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?
One thing that would speed it up would be if you could just drop the 1-ton battery by gravity (safely, which I understant is hard on the edges of any hooks holding it, maybe they could use a raised floor, which is what they do in NIO) and snap it back on in 30s or less for a total of 2m. The rest is just your usual parking, pulling the gas hose. Maybe make it go-through so you don’t have to manouver into place.