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Electric Vehicles are a key part of our tomorrow and how we get there. If we can get all the fossil fuel vehicles off our roads, out of our seas and out of our skies, we'll have a much better environment. This community is where we discuss the various different vehicles and news stories regarding electric transportation.
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Headline ends in a question mark. The answer is no.
Battery swapping is a nice option for certain types of vehicles and locations, and battery standards would be great too, but I doubt it will replace home charging anytime soon. It has all the downsides of gas stations, as stated in the article.
Perhaps it makes sense in a couple of car-generations if batteries eventually get really big, like 5000 km range or something.
Battery swapping is a nice option for certain types of vehicles and locations
Yep, long haul trucking this would make sense, provided the manufacturers agreed on a standard. Battery swap points at key long haul stops would go a long way towards making EV trucks more viable (it's close but marginal at the moment). Your own depot can be a swap point for bigger companies.
I'm not entirely sure it's needed though - the move towards higher voltage faster charging may well make this a moot point, truckies already have mandatory rest periods, if the charge times and rest times can line up then it's not worth the cost (they don't quite at the moment).
Long haul trucking could be the first use case for automated driving. They could simply swap the trucks and recharge them. Depends on what's cheaper: Adding swapping capabilities or having the whole trunk waiting to be charged.
Anything but building rail
If you could get all the batteries standardized then you could just treat them as a consumable (rather than part of the vehicle), and have the charging station automatically check battery health and rotate out batteries for refurbishing/recycling as needed, so the end user never has to even worry about the battery lifecycle. It would need a lot more infrastructure though.
Stressing the if.
Also, I don't really see the "downsides of gas stations" - if you've been driving long enough to need a battery swap then you should get out and take a break and you might need to use a restroom and get a drink or something.
On long trips you need a break. I don't need a break on my daily commute. To me, never having to stop at gas stations is one of the key benefits of driving electric.
The larger downsides are mentioned in the article. Gas stations, charger sites and potential swapping sites all require massive investments in land, infrastructure and idle batteries. And they still experience shortcomings in peak periods. The idea of driving somewhere and stopping there for refueling is probably the least efficient method of distributing energy. I'm sure the gas station companies will gladly push for this method and it will be nice to have the option, but I will always prefer not having to go there at all.
For long drives, where you do need a break, the fast chargers are quick enough. Cutting the waiting from 15 minutes to 5 minutes is really not worth the investment.
On the idle batteries part specifically, if you had a station with racks of pre-charged batteries waiting for cars to swap with, you could also have that station be part of the local power grid, so the batteries are not really idle and not a waste of space, and you now have a second reason to keep them constantly at like 80% charge.
I think battery standards are really, really important. What happens in five or ten years, when your make and model isn't sold any longer and you can't get a new battery from the manufacturer?
Same thing that will happen today when a car's computer is no longer produced
I would like the combination. Home charging day to day, but swapping on longer road trips.
Eh. My car's only 200 or so miles of range on the freeway and charges pretty slowly by modern standards, but I still find I want to stop before the car does and the car's ready to go before I am.
When a charging stop comes three hours into a longer trip it doesn't really slow me down. I want to pee, stretch my legs, and get a coffee and a sandwich anyway at that point.
We don't really need battery swaps for cars, and with a longer range EV with faster charging that's going to be even more true.
I think people who don't own an EV don't really get home charging. They think of fast charging as being equivalent to filling a gas car and imagine using a fast charger during a 20 minute drive to work like they fill up, when actually fast charging is something I only do once every few months.
For me it's not just about the charging. If I can swap my battery then the risk of the battery breaking is suddenly not as big anymore. A lot of the cars that are trashed, here in Norway at least, is because of the battery.
I don't really need a really long range ev in my day to day. I live 10 km away from work and have a cheap car with wltp of 240km (150 miles), which is kind of low, but more than enough. We charge it one to three nights a week and that works great for us.
With regards to the charging stops: We have a gasoline powered car as well and we always take that car to visit family which is a five hour drive because we don't want the one hour mandatory stop. Juggling kids in the back seat with all of their stops needed it just isn't practical. Also the one hour stop isn't even enough in the winter. Then we need two stops. Combined with all of the small stops a five hour drive can suddenly become seven and those hours are the difference if we do the trip or not for us.
Okay, but your EV has an even smaller, slower charging battery than mine.
In the time it would take to get swappable batteries standardised and swap stations built and running, cheap EVs are going to have a lot more range and better charging speed. Swap stations aren't up against today's EVs, they're up against 2035's EVs.
I still think a standard for swapping is a good idea.
Nope it's a dead end. At least that's what I think.
Even disregarding the necessary standardization for it to succeed, and the required space and mechanism for the change that makes it more expensive to run. It is still a dead end.
Fast chargers are getting so good that the time saved isn't worth it, in fact time saved will be zero in few years time.
The new high end standard already widely available is 300kW, and you can even get 400kW now. Even with just 150 kW charging you can charge an 80 kWh battery in about 20 minutes. And this is improving fast with new cars.
BYD already has a complete 1 MW charging solution that is rolled out now, and CATL has batteries that can handle 1.3 MW charging.
With the CATL 1.3 MW charging, it is possible to charge an 80 KW battery from 10-80% in a mere 2½ minutes!! While BYD is 10-60% in 5 minutes.
This will probably take a few years to become available in Europe, but the technology is there now. And many new models coming this year can handle the 300 kW charging which is already pretty fast, charging from 10-80% in just over 10 minutes.
Charging at home and Fast charging will soon make battery swap completely redundant, at least for normal cars.
On electric motorcycles sure, everything else is a waste.