Don’t charge your EV, just change the battery
In 2012, Renault sold the electric Fluence. At special battery exchange stations, his empty battery could be exchanged with a charged one in a few minutes. Those stations were in Denmark and Israel, but also at Schiphol, where Fluence taxis drove. The company behind it, Better Place, went bankrupt. Tesla opened a test station to exchange the packages under the floor of the Model S, but that too closed within a year.
Battery change stations already exist
Now Nio has 219 stations in China where they have already exchanged 2 million batteries. The second generation of Nio’s station is fully automatic and can carry out 300 switches per day. So it actually already exists, but not here. In the best case scenario, you would have one battery that uses every type of car. A standard battery. It’s not for nothing that all petrol cars take the same amount. If you had a separate gas station for every car brand with its own peg, that would not be convenient either.
Is a standard design possible?
But batteries and cars are constantly evolving – wouldn’t a standard battery design get in the way? The auto industry suffers from the ‘not-invented-here’ syndrome; if they haven’t developed it in-house, they often don’t want it. So would it come to a standard at all? And then the ultimate question: is it necessary at all? How much use is a battery exchange station now if fast charging times are close to twenty minutes?
