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?
I think it’s great to see this happening. I’ve always thought this option makes sense. I still wish the solution was a drone that comes right to you and drops a battery into a port on your roof while you are still driving, but I guess that is going to have to wait.
I want to see someone try.
Not because it’s practical, or because it makes sense. But because it sounds like it makes sense but I’m practice would be so impractical and hard that the solution would be absolutely hilarious.
You’re driving along the freeway at 70 miles an hour, and a jet powered super drone rockets along side the car carrying a 2000 pound brick of lithium and drops it on top of you like a fucking dump truck. The shock crushes the cheap Chinese car like a can of soda and the sudden change in weight sends the drone careening off in to the air at a reasonable percentage of mach 1. The last thing you see on this earth as your brain matter is squeezed out of your eye sockets like toothpaste is a wide eyed driver in the car next to you.
The resulting pile up kills 4 people immediately, and several more later as they get caught in an expanding wave of lithium battery fires that either burn them to death or suck all of the oxygen out of the air.
Did the car get successfully recharged though?
It certainly had more chemical energy added to it, so… yes?
Sounds good. Let’s work on the business plan. ;)
Gotta start somewhere right?
I can see so many issues with what you’re proposing, but hey auto grenade dropping drones have great military application