A car made by NIO sits outside the New York Stock Exchange as the company celebrated its first day of trading in 2018
In its quest to steal Tesla’s crown as the leading player in the world’s largest electric car market, luxury electric car maker NIO is betting on a novel technology.
The “Tesla of China” is offering drivers electric cars without a battery, instead allowing customers to rent the equipment as part of its pioneering battery-swap system.
For $145 (£106) per month, NIO drivers can swap their empty batteries for fully charged ones in less than five minutes at one of the company’s 130 battery swap stations in China.
Drivers simply park their vehicle into one of NIO’s stations. The car is then hydraulically hiked off the ground, an automatic trolley appears and undoes the 10 bolts that fasten the battery. The 500kg empty battery is then taken away and replaced with a fully charged one.
A single NIO battery pack, which costs around £10,700, can fit into all of the company’s car models. That means a $52,200 NIO ES6 can be bought for 20pc cheaper without a battery.
Alternatively, most electric vehicles in the UK, Europe and US use either AC charging from a plug-in-the-wall or DC fast charging — a quicker but more expensive form that requires a trip to a specialised station.
NIO is seeing a surge in popularity as a result, with shares rising after reports of hefty back-orders. But is the battery subscription idea too good to be true?
“Battery switch stations are not going to take off because range anxiety is not the real issue here,’ says Simon Tyler, director of Something More Near, a brand strategist house.
Tyler would know, having worked with and witnessed the downfall of Better Place, an Israeli startup that raised more than $200m to build the first battery swap station.
Despite being named by Wired as the "fifth largest startup of all time" and convincing many investors battery swapping was the silver bullet for targeting the masses, Better Place filed for bankruptcy in 2013.
Electric battery/vehicle production key numbers
Tyler says Better Place had everything it needed to thrive: millions upon millions in investment, a beautiful working prototype and a fleet of electric runners, so what will it take to work now?
“If NIO is in the business of batteries then they are set up for the next 50 years,” he says. “But do I think that there’s space for a business offering battery swaps by the side of the road? I think that is quite a gamble, one that I wouldn’t like to make."
Even in countries more akin with China’s wide open spaces which require longer journeys have not seen adoption of battery swapping despite its benefits.
US manufacturer Tesla’s founder Elon Musk dabbled with the idea in 2014, eventually canning an initiative which would have allowed drivers to swap for $65 per battery.
Back of the envelope maths would suggest that a driver in the UK, where the average price for electricity is 16p per kilowatt hour, would pay a lot less (around £9) to charge a car with a standard 60 kilowatt battery at home. Musk offered a year of free fast charging to customers who bought Y or S models before 2021.
Electric car revolution | Read more
When it comes to commercial drivers, however, battery swapping does show promise.
“There are benefits for robotic or autonomous vehicle fleets where there are dozens or hundred of the same type operating out of a depot,” says Sam Abuelsamid, who leads electronic vehicle research at Guidehouse Insights.
Abuelsamid says post and courier companies that rely on fleets of large cars could benefit from the cost savings of swapping out batteries when they return to collect more packages overnight and reduce energy costs.
Take an autonomous postal fleet of the future, for example, which returns to a depot every night to load up with new packages. As the vehicles are all the same, it is easy to swap out their batteries so they are fresh for the morning and the company can keep an inventory of battery packs.
The companies could use DC fast charging, but they would need a lot of capacity and could fall foul of power company’s peak hour tariffs. Using cheaper AC charging is not an option when a company needs a van back on the road as quickly as possible.
“They can swap the batteries out, put the depleted batteries in a rack and charge those and still get the vehicle back on the road quickly but not paying for the extra electrical capacity that’s required to fast charge the vehicles all the time,” Abuelsamid says.
This keeps the batteries fresher than if they were charged using DC fast charging — which is a good thing for consumers too as it improves the life of the battery and may make it easier to sell cars on as the next buyer won’t be worried about degradation. Maintenance costs are already low due to the cars having fewer moving parts.
It could also help commercial vehicles slot into the Utopian vision of “vehicle to grid integration” where a power company can draw some of the power out of batteries that are not in use back to the grid to supply others during peak loads.
Electric dreams | BMW gets charged up
James Hodgson, leading smart mobility research at ABI Research, argues that the geography of a market is crucial context when debating the merits of the technology. In the UK and Europe, range anxiety is an “irrational” consumer worry that has been sensationalised in the first place, he says.
“The vast majority of trips could be fulfilled by a very modest battery range that you could get from a very inexpensive electric vehicle,” he says. “It’s only for those extraordinary trips where domestic charging couldn’t fulfil the need.”
However, manufacturers like Tesla and its competitors still need to convince people that they are able to take that one off trip without getting stuck on the side of the road without power but that DC fast charging does the trick on most models.
Psychology plays a huge part too, he says. The Chinese may be the largest buyers and producers of cars (making almost 26 million in 2019) but are not as obsessed with ownership in the same way as Britons and Americans. The idea of renting a battery does not seem as daunting.
This could be a generational trend that may die out as Millennials and Gen Z around the world are accustomed to subscription models and renting — be it for for Netflix, Spotify or Amazon Prime — and the move might come more naturally.
There may not even be a need for battery swapping as technology advances improve — inspired by the cells that power our smartphones and home products. Apple is reportedly working on its own car with a "breakthrough battery" poised for launch in 2024.
“There’s a lot of investment and learning in the consumer goods market and that is being transplanted into the automotive market so you can provide better life cycles with less degradation, and the ability to offer longer range on a single charge,” Hodgson says.
“Once you can solve those problems then the need for battery-as-a-service becomes less clear”.
Свежие комментарии