But time, in multiple senses, is still conspiring against battery swapping. That’s a solid range boost in five minutes. In April, Nio claimed it had performed 2 million total exchanges at its Power Swap stations, with users gaining an average of 123 miles of range per swap. In return, owners pay about $142 a month to lease a 70 kWh pack with six monthly swaps. Last fall, Nio launched a “Battery as a Service” subscription: Think of it as buying a car with “Batteries Not Included.” Since batteries remain the most expensive EV component, the plan saves owners roughly $10,000 on the car’s price. It’s akin to every public charger coming with its own pump attendant. Despite the whiz-bang tech, Nio’s stations still require a human operator to safely drive the car onto the lift and monitor the process. That battery is whisked away on a motorized track, and a fresh one is installed. Laser-guided wrenches unscrew bolts and lower the battery case from the car. Cars roll into a covered bay for a hydraulic lift. China’s Nio has taken on the challenge of designing compatible cars, and a few hundred robotic stations that swap out batteries in three to five minutes. The latest proponents are China’s EV maker Nio, and Ample, a San Francisco-based startup. That debacle didn’t drive the final, automated nail into battery swapping’s coffin. Fast Company magazine called Better Place “the most spectacularly failed technology start-up of the 21st century.” Better Place sold fewer than 1,500 electric Renaults before it was liquidated, with Agassi fired in disgrace in 2012. Critically, Better Place failed to get any other automaker onboard to design and produce standardized vehicles with swappable batteries, with Agassi alienating such potential partners as BMW and GM. Robotic swap stations were supposed to cost $500,000 each, but ended up costing $2 million. But that battery could drop through the Renault’s floor for swaps at Better Place stations in Israel and Denmark, adding another 80 miles in about 10 minutes, rather than hours of recharging.īut despite raising nearly $900 million from investors, and the media anointing Agassi as an electric savior, Better Place imploded like the Theranos of its day. When you did find a working plug, batteries took forever to charge.īetter Place’s alternative, through a contract with Renault, was the 2011 Fluence Z.E.: An electric sedan whose upright battery ate into trunk space and provided a piddling 80-mile range. Once range was depleted, reliable public charging barely existed, as I recall from my own anxious drives in San Francisco when I tested the original Leaf and BMW i3. Most newfangled EVs (Tesla excepted) could barely get beyond city limits on a charge, including the 2011 Nissan Leaf and its 73-mile range. In those quaint EV days, with Tesla taking baby steps with the Roadster (built from 2008 to 2011), battery swapping seemed to hold hazy promise. The Israel-based Better Place-founded in 2007 by smooth-talking Silicon Valley entrepreneur Shai Agassi-promised to change the world with robotic service stations that would pluck a battery from a car and pop in a fresh one, extending its driving range in a matter of minutes. The technology’s troubled history traces to Better Place, or Exhibit A in the case against battery-swapping’s future. That’s despite credulous media reports that coo over the (admittedly cool) spectacle of robots switching car batteries like greasy Rube Goldbergs-but tend to avoid asking tough questions about how it’s supposed to work in the real world. It’s a technical and market dead-end that seems more about separating green investors from their money than providing a solution. Here in 2021, Battery swapping in EVs has become an especially bad idea. Battery swapping has become a lot like hydrogen fuel cells for passenger cars: They’re automotive ideas that are never quite born, but just won’t die.
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