Rocinante
Established Member

Will swapping out electric car batteries catch on?
One Chinese carmaker has plans for thousands of stations in Europe where you can switch batteries.
www.bbc.co.uk
What are people's thoughts on these Automatic Battery Swaps for EV's. Is this the future or a pointless exercise ? It seems to me to be a bit pointless.
As battery technology improves, range will improve, and presumably charging times will decrease as well, so you'll be charging less and it will be quicker to do it.
Having a system where the whole battery is removed from the car and swapped over, requires a very expensive "charging station", with machines to do the work, and storage for all these batteries they'll be charging ready for use, compared to just installing a normal charging station.
Your car will need to be compatible, so are all the manufactures going to agree to a specification or are you going to be limited to a station for your 'battery type'.
What happens if there's been a rush on that morning and there are no batteries left. Presumably you can charge as normal, but that would put a dent in your schedule if you were expecting to be in and out in 10 minutes as opposed to being able to plan.
The benefits it talks about are:
- No waiting to charge, but I can't see banks of these like you have for charging station, but just have one slot due to the complexity and size required, so no doubt there would be queuing in busy periods, and as I said before, as the technology improves, charging times are dropping anyway.
- It also discusses always having a good battery, but at the moment, people are expecting to have the SOC remain fairly healthy for the car's life, so is this just trying to play on peoples fears
- Reduced purchase cost as you won't own the battery, but you'll be paying a lease on the battery, so you'll still end up paying for it either way.
- It doesn't mention it but the main advantage I can see would be for people who can't charge at home, but the other drawbacks still affects this, and there are other solutions to try to help with this ie lamppost charging.