China is already doing EV battery swapping and here’s everything you need to know about it.
It may seem that China wants to be big in every possible technology. That’s because it is true. China does indeed want to be big in everything. We take a look at China’s efforts to become a big player in battery-swap technology for electric cars.
This technology has mostly been rejected by the rest of the world, but China is launching new battery swap stations and new battery-swap cars by the dozen each week. In this post: a bit of history, a bit of policy, and a lot of new cars. To keep this article within readable limits, I mainly look at battery swap solutions for passenger cars.
For an overview of tractor trailer trucks with swappable battery packs see my earlier article. Besides cars and trucks, China also has large battery-swap programs for buses, light trucks, delivery vans, and whatnot. More on that, perhaps, in later stories.
What is battery swapping?
Battery swapping refers to a technique where an empty battery of an electric car is replaced rather than charged. The replacing, or swapping, happens in a swapping station. The swapping process itself can be partially manual, partially robotic, or fully robotic.
The batteries are recharged either at the station itself or at a centralized charging facility. The ownership of the battery usually lies with the car maker, a utility, or the battery-swap company, not with the owner of the vehicle. The owner of the vehicle usually pays a monthly fee, sometimes called a lease, sometimes called a service-fee.
What is good, and what is not?
Proponents of battery swapping say that battery swaps are fast, a swap takes one to five minutes. Batteries are maintained well and charged in the optimal way, and will therefore put out more power and last longer. The batteries can be updated or changed completely to a new model, without any worry for the car’s owner.
At the end of their life, the batteries will be fully recycled. The purchase price of a car with a swappable battery is lower, because the owner doesn’t need to pay for the battery when he buys the car. And finally, second-hand values will be higher compared to normal EVs because there is no battery deprecation.
Those that are not convinced say that a swap may be fast, but only when you don’t have to wait, and only when enough swapping stations are around. They say that the ever faster ways of conventional charging will make battery swapping unnecessary in the near future.
Swapping, they say, isn’t as economical as it seems, because for each car the swapping system needs to have at least two batteries (one in the car and one in the station). A swapping station is large, taking the space of about three parking lots.
It is expensive too, in China, building a swapping station costs an average 3 million yuan ($450,000). And swap isn’t cheap for manufacturers either: a battery-swap-ready EV costs some 65,000 yuan ($9,700) more to build than a regular EV with a non-swappable battery.
Standardization
For battery-swapping to work best, standardization may seem important. But it is also extremely difficult. It is not like standardizing a plug, a device that you add at the end of a cable. A battery is an integral part of an electric car.
To fully standardize battery swapping, you’ll need a similar sort of batteries, of similar size, of similar weight, located in the same place in a vehicle, with the same cooling system, with the same connectors, with the same-size hatch, and with the same hatch-connectors. Try that out!
Another argument against standardization is that it forces car makers and/or battery makers to give up some of their unique battery technologies. But as we will see, some battery-swap companies in China say they have found a partial solution.
Others don’t even try. NIO battery swap stations only work with NIO cars, understandably in a way, as standardizing just their cars will be hard enough. Naturally, engineers can engineer everything. In theory, it is possible to design swapping stations that can handle any kind of car and any sort of battery.
But that will drive up size and cost so much that it seems practically impossible. The Chinese government is trying to force car companies to some standardization, so far without much success.
Battery swapping – the beginning
The idea of battery swapping is very old. The first known company to offer battery swaps was the General Vehicle Company (GeVeCo), founded in 1912 by General Electric and the Hartford Electric Light Company.
The company offered a subscription-based battery swapping service for trucks. In 1924 the service was shut down, due to corporate troubles and the ascent of the gasoline-powered truck.
It then took until 2007 for the idea to make a comeback, via a company called Better Place, based in the US but with most of its capital and operations in Israel. They launched several pilot projects with battery-swappable Renault and Nissan cars, but the concept didn’t catch on. After spending some $925 million the company went bankrupt in 2013.
There is a small side-story here: in 2010 Better Place tried to get China interested in their technology, they talked to State Grid, China’s main electric utility company, but this company wasn’t interested, as they were busy developing their own swapping systems, as we will see.
However, Better Place did develop a prototype with Chery Auto. At the time, I attended an event headlined by a representative of Better Place in Beijing, in a small and crowded room above one of my favorite bars.
They guy was very enthusiastic but didn’t seem to know much about the Chinese car market. I told him so much, at the bar after the event. Had they only listened to me! Anyway, it all came to nothing.
China Is Already Doing EV Battery Swapping And Here’s Everything You Need To Know About It, July 7, 2022
