the car to charge - hardly a seamless experience. I could go on and on.

Maybe while hotswapping is not the best idea, the concept of universal batteries could work by giving owners of EVs alternatives for when their current battery dies...

Battery swapping makes a lot of sense for heavy duty vehicles. Lorries can have much smaller batteries, possibly 200 miles will be sufficient, allowing more goods to be carried. Most batteries can also be charged when demand for electricity is low, saving renewables that would otherwise be wasted.

The world agreed on domestic battery standards, why not vehicle battery standards? No need for mechanised swap stations, and if the batteries made smaller and modular, any bad cells can be isolated and sent back to manufacturer easily. If you have ever played with Radio controlled vehicles in your life you'd know a removable batteries is a godsend. Nobody got time to wait for a charge.

You really did minimal work before come to a conclusion battery swapping is a bad idea. Apparently it’s working and working very good in every places now.

Battery swapping has additional benefit that was under the radar.. Quick charging batteries degrade them faster. We will need physically less resources to sustain such system (resources for new batteries) (although bigger investment of resources on start)

I believe India are implementing standard battery formats so they can be swapped across multiple vehicle types. Granted it is only light vehicles like scooters, bikes & them tuk tuk thingymajigs but if they are actually mandating the change to any new vehicles it's a bloody good start - I'm not 100% on the details. Smaller format battery packs would then be able to be used on a lot of bigger vehicles too i.e. 1 pack for a scooter, 2 for a motorbike, 4 for a tuk tuk, 8 for a small car, 16 for a large one - you get the idea. You could pay more for the convenience of swapping out batteries for fully charged ones instantly, or simply recharge them yourself if you aren't in a rush. The rest of the world should follow suit so any battery pack will fit any car in the future. The only stumbling block is economics to make it viable & value for money compared to how it is done now as there are many variables to consider. Apologies if any of this is covered in the video, I haven't watched it yet lol ;p

Some people are held back from buying EVs because they are afraid of their battery going bad or becoming obsolete with better tech. Battery swapping can alleviate that fear. It can also alleviate the high up-front cost of buying an EV. Catl is pioneering sodium ion batteries. Sodium is 1000x more abundant than lithium and is easily recycled. Sodium ion is better in almost every way than lithium batteries except for density. But you could have a low range sodium ion battery as a daily driver and swap it for a high range battery for long trips. Also you could just charge your batteries as always and just swap them if it made sense for your life style or immediate need.

Faster charge rate = hotter battery leading to degrading battery!

I thought manufacturers were now making the battery an integral part of the structure of the car to save weight - this would imply it’s difficult for such a battery to be made replaceable at all?

I always forget that one can still charge their Nio, it's not swapping only.

Considering it costs £20,000 to have your EV battery replaced and therefore practically makes your 5 to 7 year old car worthless I think this is the perfect solution, not only getting a full charge in the same time it takes to fill your tank with petrol and pay, but also never having to worry about your car being devalued due to a pending new battery required.

I think you need to revisit this topic again after a year has passed.

Everyone said NIO can’t make BAS work but so far they seem to be doing great- I wouldn’t doubt NIO

Fast charging has got so good that swapping no longer makes much sense. If it takes roughly the same amount of time to do, I would much rather not taking apart my car every time I need to go some extra miles

For delivery vehicles and taxis, it could be a great option, so a driver can get quickly back on the road, especially if a company only have the same vehicles. But, not only because we offer home chargers, but because it makes more sense, charging is the future of EVs, matching your home or public charger with solar panels is the sustainability winner! Great video! Thank you for sharing 🔌⚡🚘

I have a new idea for cars!! it's called the internal combustion engine . It runs on gasoline only! You can fill your tank in a couple of minutes... you don't have to wait for an hour!!