Electric vehicles have so many advantages. No tailpipe (you're welcome joggers), low-maintenance, and crazy cheap to operate. Are there downsides to driving an EV compared to a gasoline-burning car? Yes there are, and charge time can be a big one. That's why I wonder why battery-swapping isn't taken seriously.
The problem is that it takes significantly longer to charge an EV compared to a gasoline-burning car. This may not be a problem just driving around town, but what about going on the road? Having a car has always promised the freedom of just getting in and driving, but with an EV now you have to plan out your route and think about how you're going to stay charged. You can't just jump in the car and drive to Las Vegas or Yellowstone National Park; you have to think about where to charge and for how long you'll be there. Even with a Tesla your "refuelling" time is three or four times longer than a conventional gasoline car, sometimes much longer. This is the problem I feel battery-swapping could solve.
Swapping your depleted EV battery out for a freshly-charged one could be completed automatically in a minute or two, as famously demonstrated by Tesla about seven years ago. No more waiting around or meticulously planning your stops; just get in your car and go.
Not only does battery-swapping solve the charge-time problem, it could also solve the battery cost and degradation problems.
A drawback to most EVs (Tesla much less so) is that their batteries degrade over time, so you end up with less range every year. I own a Nissan Leaf, which has the worst battery degradation of any modern EV. It started life in 2011 as a 70-mile car, and now it's a 30-mile car. Anyone who's owned a cellphone for two or three years knows the story of battery degradation too. With battery-swapping even a 20-year-old car would have like-new range. (If only I could swap the pack in my Leaf...)
EV batteries are very expensive. They are the big reason that buying a teeny commuter car like the Chevy Bolt costs around $40,000. In a battery-swapping economy, it would be possible to spread that cost out more efficiently, thereby reducing the cost of buying or using an EV. Instead of sitting for most of the day, an EV battery could be used more often by more people, meaning its shared ownership cost would be lower than a single person buying it outright.
So why is this solution all but dead? I might speculate that it is because cooperative action tends to be anathema among capitalists. The game just isn't played that way. Or another way to say the same thing might be that the industry is not yet mature enough. So here we go down the road of Tesla single-handedly creating a national charging network and other players doing a kind of shabby job trying to catch up. Here we go down the road of trying to engineer charging schemes that pump massive amounts of energy into batteries in ever-shorter times. It's like cooperative effort is so undesirable that we'll do anything else to solve the problem. Is battery-swapping an impossibility with no historical analog?
The propane industry may serve as a comparison for what a battery-swapping economy would look like. That industry has a 100-year history, standardized tank sizes, standardized safety protocols, and a leasing model. Although propane wasn't specifically for cars, it is form of energy that people wanted to use.
Like propane tanks, EV batteries could have standardized sizes like an A, B, and C size, possibly with variants and initially some proprietary sizes. I could imagine some manufactures remaining proprietary for a while (I'm looking at you, Tesla) until customer demand drove them to standardize. Who wants to own a car you can only fill at a special gas station?
Speaking of gas stations, they could change into battery swapping stations and be ubiquitous. Unlike propane tanks that have to be centrally filled, EV batteries would be "filled" right at the station on a basic L2-- this is another efficiency. EV batteries would circulate kind of like a Redbox DVD, going from station to station around the country.
The propane industry has customers that lease larger, more expensive propane tanks because it reduces upfront cost a lot and improves safety. I wonder why we couldn't use a similar approach with the super-expensive EV battery packs?
What if you could buy a good quality EV for around $20,000? That could be possible if you could buy the car and lease the battery. If you didn't have to pay in full for the expensive battery pack, I estimate that the $40,000 Chevy Bolt I mentioned earlier would cost around $18,000.
In the propane industry it's possible for a customer to purchase outright the expensive propane tank. The same could happen in the EV industry; a customer could opt to purchase the pack outright and escape any leasing arrangement.
What do you think of battery-swapping?
