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this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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Imagine if we could swap batteries on the car with these. Daily commute to work in the city? pick the sodium ion version for safety and longevity, lower density but enough for daily errands. Wanna go out for a long drive for camping? switch to a higher density battery without any worry of running out of juice.
I never understood why swappable batteries weren't prioritized as standard in the first place. Decouple charging time from refueling time, and you could be in and out of the service station in minutes. Plus, batteries degrade over time, so a long-lasting car is going to need replacements eventually anyway.
Batteries in EV don't degrade that much, it is now expected that for most cars the battery will last longer that the car itself.
https://scienceillustrated.com/technology/how-long-do-electric-car-batteries-last-what-6300-electric-vehicles-tell-us-about-ev-battery-life
Regarding charging time, charging time is not that much of an issue. With a decent battery you need to stop roughly 15-20 min every 2 hours on the highway, less on smaller roads.
It's honestly not a big issue and the charging time is being reduced with new technologies of batteries. What could be an issue in the other hand of the lack of charger. For this issue swapping batteries would only make things worse. An EV charger is a very basic infrastructure compared to a swapping station.
Building a swapping station would be orders of magnitude more expensive than an EV charging station and requires way more space. So I suspect we only would have a limited amount of stations available.
Lastly, going to the station to refuel a car is a reflex inherited from thermal engine powered cars. Most of the EV charging is done during the night at home or on the parking spot. Public chargers are used only occasionally.
So for all these reasons I think swappable batteries are actually a terrible idea for regular cars even though it sounds like a good idea.
That’s just it. Swappable batteries sound really cool and appealing, and I guess that’s why NIO is trying them out. Building that sort of infrastructure is incredibly expensive, and it comes with high financial risks. Finding that kind of money from investors appears to be happening, but I don’t know if they actually have enough runway to make it viable. To me, that sounds like an infrastructure project only a government could do.