If you drive a gasoline car and you are running out of fuel, you have only one option, and that’s to find a gas station. Electric vehicle drivers have three choices. They could (a) slow-charge a flat battery at home overnight, (b) fast-charge it at a central point, or (c) exchange it at a swapping service. We contrast battery swapping versus recharging in this post, and find the swapping option is not wide open.
Why Is Battery Swapping At a Disadvantage Compared to Recharging?
There in no one, central standard for electric vehicle batteries, although their plug-in points are standard. EV batteries come in all shapes and sizes, and lithium-ion is no longer the almost-universal chemistry.
Michael Barnard, writing in Clean Technica is spot on when he makes a telling point. If you want to operate a battery exchange station, he says, you must a hold a range of batteries that suits customer requirements.
You would therefore need to have an extensive stockroom, what with all the new electric vehicle brands flooding North American markets. And every time a new competitor arrived, you would need to open a new bay. This is the tipping point in the battery swapping versus recharging paradigm.
Commercially Feasible Environments for EV Battery Exchange
Unless, of course, you decide to limit yourself to a niche market, which seems a logical way to proceed, given the evidence. This line of thought opens two new possibilities. These options are (a) target a specialist location and (b) provide the service in-house.
Your customer niche could be battery-powered cement trucks for example, assuming there is a limited range in your location. The industry runs a just-in-time service, and operates within city boundaries. A battery swapping service could be just the thing, if you have a load of product with a short shelf-life like premix.
A large Amazon-type distribution depot could have one hundred fork-lifts at a single location. These must be available on demand, not recharging in a quiet corner. An in-house battery-swapping service could seem a no-brainer in this situation.
We close this post with the observation that if you want to stay in business, you must supply what your market wants. And also, that you need sufficient volume to make your enterprise profitable. These factors disadvantage battery swapping versus recharging services, making it a limited market, at least for now.
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