Swap this technological dead-end out for better batteries, improved superchargers and more universal EV charging standards

Battery swapping has become a lot like hydrogen fuel cells for passenger cars: They’re automotive ideas that are never quite born, but just won’t die.

Here in 2021, Battery swapping in EVs has become an especially bad idea. It’s a technical and market dead-end that seems more about separating green investors from their money than providing a solution. That’s despite credulous media reports that coo over the (admittedly cool) spectacle of robots switching car batteries like greasy Rube Goldbergs—but tend to avoid asking tough questions about how it’s supposed to work in the real world.

The technology’s troubled history traces to Better Place, or Exhibit A in the case against battery-swapping’s future. The Israel-based Better Place—founded in 2007 by smooth-talking Silicon Valley entrepreneur Shai Agassi—promised to change the world with robotic service stations that would pluck a battery from a car and pop in a fresh one, extending its driving range in a matter of minutes. In those quaint EV days, with Tesla taking baby steps with the Roadster (built from 2008 to 2011), battery swapping seemed to hold hazy promise. Most newfangled EVs (Tesla excepted) could barely get beyond city limits on a charge, including the 2011 Nissan Leaf and its 73-mile range. Once range was depleted, reliable public charging barely existed, as I recall from my own anxious drives in San Francisco when I tested the original Leaf and BMW i3. When you did find a working plug, batteries took forever to charge.

Better Place’s alternative, through a contract with Renault, was the 2011 Fluence Z.E.: An electric sedan whose upright battery ate into trunk space and provided a piddling 80-mile range. But that battery could drop through the Renault’s floor for swaps at Better Place stations in Israel and Denmark, adding another 80 miles in about 10 minutes, rather than hours of recharging.

But despite raising nearly $900 million from investors, and the media anointing Agassi as an electric savior, Better Place imploded like the Theranos of its day. Robotic swap stations were supposed to cost $500,000 each, but ended up costing $2 million. Critically, Better Place failed to get any other automaker onboard to design and produce standardized vehicles with swappable batteries, with Agassi alienating such potential partners as BMW and GM. Better Place sold fewer than 1,500 electric Renaults before it was liquidated, with Agassi fired in disgrace in 2012. Fast Company magazine called Better Place “the most spectacularly failed technology start-up of the 21st century.”

That debacle didn’t drive the final, automated nail into battery swapping’s coffin. The latest proponents are China’s EV maker Nio, and Ample, a San Francisco-based startup. China’s Nio has taken on the challenge of designing compatible cars, and a few hundred robotic stations that swap out batteries in three to five minutes. Cars roll into a covered bay for a hydraulic lift. Laser-guided wrenches unscrew bolts and lower the battery case from the car. That battery is whisked away on a motorized track, and a fresh one is installed. Despite the whiz-bang tech, Nio’s stations still require a human operator to safely drive the car onto the lift and monitor the process. It’s akin to every public charger coming with its own pump attendant.

Last fall, Nio launched a “Battery as a Service” subscription: Think of it as buying a car with “Batteries Not Included.” Since batteries remain the most expensive EV component, the plan saves owners roughly $10,000 on the car’s price. In return, owners pay about $142 a month to lease a 70 kWh pack with six monthly swaps. In April, Nio claimed it had performed 2 million total exchanges at its Power Swap stations, with users gaining an average of 123 miles of range per swap.

That’s a solid range boost in five minutes. But time, in multiple senses, is still conspiring against battery swapping. Jeremy Michalek, a mechanical engineering professor and director of Carnegie Mellon’s vehicle electrification group, calls battery swapping a relic of a bygone EV age.

Today’s new EVs routinely deliver 200 to 400 miles of range, with a potential 517 miles for the forthcoming Lucid Air. Those EVs charge in 35 minutes or less at Tesla Superchargers and other oases for time-pressed drivers. DC fast charging times have soared by roughly sevenfold, to today’s top 350-kilowatt units. Why do drivers need a contraption to extract the 630-kilogram battery of a Porsche Taycan Turbo, when they can juice that battery in 20 minutes flat? Lucid says its Air will add up to 300 miles of range in the same 20 minutes. That’s enough for nearly five hours of highway driving at 60 mph, before it’s time for a fill-up.

“When you’re looking at 300 miles of range from a fast charge, it changes the game for how convenient EVs are,” Michalek said. “You’re going to spend 20 minutes going to the bathroom and getting coffee anyway.”

In addition, the world has spoken, loudly. Governments around the world are choosing DC charging as the tech winner, including President Joe Biden’s plan to invest $15 billion to install at least 500,000 public chargers. Tesla demonstrated battery-swapping in 2013 on its Model S before abandoning the tech—with reasons including cumbersome stations and tepid consumer interest—in favor of its Supercharger network that now appears a smarter bet.

Read more: IEEE SPECTRUM

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The European CO2 regulation for new passenger cars appears to be a complete success story. In 2020, the share of electric vehicles rose from 3% to 11%, the average type-approval CO2 emission level decreased from 122 g/km to about 97 g/km, and none of the manufacturers will be subject to noteworthy penalties as all of them are on track for compliance with the regulatory targets.

That the regulation would be a success was not always that clear, however. In reality, it was a rocky road to get to where the European vehicle market is today. Once it became clear that the European Union would implement its first regulation for new car CO2 emission levels, the rate of emissions reduction increased from about 1.2% per year to 3.5% per year by 2008 (Figure 1). At that pace, it was easy for manufacturers to comply with the first regulatory target of 130 g/km by 2015. Unfortunately, only a part of the CO2 reductions achieved during this first regulation’s time period were real, with the majority attributed to manufacturers aggressively gaming the test procedure.

Once the 2015 target had been met, manufacturers showed little interest in further reducing the CO2 emissions of their vehicles. Between 2016 and 2019, type-approval emissions even increased, from 118 g/km to 122 g/km. It was only from January 2020 onwards that manufacturers changed course. Within one year, the official new car CO2 emissions fell by 20.5%, which is more than during the entire 2008-2019 timeframe. The electric vehicle market share more than tripled within one year, easily outpacing other markets such as China and the United States.

This fluctuation reveals one weakness of the EU’s CO2 regulation: Unlike in the United States, the European policymakers did not set annual targets, but instead opted for five-year target intervals. As a result, the 2015 CO2 target applied during the entire 2015-2019 time period until the next regulatory target took effect in 2020. Manufacturers clearly took advantage of this regulatory weak spot by optimizing their vehicle fleet mix in 2016–2019 towards profits, largely ignoring CO2 emissions and delaying the launch of some electric vehicle models until 2020. At the same time, the breathtaking change in the market composition in 2020 highlights a strength of the manufacturers: With the right regulatory instruments in place, vehicle manufacturers can quickly adapt their product portfolio and marketing strategy in such a way that tripling electric vehicle shares and reducing CO2 more than 1% per month becomes possible.

Unfortunately, we Europeans are on a pathway to repeat our mistakes of the past. The currently adopted policies require manufacturers to reduce the average CO2 emission level of new cars by 15% by 2025 and by 37.5% by 2030, all relative to a 2021 baseline. The resulting annual CO2 reduction of about 5% is significantly lower than what manufacturers achieved in 2020 (20.5%) and close to the annual 3.5% reduction in the early years of the first CO2 regulation. These policies fail to account for the significant technological advances in the industry, with electrification enabling much faster emission reductions than combustion engine efficiency improvements. In order to be on a pathway that is compatible with the EU’s longer-term climate protection objectives, what we really need by 2030 is a reduction in average new car CO2 emission levels by at least 70%, instead of 37.5%.

But it is not only the target levels themselves that are problematic. The fact that there are no current interim targets entails the great risk that manufacturers will play games again, delivering the CO2 reductions required only at last minute, while holding technology levels constant in the intervening years. Such an approach is detrimental from a climate protection perspective because the sooner new car CO2 emission levels fall, the faster annual fleet-wide CO2 emissions decline and the higher cumulative CO2 benefits are, relative to a business-as-usual scenario.

Aside from the climate protection angle, there is a very important industrial angle to this as well. At a time when politicians across Europe are working hard to persuade companies to increase battery development and manufacturing capacities within Europe, it is of utmost importance to ensure market stability for planning the necessary investments in factories and workers. Without interim targets, such stability is lacking, as the following assessment shows.

In 2020, the new registration share of zero- and low-emission vehicles (ZLEVs) was 11%. Applying a discount factor for plug-in hybrid vehicles, the weighted ZLEV share was about 9%. Leaving any regulatory credits aside, the average new internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle in 2020 emitted about 117 g/km of CO2 in the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC).

Manufacturers can meet the current 2025 CO2 reduction target of 15% solely by improving the efficiency of conventional combustion engines and transitioning towards mild hybrid vehicles. Emissions from ICE vehicles would decrease by about 4% per year to 96 g/km in NEDC terms. Credits for eco-innovations and an exploitation of the flexibilities of the new Worldwide harmonized Light vehicles Test Procedure (WLTP) would further help comply with the 2025 target. Following this pathway, an increase in the market share of electric vehicles would not be necessary until as late as 2029.

Read more: icct

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