I remember reading an article somewhere which explained why this was an impractical issue. I forget the details, but I think issues like weight, ending up with a battery pack that doesn’t hold its charge well, etc. were all big concerns. Weight seems like it would be a huge problem given that the battery is the largest component of the EV drive train and it’s usually kept along the floor of the EV for weight distribution.

Impractical? Nio is already doing battery swaps at scale in China.

https://hbr.org/2024/05/how-one-chinese-ev-company-made-batt...

That is a harsh characterisation of the work done by Tesla.

Battery swapping isn't some top-down authoritarian decision made by the CCP and forced into the Chinese society.

Nio is just a company that's providing a much needed solution to this problem.

They also have 2% ev marketshare in China, because its still an expensive and complex feature that has downsides that the previous comment mentioned. Like these high energy batteries are dangerous as the can burn quite spectacularly, so I personally would not want to take and remove one from my car every charge hen I can wait a few minutes at a regular charging station that is much more common than a replacing station.

I don't think a battery swap is more dangerous than the current fuel stations where you can just use your lighter and set everything on fire

I think swappable batteries may be a more practical solution for heavy trucks rather than cars. They have the advantage that they are already built to carry heavy things loaded by forklift, unlike cars.

There's an Australian company https://www.januselectric.com.au/ doing them. They do electric conversions on existing trucks.

I agree, but there are aggressive subsidies around electric vehicles and general graft. Similar things happen in most countries but in dictatorships things can go to absurd levels when it aligns with the current policy.

Those subsidies can be more easily justified by climate change. Also I don't think they approach the historic, multi-decade subsidies to fossil fuels

Working on it but there are still elections scheduled.

Russia, China, Iran and North Korea all have elections too. I don’t know if there’s a single contemporary dictatorship which doesn’t have elections.

The movement has been towards making batteries structurally integral to the vehicle to save weight in the frame.

CATL trying it supposedly next year with a rollout of swap stations

Realistically, this is a pipe dream. China has had a few that are trying this NIO being the most well known.

To me, it's not really viable. The 3 main problems are - The extra costs in a vehicle to allow swapping within say 5 minutes is non-trivial. The physical space required to house X number of batteries ready, X number swap ready is a lot at any moderate volume. Last, Batteries are not universal and now you're constricting either the design of all cars or you have to go to a specific swap station that houses your battery, related to the physical space. I would not accept a battery w/ less volume.

Time will tell if I'm wrong; NIO might do it, but I'm a naysayer for sure.

> NIO might do it

The main obstacle is battery swap is capex heavy, hence PRC might do it, but most other places, less likely. It's pretty easy to extrapolate PRC auto parking / self driving cars sneaking out during low congestion to hit their battery swap queue. But that is a fairly significant logistics / infra issue when most countries would be lucky to get sufficient fast charging piles in place. Battery volume is probably not an issue since batteries will be rentals for minimum XYZ capacity. And algo might eventually bid for price, i.e. discount rental for partial charge if it means your car go for a swap by itself a couple days earlier.

NIO has a battery swap station in my city in Trondheim, Norway. It has not been that popular. You might say that installing a fast charger is complex and costly, but a battery swapping station is also very costly and complex. The difference is that you can put out more fast charging stations at various locations. This means that you often have to choose between driving 20 minutes to a battery swapping station to do a 5 minute swap, or drive 5 minutes to do a 20 minute fast charge. The added complexity of a swapping station just is not worth it.

Would you do it if it was cheaper per kwh? Say you have an EV where any battery you get from the swap station is better than 90% degradation, and you pay $0.40 per kwh for the electricity in the battery- but you get the option to take a battery between 80% and 90% degradation, in which case you get the battery all filled up, but only pay $0.35 per kwh for the electricity in that battery.

Like Henry Ford tried on the Model T: The Model T was offered in three fuels: Gasoline, Electric, and Alcohol. It only took I think less than a year to make it Gasoline only.

Is there any universe where we go the electric route instead of gasoline back then? I imagine the range was nothing

There were issues with charging, motor driving, and batteries.

For converting from ac to dc for charging you had either a dc generator or old school selenium rectifiers or vacuum tubes ones. I used to have an old 60's battery charger with selenium rectifier. First car I drove had a DC generator. So wasn't until the 70's you got cheap high quality rectifiers and thyristors.

When I started my career in the 80's it was all coming together. Robust power electronics shows up then. By the end of the decade inverter controllers for motors were becoming common. And the mid 90's is when Toyota starts working on their hybrid drive. The battery they used was a nicad battery.

And then there are batteries. Before 1980 or so you're options were lead acid or nicad. The former have low energy density and the max output current was low. Nicads were expensive and also low capacity, but had higher output per weight. Which is why the Prius and the EV1 used them.

Late 80's I got a hold of some lithium primary cells they could put out a few amps at 4.1V. I did a calculation if you put 5000 of them at $10 each into an EV the battery would weigh 600lbs and put out about 250 hp. Weeee! And at $15 each the battery would cost $75k. Cause primary batteries it's $250/mile. 1 years later you had rechargeables with similar specs and cheaper.

I feel that in the 1910-20s when gasoline won the electric technology just wasn't there. People wanted electric cars to succeed buy the economics and performance wasn't there.

When cars where new they didn't go very fast and ICE efficiency was very bad. It just turned out that it's a lot easier to improve ICE power output and tank size than to improve batteries.

Probably not.

The gas piston engine didn't just power cars, it also powered aircraft, armoured vehicles, and trucks. Anyone using electric vehicles by the time World War 2 broke out against a gas piston enemy would've been constantly outmanoeuvred and outgunned. And the logistics chains to bring men and materials to the front of the enemy's front lines would've been far faster then any electric trucks at the time. Especially without the modern day micro controllers that make modern battery management systems possible.

There were electric milk delivery vehicles when I was a kid.

One where people figured out that CO2 would lead to global warming, tried to limit coal use and then discovered oil. Maybe?

Tesla tried battery swapping in 2015 and abandoned it due to a lack of customer interest (and also due to various problems that made the process less straightforward than you'd think). Both the Model S and Model X were designed from the outset to have swappable batteries.

The battery swap feature was implemented only to maximize California clean energy credits. Only enough infrastructure was built to claim the credits.

“In 2013, California revised its Zero Emissions Vehicle credit system so that long-range ZEVs that were able to charge 80% in under 15 minutes earned almost twice as many credits as those that didn’t. Overnight, Tesla’s 85 kWh Model S went from earning four credits per vehicle to seven. Moreover, to earn this dramatic increase in credits, Tesla needed to prove to CARB that such rapid refueling events were possible. By demonstrating battery swap on just one vehicle, Tesla nearly doubled the ZEV credits earned by its entire fleet even if none of them actually used the swap capability.”

NIO is still working on this and expanding outside China.

They sell a tiny amount of cars still, but hit 500k total production last year, which is not insignificant.

Premature reject. It's working in China, it would work in trucking. "Tesla tried" doesn't mean jack. No car manufacturers want to do this because it means loosing a point of innovation. It has to be regulated to happen at scale. It won't happen but not because it can't work. After all... look at 12v car batteries

Horrid quality video and not about the trucking you mean (i think), but these [0] electric dump trucks are a very welcome sight everywhere in Shenzhen, China.

[0]https://youtube.com/shorts/B0akomAQgkM?feature=shared

Battery swapping for trucks is far different from cars though. Trucks are reasonably standardised, they commonly have predestined routes and purpose built depots to operate from. If you're say Pepsi and you've got a fleet of trucks going between your warehouses you can build the infrastructure around your route.

If you look at old mobile phones with removable batteries, you'll notice that there is usually a lot of space taken up by the plastic around the battery which is designed to allow a user to replace it repeatedly. A car battery that's rapidly replaceable would need a large, strong structure around it to allow it to be replaced but also to hold together in the event of a crash. If batteries had to be swapped out, you would lose more cabin space and structural rigidity. Then you get to standardised connectors and mountings, data protocols, the list goes on. And that's before you think of the automated equipment to actually swap the batteries.

In a world where we can charge a car today from 10-80% in 10 minutes, it doesn't seem like a worthwhile engineering challenge.

Well it's patented and Tesla doesn't own the patent. But that aside, you trade a different set of problems, specifically what happens if the pack that is put into your car is damaged and as a result of that damage catches fire when it is discharging? That isn't something that happens with gasoline.

I keep hoping flow batteries can overcome their issues as replacing depleted electrolyte with charged electrolyte is much more like 'refueling' in the current sense of the word.

A patent on the idea that a battery in something that uses a battery can be replaced has to be the world's most preposterous patent.

Contaminants in fuel can cause damage to cars. I don't know if retailers tend to carry insurance for this but typically they are responsible, although proving it may not be easy. I imagine the risk would be quite rare and fairly well handled with insurance.

What's patented? Seems like a ridiculous patent if it entirely covered all practical manner of swapping batteries to recharge an EV.

Any gasoline can catch fire though, just like probably any battery can catch fire.

At some point we are going to have to stop comparing gas and electric cars.

A battery can weigh up to half a ton. Because of the weight, you want to keep it at a low position in the car. That is not easy to swap. By contrast consider that you charge your car. For a daily commute, the most practical is to charge it on your driveway or at the office. In my case that means I only have to consider public charging on vacations and longer weekend trips. Now this means my net travel speed is lower then. But I can adjust to that.

It is actually practical position for an automated swap. You drive to the position, the door on the ground open, the robot pulls the old battery and installs the new one, no hassle.

no hassle unless the door has to cope with rain, salt water drizzle and daily freeze-thaw cycles. then it suddenly starts to cost like half a spaceship

I absolutely do not want that unless there are guarantees around the condition of the batteries.

I can't imagine much worse than being on a road trip and quick swapping to a new battery that you discover, after driving away, has significantly degraded performance and range.

Why would you care if you can just go in and swap it again?

Now think about a field you know. Maybe laptops or phones.

Would a standardised battery block in laptops work? The same battery would work in a Frame.work, System76, MacBook air, MacBook pro, a Lenovo Thinkbook and whatever gaming monster there is from Asus.

Sounds stupid, right? It's just as stupid for cars.

And if laptops had battery swapping, would you swap your brand new battery, but empty, to a random one at a swapping station? Would you trust the people and systems that the battery hasn't been tampered with and is in good working order?

I am not sure it is the same. First of all the limitation in usage for a phone/laptop reduces the utility, but for a transportation device it is way worse. On phone/laptop you can use the main functions while charging, but tethered. On a car the main function is the only thing you cant use.

There does not have to have a single battery standard, could be s/m/l, like coincell, aaa, aa etc.

> Would you trust the people and systems that the battery hasn't been tampered with and is in good working order?

Do you trust random utilities/charger manufacture?

> new battery, but empty, to a random one at a swapping station.

Would you care if it is within regulated thresholds and you can get another one any time you want?

Yet standardization across manufacturers is a huge hurdle... Like every automaker has different battery designs, voltages, and cooling systems optimized for their vehicles. Plus, swapping stations require massive infrastructure investments and a steady supply of charged packs, which means even more logistics and costs.

is that infra more expensive than preparing for the holiday events when half the nation decides to relocate to somewhere else and they need on the go charging? Not just the charging stations, but grid usage etc.

Right, like propane tanks for my bbq

Would slow down battery innovation. Form factor is constantly changing right now.

> that can be field replaced

Incredibly dangerous to put naked electrical connectors right next to something flammable that you can't even extinguish.