Let’s say the infrastructure is there for this, and you don’t have to purchase the battery with a new EV…you just purchase a battery plan for like 100$ a month. It’d easily cut 10-20k off the cost of an EV up front.
Plus, quick charging isn’t quick. At best you’re looking at a 20 minute stop, and you’re praying a stall is open when you get there. This could solve that problem as well.
It’s an interesting idea.
Especially living in a city, this looks interesting to me. ‘Fast’ charging I’ve seen was in the range 30-60 min but then it’s like the phone, from about 20% up to 80%. So living in a city, I’d have to wait for half an hour for half the battery.
With a swap-station, it could be nearly as fast as a fossil fuel stop. About 2 minutes for a 0% to 100% stop.
This also allows for smaller batteries, for smaller cars, for lighter cars. You don’t need to carry a lot of overall range if you can swap/refill to 100% in 2 minutes.
I see comments like this about EVs all the time but it just isn’t my experience at all. I’ve never in my life charged for an hour at a DC fast charger. On most EVs, you’ll see a 15-30 minutes for 0-80% charge but you don’t have to charge above 60% where the charge rate usually slows significantly. For instance, a 10-60% charge on my car takes about 10 minutes and that gets me close to 150 miles of range. All of this assumes you don’t have access to level 2 or even level 1 charging. If you do, then you’d never need to go out of your way to charge.
I was going to say this is not going to work but thinking about it… it might. Swapping stations will be very hard to build and maintain but it’s not exclusive technology, i.e. cars with swappeable batters will still be chargeable. So swapping stations will be like ultra fast chargers. You will have big network or normal chargers, smaller network of fast chargers and tiny network of swapping stations in key locations. If this standard will not make the car more expensive it could be an incentive enough for people to buy them. As more cars can swap batteries they will build more swapping stations. It will not become the main way to of charging any time soon, maybe never, but it could work for longer trips.
So countries are pouring investment into charging networks… it would be interesting to know the thinking behind that versus this approach. One thing is certain though: this can only work at scale if manufacturers agree on standards for battery modules so that they can be swapped out by the same machinery. Notice that this is only for one specific model - the machine which removes the battery knows where the battery modules are and how to remove them. There would also presumably be some tradeoff for battery form factors which are designed to cram more in at the cost of making them harder to remove.
Stellantis on it’s own is pretty big, they own Fiat, PSA (Peugeot & Citroen), Opel, Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep off top of my head. Some smaller brands too. They might be starting with Fiat 500e since 500 line is a budget one that could have price driven even lower by decoupling battery cost.
This is a different idea than I read from the article.
I read “swappable”, as a substitute for charging, and believe that has been proven impractical by every company that has tried it so far.
“Replaceable” batteries to support battery leasing and enable cheaper chemistry even if it doesn’t last as long, is an entirely different story. You’re not expecting frequent or fast changeout, you don’t need vast infrastructure or to stock every variation, you don’t need every brand to reach consensus , you just need to sell your dealer one or two machines and they only need to stock for what they sell. It gives dealers a reason to continue existing (which I don’t agree with but can understand)
Been wanting this for a while. Make a battery standard. You stop and swap out a charged battery for your used battery via a system like a drive through car wash. Pull into the bay and the machinery automatically does the work.
It may not be such a huge deal for cars that do mostly local driving, but I think it would be great for longer haul trucks to move into the EV world if the major highways had such stations along the route.
Excellent, making it was easy to swap w battery is the way to go. I was getting hate in the ev community stating that making batteries replaceable and swappable was not a real problem.
This has been on the way in Europe for a decade now. Just wasn’t quite mature.
