Battery Packs

novaboy80 · 23-05-2023 6:54pm #1

Why don't they exist for EV's?

It's a very simple question, as IMO it seems like it would be the answer to all the EV charging points, or lack of I should say.

We have them for every cordless tool imaginable so why not cordless cars!

The answer I presume is probably a long and complicated one but I would love to hear people's opinions as to why they don't exist.

Image every service station in the country with a fast and effective system and machine capable of performing an automated or semi automated battery pack exchange on a customers EV, surely it could be completed in under 5 minutes, the customer drives off with their fully charged battery pack and the discharged one is either been recharged at the service station or put on a pallet with the rest of the dead batteries and will be collected by the artic truck who calls daily to bring the batteries to the recharging facility which has the majority of it's electricity sourced from renewables

Makes perfect sense to me but I'm sure that there's legitimate reasons this system would not work, otherwise Tesla would have been on it.

Thoughts?

denismc · 23-05-2023 7:08pm

Chinese company Nio do a battery swap for their cars, afaik this is the only company doing this.

Not available in Ireland yet!

Tired of waiting to charge your EV? First ‘battery swap stations’ open in Europe | Euronews

the_amazing_raisin · 23-05-2023 7:11pm

It's already being done by a company called Nio

https://www.nio.com/nio-power

It works, but there are disadvantages which can outweigh the potential advantages

First, it CAN take 3 mins to swap but it's been reported that 10 mins is more of a realistic average

You have to sit in the vehicle during this time AFAIK so if you need the bathroom or something you have to do this afterwards, whereas you can do all that while the car is charging

So the time advantage isn't as great as described

The other issue is cost. You need a series of battery stations full of batteries ready to go. This can run to a cost of over €1 million per station, whereas your averag charging hub will cost a fraction of that

Or you spend the €1 million on putting something like 24 chargers on a site like Tesla do, so the chances of queueing is minimal

Tesla have tried this idea before and abandoned it in favour of Superchargers. Pretty much every other company that's looked at it also abandoned it

The only place it seems to be working well is with electric scooters like below

https://www.gogoro.com/

At a guess, this is probably down to the vastly reduced cost of the swap stations because the battery can be much smaller and carried around

24-05-2023 9:34am

If I had a high mileage car with a tired battery I would play battery swap lotto until I got a nice new one as an exchange and would then stop using the said stations.

kanuseeme · 24-05-2023 10:00am

A better place with the fluence was operating in 1 or 2 countries then went bust and early model s was designed/planning for battery swaps, another drawback would be as above, you had a good pack and now you have an sh81722 ''pack''

the_amazing_raisin · 24-05-2023 3:31pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120634434#Comment_120634434

Yeah and this is where the business model breaks down because the manufacturer basically accepts responsibility for ensuring the packs are always in good condition

I think Nio make it work because the pack is huge (110kWh IIRC) so even if it degrades a bit then you'll still have plenty of range. Also the cars themselves are very expensive so they've a decent pile of cash to pay for lots of spare packs

I don't see it working for something like a Leaf30 where a 10% degradation can be a hefty chunk of range gone, particularly if you were banking on it being enough to get you to your destination

Imagine getting a battery swapped expecting 150km of range and only getting 130km

The only other financial model that might work would be a battery lease, but we all saw how unpopular that was with Renault

24-05-2023 3:46pm

Indeed the opposite is also true. If you had a brand new Zoe would you risk driving to this station and potentially receiving my old 22% degraded pack.