Battery swapping is a technology that could solve one key barrier for EV adoption: consumers’ range anxiety and the long waiting time for battery charging. Wouldn’t you feel more assured on a weekend trip if you knew you could stop at a swap station and replace depleted battery packs with fully charged ones in five minutes? But this isn’t easy to do, as Tesla and Better Place’s past failures. In China, however, battery swapping has been a reality for a couple of years. How did Chinese companies like Nio make it work with 2,300 swapping stations nationwide? What can companies outside China learn from the Chinese experience?
Did you notice the charts showing Wh/kg? Since 1991, the charge a battery can hold per weight has gone up 500%, even while prices have dropped a similar percentage. That’s huge, and that’s what makes EVs (and even smartphones) so practical now, but not back then. We have made that jump