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?
I think swappable batteries could be a good solution to fires and probelms seen with long term battery health. Like if batteries were smaller and you swap it out rather than charging they could be inspected before being redistributed. In an ideal situation the cost of purchasing a battery would be removed from the vehicle price and shift to a subscription/interchange system. It could help consumers if their battery goes bad by not needing to buy a completly new one and prevent fires. Unfortunately, everything is terrible and I imagine this would inevitably turn to some kind of scummy, overpriced, preditory system. I am not sure if damage caused by batteries is enough to justify such a program but I think insurance companies and governments have or will look into it.
They’ll make it illegal to charge your own battery. And enshitification will guarantee perpetually rising prices, lower and lower range batteries, or some combination of the 2.