this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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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.