this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
50 points (93.1% liked)
Technology
59311 readers
5315 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Just my personal opinion, Swapping sounds nice until you think about it. There's a reason battery swaps haven't been successful, and that is that for it to work, we need universally used battery types, that can be swapped by the same equipment. When batteries are not standardized, a swapping station can only serve very few models or would need huge stock of different types of swappable batteries. Both situations means great distance between swap stations, compared to universal charging stations. Apart from that there are other problems, like batteries will be unlikely to be owned, but need to be leased, usually adding extra cost.
Tesla worked with battery swaps too, but discarded the idea pretty quickly, and Tesla has been right more often than not on this kind of issue. AFAIK BYD is working on it too, but my guess is even they will fail, despite being #1 China EV/Battery manufacturer.
I'd love to be wrong though.
I think you’re right, it really may be an insurmountable logistics issue. But it’s also a complete nonstarter in a world where the only difference between models (or often their prime upselling point) is the battery capacity. There could theoretically be some kind of EU-style mandate for standardized battery sizes but I sincerely doubt it’ll happen until well past the time the market is concerned about and motivated by range.