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One of the big issues for electric vehicles is the long time it takes to recharge the batteries. Even the fastest recharging station today requires quite a bit of time. much more that filling her up with fuel.
So why not just stop at a service point and swap the depleted batteries with new ones? That should be as fast as filling the tank with gasoline, may be even faster!
Well, it is not a new idea and a few trials have taken place over the last ten years and they have all be discontinued because … of several reasons:
- structural: a vehicle supporting battery swap need to be designed in a way that the batteries can be removed quickly, hundreds of times, with complete safety. That is easier said than done. If you look at the amount of batteries in an electric car you start to see the complexity. Rather than having the batteries well positioned in a firm way on the bottom of the car you will have to make them “mobile” and this will require a strengthening of the car structure and quite a bit of engineering to detach and insert the batteries (they are heavy) in an easy way.
- business model: swapping batteries means creating a huge stock of batteries, to have them available for replacement. A very conservative figure would be to double the amount of batteries and already today one of the problem is to produce a sufficient number of batteries to equip electrical vehicles. Swapping batteries would require produce twice as much. The cost (and batteries cost quite a bit) will mean a further increase of the cost of electrical vehicles that is already higher than the one of gasoline based vehicles.
- standardisation: all cars would need to use the same kind of batteries and the same way of inserting and detaching them. So far this has not been a design goal. The market is too young to adopt standards in this area.
- accountability: gasoline is basically neutral in terms of sourcing (yes I know, petrol companies would strongly disagree but that is -at least from a perception view the reality) to the point that your vehicle does not come with a notice: “buy petrol ONLY from this supplier”. With batteries it is quite different. Car makers ask you to get specific type of NEW batteries. With swappable batteries they will have no control on the kind of battery that is going to replace the original one and in electric vehicles batteries are a crucial (possibly THE crucial) component to deliver the expected performance. Who will be accountable for a decreased performance of the car?
Hence for the above reasons, and a few others I did not mention, all attempts to swap batteries rather than recharging them hit a No Way wall.
In India, however, when you talk about electric vehicles you are not talking about electric cars but electric three-wheelers and electric (motor)bikes and here the story is different. These are very small vehicles needing much smaller battery packs, in general one battery box like the one in the photo might do.
In this context swapping is way easier, in addition these type of vehicles run in a urban environment where density is high, hence swapping is more dynamics and these reduces the stock required. Also, these vehicles are produced by a single company and this enforces a standard.
Notice that it is to be considered as another trial. It involves some 500 three-wheelers in the city of New Delhi serving some 80,000 rides a day. That is a tiny fraction of the three-wheelers driving in New Delhi (over 100,000) yet it is a start, an important one considering the level of pollution in the city and the contribution to that pollution by these vehicles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=58&v=9AcqlDAHopU
