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?
The example of driving from Paris to Mt St Michel where you have to plan carefully to get to ‘the only supercharger’ east of Paris is a bit stupid. Why not charge at Total, Engie, or even Lidl? I assume Teslas are not exclusively charged at superchargers, which can be pretty slow at 150kW when there are 300kW options as well.
A good and in France rapidly improving charging network is important, swapping batteries sounds nice but brings so many compatibility and standardization issues, not considering ownership/lock-in etc.
I stopped reading the article there.
Either the author is voluntarily misleading or he has no idea of what he is talking about.
Here is the map all the fast charging stations (>100kW) along the way between Paris and the Mont St Michel.
The Tesla model 3 in Europe uses the standard combo CCS plug so it can use all of these stations.
I did not count them but at a first glance the number of charger is higher than “none”
Edit: OK I read the article after all but I really don’t see what problem battery swapping would solve.
I could see a use case for public transport that has to go a specific road and need to run non stop every days but even then I suspect that having overhead cable on a short section to charge the battery while running would be more appropriate than battery swapping.
The article is talking about the lack of charging station but battery swapping just make the problem way way worse. A battery charger is just a parking spot and a high voltage AC - DC transformer connected to the grid. It’s relatively cheap and easy to install, does not take much space and work for all electric cars compared to a battery swapping station that can only work for one specific brand (specific model too ?) need robotics and plenty of storage. Its much harder and expensive to install and you need one charging station per brand. This means less stations overall.
Finally there is the speed of charging, this is true that battery swapping is probably faster than fast charging but honestly I don’t find charging an electric car that inconvenient.
On long highway trips I need to stop around 20 minutes every 2 hours, a 20 minutes break every 2 hours is not that bad, just enough time for a toilet break, a quick coffee before going back on the road.
The cost to install stations would dramatically reduce if you had one stations that could supply 20 parking lots instead of one station for each two lots.
It also shuts up all the complaints about batteries going dead and the cost of replacing them.
I do agree ice vehicles are already very convenient and most people complaining are mostly just parroting oil propoganda, but making them even more convenient isn’t a bad thing.
I don’t think many run their batteries to the ground but it’s nice to know someone can just bring you a spare if you do.
Probably one platform (used for several models, sometimes shared between brands. For instance VW Polo, Audi A1, Seat Ibiza and Skoda Fabia are all based on the same platform).
Unless you have cars with modular battery packs, which do not exist right now.
Tesla drivers are c*nts anyways :p Focus on proper EVs.