Note 1: Nio just announced that the vehicle now comes with Zero free pack swaps. Note 2: Given that the Model S was released about 11 years ago, we don't know how long the average Tesla battery will last. They should last, on average, at least 12-15 years, but it could be much longer. Of course, individual experiences will vary depending on the battery pack and how well the battery is looked after. The exception is of course extreme conditions where the battery might only last about a decade. That might be another situation where Nio pack swapping might make more sense for the consumer (living in the desert). Note 3: Some people are saying that no one owns a vehicle for that long. Yeah, they don't, but people will factor these things in when buying and selling used vehicles.
Battery lifetime is not measured in years, but in number of complete charge/discharge cycles. That number is itself affected by a) how well the battery management system is designed (great on Teslas, appalling on Nissan Leafs...), and b) how much care, respectively abuse, the car owner puts on the battery. Some Tesla battery packs are over 500k miles "old" and still above 80% of charging capacity!
@@st-ex8506 Actually, since battery lifetime exceeds 3 years, calendar aging is a very important factor to take into account regarding battery degradation.
@@neutronpcxt372 I am no battery expert, just someone who reads/watches videos quite a bit on the matter. But I can calculate. So, I'll walk you through my reasoning, and you'll tell me where I err. Assumption 1: We are dealing with a Model 3 with an initial real-world range of 300 miles (for simplicity of calculation). Assumption 2: That battery's capacity will degrade down to 70%, in a straight line fashion, over 1500 full cycles. Therefore, the number of miles that the car can accumulate until its battery hits the 70% arbitrary limit is: 300 * 1500 * 0.85 (the mid-point capacity degradation) = ca. 382'000 miles. The average US motorist drives 13'500 miles per year. So, the car will last him or her (provided he or she is a "keeper", of course) 28 years!!! That's what Teslas' are designed for... roughly of course. I am ready to believe that there is also a calendar time component to the battery's aging, but it is unlikely to be the driving one! Having said this, there are plenty of examples of cars with over 500k miles, whose batteries are not below 80%. Those cars are obviously driven a lot, so the calendar aging impacts them little... that MAY explain things...
The biggest drawback IMHO is customers don't arrive in exactly 5 minute intervals, that arrive randomly. This will require you to queue so you don't miss a turn, no plugging in and walking away like at a SuperCharger. When you goto an "In and Out" burger after work the line can be 20 cars long, you queue for 15 minutes for the 45 seconds it take you to accept you food and pay. Compare that to the people who park walk inside, place an order go to the bathroom and get a served in 5 minutes.
@@st-ex8506 That's why I used both. Because both are important. It's a big focus of research right now because scientists have realized it's neglected in favor of cycle life. Chemistries that use more silicon are showing calendar aging issues that weren't expected, for example.
The thing that concerns me about pack swapping is that the undercarriage is not always going to be nice and pristine, corrosion, mud, snow, dings from road debris, etc will interfere with the fasteners and mating surfaces. Just keeping the mechanical connections in good shape for 10+ years is a rather difficult task.
Great analysis and very well explained. I've always assumed that swapping wouldn't make sense from a cost perspective knowing how incredably focused Elon is on costs. One of the reasons I've had very high conviction in Tesla is not because of Tesla (as I'm not really a car person), but because I've seen his approach and success in cost cutting at SpaceX.
When I saw the title, I initially wasn't as interested in watching this video compared to your usual ones - however, it's excellent and I'm glad I did watch.
I've seen video of Drew Baglino, Tesla CTO talking about why Tesla abandon Swapping. It's mostly about cost and I think it's also about engineering (both is link of course). You want no moving parts, high reliability which you can't get that from swapping.
Excellent work Jordan. Your final conclusion was was well reasoned though for me personally I would have never considered renting out the battery unless I was in a very specific situation. Years ago this option of battery rental was given in Europe in the early days of EV, but quickly people realized it wasn't a good deal for them. Of course many in Europe at the time buying an EV had off street parking and were probably also reasonably well off and did the math. Reno was one that offered battery rental but after about two years or so they dropped it. It was especially difficult for those who owned the car but not the battery when they wanted to sell their car... it was a nightmare. This also led to changes being made and of course more data on battery life.
I've caught a lot of flack from nio fans for saying battery swap is dumb, been saying that when the share price was ATH. Every way you look as an engineer bat-swap is a fat cost pig. Did you mention the chassis design is complex, bloated & kills torsional stiffness? Just thinking of the cooling fluid couplings gives me a headache. Oh yeah, the nio club house is even dumber.
The cost of renting vs owning the battery pack for the owner doesn’t make sense to analyze over 18 years because most owners don’t keep their vehicles for 18 years. We are not interested in the cost for the life of the vehicle, but in the cost for the life of ownership. So it makes more sense to calculate over the course of 3-9 years that most people keep their cars
You are too confident the market will accurately price in the ownership advantage over the rented battery as I doubt people will choose to pay the premium required to cover the amortization costs
He didn’t include the charging cost of owning the battery vs renting the battery, which results in saving 4K USD per year for renting the 75kwh battery
17:05 Regarding the free upgrade: I doubt that the 75 and 100 kWh packs would fit into a compact vehicle. In that case, the upgrade would only work for 75->100.
Max swap station throughout mentioned was over 300. I think it is an assumption that should be questioned. Just because you can swap every 4minutes and hold 20 or so packs doesn’t mean you can charge them at the same time in parallel. 20 x 100kw is a lot of power to pull at the same time. I don’t think the swap station can provide storage and power and cooling for that many packs.
The Pony Express managed comparatively high speed mail delivery by doing horse and rider swaps on a cross country route. The Pony Express was in operation for only 18 months. It kind of made sense in the brief period before transcontinental train service was available, and there was enough demand for $5 per letter delivery. (That was $5 in 1860 dollars.) There may be customers that can economically justify battery swapping today. I am sure the market and technology will rapidly evolve to destroy those few niche situations.
I agree it will be niche, Cop cars, ambulances, even some taxi services. Of course I could simply lack the imagination required to see how those things could work by charging and I am not saying that it couldn't be done...
I think your final throughput number to get to the 50:1 wastage calculation are far too optimistic. Getting to 50% use would mean cars queueing for 12 hours a day, or arriving permanently all day and all night. Superchargers can easily see a 10:1 ratio between peak times and night. Unless you want hour long wait time (Bufferbloat in queueing theory terms), I would be surprised if even an ideally placed station can do more than two hours worth of peak throughput a day - maybe 30 total. That reduces your number to 10:1 and still assumes one common pack design and well-placed, highly used stations. You can take a look at networking or payment systems for similar throughput vs. queue vs. peak capacity rates. In addition, 36% of Superchargers have 6 stalls or less, and 34% are in the awkward 8-10 stall size that would require two lightly used swap stations to match. That means that until you have tens of millions of cars on the roads, integer size requirements easily reduce efficiency by 50% or more.
Do you know why? I'm guessing snow, salt, sand and freezing temperatures can play hell on those. I've had a few cheap Chinese ebikes, and they were clearly not designed for a climate where things simply never dry out for months on end.
To me, Nio is to electric vehicles what Redbox is to movies. It's a cool concept that would be really useful if you couldn't just get the same result sitting on your couch at home by streaming it through a wire in the wall
Another great job Jordan! This topic is important and I believe the benefits of battery swap have been over sold or compared against older battery tech. The pace of battery tech is moving along at a rapid pace and if we realistically consider the time it would take to build out a swapping station network, it will be a decade or longer before it is anywhere near where it truly needs to be. The flexible footprint of charging stations makes them easy to put into most communities. The only reason Tesla would need larger footprint for a charging station is if it was a combo of battery backup, solar, and charging station, thus making it an off grid option station, which would be great for many reasons including when the power grid is knocked offline. Tesla could become the emergency power supplier in natural disasters or if some crazy political mess cuts oil supply way down. EVs will keep things going by using the charging stations Tesla built with battery backup and solar. Back to the topic of this video, thank you for hammering the supplies and management issues with swap stations. As you noted, all those moving parts creates a high likely hood of failure. Which means the station not only go off line, but Nio will have to have contractors or staff costs to go fix those stations. Not only is there repair costs, but all that maintenance will need to be managed, which adds to their costs. Not to say charging stations do not need repairs or maintenance, but it is much lower levels. It does seem like fans of swapping are using a very skewed view of things to make it seem like battery swap is a clear winner. If Tesla does release their costs on their current generation charging station costs, I am guessing it will be surprisingly low. As you noted, the volume of chargers being built is helping to lower costs with economies of scale, but then add in Tesla endless cost cutting redesigns and approach, I could see them cutting the $40,000 per charging station down to $20,000 while boosting output which will shorten charge times for many users. Looking at Nio as a company, they feel like they use gimmicks to try and stand out. The Nio lounges, those hang out places in high rent neighborhoods in Europe and other places, seems like a massive waste of money. The little dash robot head is cute and some love it, but I just see that as something that requires repairs down the road and for me, it adds nothing to the appeal of their vehicles. Unless there is a massive shift in the way Nio operates, I believe they will be one of the first big EV brands out of China to fail. Only if the CCP decides it will fund Nio to keep them going will they have a long future. They may surprise me, but I just have not been impressed with how they manage their business and their doubling down on the whole battery swap system.
Very thorough video. I think beyond this analysis one has to simply look at fast charging trends, cell advancements and long pack longevity that already exist to see that any advantage pack swapping might have now will be gone within 10 years anyway. Pack swapping has its negatives with the one positive of slightly faster pack charging. Once that one advantage is lost then what you have left is a huge charging infrastructure sitting there as a massive stranded asset for Nio.
I think NIO gives us more choices, while comparing the advantages and disadvantages of charging and battery replacement options, it is important to discuss that NIO is also building a large number of charging stations and developing battery technology
Thank you for talking me out of the notion of even considering the idea of ever purchasing a Nio. The costs are too much for any convenience it could provide. Any information regarding the Canoo subscription service costs would be welcome.
Coincident with the release of your video, NIO reduced their prices and removed pack swapping as an included feature. You can buy it but I think that will probably end NIO pack swapping due to lack of buy-in by owners.
They just reduced the number of free swaps per month, but it's still there as a feature. Trying to become revenue positive. Agree witht the conclustion though!
Having driven a lowest range Tesla model 3 on a long drive, I was totally ready for break from driving each time the car wanted charging There's no need for the speed of swapping
One long ass comment. Given how much false information this video has (listed below), take all the analysis with a huge grain of salt. But I have to say nice video and conjectures, though many are wrong because Nio is kinda bad at marketing and has no real intention to explain all the technical details to people. People also have a tendency to overestimate the cost of swap stations vs fast chargers. This is natural but wrong. Nio is also very capable of deploying their new 800v 500kW chargers thanks to these battery swap stations. These swap stations need a lot of power (>630kW) and is ideal to also add 500kW chargers so people who have 800v cars can enjoy these when the swap station isn’t busy charging. Right now in China it is not easy to find these 800v fast chargers. 4:16 you got the price wrong. It’s actually 136 USD for 75 kWh and 235 for 100 kWh. And coming up with a price for owning is kinda absurd since you just buy it when you buy the car and who knows how long a user is going to keep it for. In terms of cost per swap for users in China it’s about the same if not lower for charging at a fast charger. 11:45. Most of the 2500 swap stations are 2.0 (probably more than 2200) and Nio is planning to add 1000 3.0 stations this year. 11:51 swap speed is about 5 mins including having the car move in and out of the station. There are plenty of videos online in China filming the whole process, in Europe it seems to be taking a little longer right now for some reason. 12:01 one swap station takes up four parking spaces. 14:30 drawback no.1, Nio is already doing very well with swapping, you don’t need to worry about this. 15:29 drawback no.2, yes but so what? At one 2.0 station per 350 vehicles this is only 4% more batteries. 3.0 has more batteries because it would support Nio’s cheaper brand which has a different type of battery pack. And the more battery a station has the more it can act as an energy storage device and the better it is at taking in cheap electricity at night and sell (swap) when electricity is expensive in the day. 15:50 it should allow batteries to last longer because Nio does not necessarily need to charge them so quickly. They have a complex algorithm to estimate demand and they swap stations and run checks on batteries that can’t be done in vehicles. 18:50 so all Nio vehicles have to use the same pack size with the same connectors. So Nio can’t build small cars which they don’t plan to do. So Nio can’t do CTC but hey you can refuel in 5 mins. 19:47 Okay getting a little frustrated at this point with how much misinformation you are presenting (not exactly your fault). Nio’s cars actually are capable of charging at very good speeds. A test done recently in China shows Nio’s 400v car can charge about as fast as Xpeng’s 800v G9. Both using the latest chargers under ideal situations (being the only car charging). Nio has not focused too much on charging speed because they don’t need to. But Nio’s next gen 3.0 platform will be 800v and should charge very fast. Sigh, can go on a bit more but probably not necessary. 20:43 This is wrong. Nio has never disclosed the cost of their battery swap stations. There is a very good estimate (with recognition from the boss of Nio Power) that puts the price of a 2.0 swap station in China at 175k USD without batteries (and the author claims he confirmed with people in Nio’s supply chain and the cost is actually much lower). This is about the price of a supercharging station with 1 480kW charger plus 5 120kW chargers in China. With batteries (assume 12 100kWh batteries) it should be about another 167k USD. So the absolute upper bound for Nio’s 2.0 station would be 342k USD with batteries, not 435k USD without, and the actual price should be lower. 22:00 I doubt the price of superchargers will decrease. The true expensive part was never about the chargers but just how much power is needed and the cost associated with the electrical grid. And the bottleneck is forsure both the infrastructure and the battery or else you should already be seeing 800v 500kW chargers getting deployed everywhere.
1) Pack price depends on the country, as I said in the video. I used the most up to date info I could find for a comparable market to the U.S. Doubtlessly cheaper in China. 2) Yup, that doesn't conflict with what I said. 3) I used Europe. So the information here isn't wrong. I also didn't cover the multi-day outages that some swapping stations are experiencing. 4) Incorrect, you have to include ingress and egress, exactly as I said. 5) See point #3. These stations go out of order and aren't repaired in a timely fashion. 6) Already covered later in the video. Anyhow, I'm at #6 here and it seems most of the issue here is that you didn't pay close attention to what I said in the video. Probably not worth covering the rest for that reason.
@@thelimitingfactor 4) When you arrive at the battery swap station, the battery replacement will proceed in order, so you can park nearby if it is not your turn. Therefore, no separate space such as ingress and egress is required. The same is true of charging stations. Just as space is needed only for vehicles being charged in charging stations, but no separate entrance space for another vehicle is needed.
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Great input, Zhang, thank you, thank you, thank you!
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Your base confusion, @thelimitingfactor, is conflating "battery swap" with "Nios offering as of 2023".
I am not a fan of Nio etc. but the argument that Tesla´s supercharging with 450kW is leading to only 25min charging time and will improve in the future is a little bit utopical when we assume that there will be a big rollout of EVs in the future. The limiting factor (hah) is the power infrastructure of the surroundings. Battery swapping only makes sense to increase the battery charging load of the station to 100% all the time. The fact that Nio is fast charging their batteries IN the swapping station completly misses the point... Here in Germany, especially on the Autobahn, the gas stations have up to 10 pumpstations that can be occupied at the same time. There will be very large infrastructure costs if the gas station owner needs to build a 5MW powerline...Also ignoring the fact that 10 charging stations will not be economical viable. 20-30 probably more realistic leading to 15MW of power drawn.
The charging load for chargers or a swap station will, like always, depend on the amount of vehicles flowing through. Power lines vs. digging and installing tanks.. Nothing comes without a trade off
NIO actually has to sell some cars here in Europe before the issue of battery rental or outright purchase becomes pertinent. The consensus here is that Tesla is the one to beat and the independent reviews of NIO have been less than glowing. Finally the prices of Chinese EV imports do not compare well with those of Tesla or other manufacturers such as VW, Audi, Skoda, BMW and Stellantis. It may come as shock to many Americans but Stellantis actually sold 288,000 EVs in Europe last year. It’s European subsidiaries, Vauxhall, Peugeot, Citroen, DS, Opel and Fiat are all producing inexpensive small EVs.
Couple advantages of battery swapping: it's super easy to replace a bad battery, Tesla costs $20k but NIO can do it at $10/(2 swaps) and the bad one failed health check at the station and get recycled by NIO. Also the batteries in the station play a role in grid balancing when no one wants a swap at low traffic time. And most importantly, when larger battery size come out, like NIO's 150kwh one, you can easily upgrade it.
@@dada373678229 @Joey Z The limiting factor in the video said that the cost of replacing a Tesla battery is about $5,000 to $10,000, and the article I read says it's $16,000 for the Model 3. In a survey conducted by Slash Gear, a high-tech media outlet last year, it was reported that 65.7% answered that they were not willing to buy a Tesla despite the expensive battery replacement cost. For the Model 3, Tesla's cheapest model, which offers a battery warranty of eight years or 100,000 to 150,000 miles, battery replacement costs reach $16,000.
Regarding the cost comparison. One quick note, the life of the battery is kinda irrelevant. What matters is it's resale value. Likely after 80k miles it will be worth almost nothing despite having many useful miles left.
Comprehensive video on a divisive subject. Nice work. When you mention it's a niche case, I got the impression you're referring it more with a US state of mind? Urban dwellers, who can not possibly charge easily is very common in China... Nio have completed close to 26m battery swaps to date. This is a staggering number that clearly shows adoption acceptance. You mention about charging time with Tesla but I'd mention it's worth highlighting this will change significantly for Tesla now they are opening up their network. Wait times will undeniably increase. You focus a lot on the numbers & rightly so but the most often overlooked aspect I feel is optionality. In China they really enjoy going on long road trips. The ability to change your battery to 50% and soon to be 100% more range is a considerable advantage to their peers. While lastly, Tesla are the clear EV leader & will more than likely remain. In a world that is saturated with EV offerings being able to differentiate yourself from your peers is of the utmost importance. Branding is king. BaaS achives this in spades. And as mentioned earlier 26m swaps to date highlights the acceptance
Yes! Good point I could have used more precise wording there. I'll be interested to see the actual increase for Tesla. It will be a year before other automakers switch over, and that fleet will pale in comparison to Tesla's fleet. Some are using the magic dock, but that's at limited locations. Fair point over all
It is definitely interesting to observe how different automakers arrive at different solutions based on the requirements of their home market. Then we'll see how well that transfers to the other markets. My guess is NIO could do ok in urban Europe where we have lots of apartments without dedicated garages but I see them fail in the US.
@4:41 This is only true if one buys the car and owns it for 18-22 years. Most people own a car for 5 years and then sell it. The depreciation when they sell it after 5 years results in not getting all their money back from purchasing the battery which drives up the real cost of what they paid per month for the battery over 5 years. Not sure it would result in a cost still less than renting or similar but just something to factor. @11:00 I have found that when traveling between cities or long distances using Superchargers at gas stations that it usually takes much longer than 5 minutes for people to get out of their car, plug in, get everybody out of the car, walk inside, use the bathroom, get snacks, pay for snacks, walk back out to the car, get everyone back in the car and take off. Typically I find that in order to get my family to do all this without being a tyrant it takes 15-20 minutes anyway. But we can all do this at the same time with the car sitting there plugged in. Interestingly with ICE cars it isn't as convenient. One person usually has to stay behind anyway and pump the gas until full and finish the payment transaction and then get in and drive to a parking spot and park again so then they can go in and do their business. This staggered overlap of people doing their business offset by around 5 minutes makes the process even longer. Pack swapping will result in similar stops as an ICE since again one person will have to stay with the car while the pack swaps while everyone else does their business, then when done swapping they will have to pull out, look for parking, park a second time and go inside and do their business while everyone else waits in the car. So ultimately single drivers without a place to park at home that has any power like street parkers will find that pumping gas and battery swap will be faster than DC fast charging at this point in history. But long distance driving it likely isn't really any faster. But in 10 years DC fast charging will likely be so similar in time that there will be no reason for complex mechanical battery swapping.
Another NIO beat-up by a pro-Tesla youtube site. Why can't people give credit where credit is due? Swapping is incredible and will go hand in hand with standard charging at home and by public pole ... Battery swapping will suit some and not others.
Notably, no counterpoints. If I were pro-Tesla, I wouldn't sing the praises of CATL and BYD, which are also Chinese companies. What's different about Nio? They've adopted a dumb strategy if they want to compete with BYD and Tesla at a super-massive scale.
Thanks for the work collating the information. Except for the luxury customer who values novelty there seems to be no business case for NIO to operate. Even the long haul driver would soon see a policy change to limit battery swaps to help keep NIO in business. I wonder if you could extend your video or make another one about the big factor I hoped you'd cover: Given many companies making EVs will go bankrupt (leaving a few giants), how would you recommend valuing company viability in the EV purchase decision? For NIO, the rental makes for an interesting twist. Assuming they'll go bankrupt but being able to get the use of an EV without paying for the battery up front, what value does that present? Also, not paying for the battery allows the sale of the car should a step change in batteries at scale occur (sodium? sulphur?). Your depreciation would be less compared to owning the battery and could then buy a newer EV with the better battery. And maybe if NIO hangs on, you might be able to get that newer battery chemistry as part of the rent. TL;DR: Taking company viability into account it may look like only 1 or 2 companies would be able to support their warranty over 20 years...and what discount should that put on all the other EV offerings?
About 1/3rd of all drivers only keep their cars for 3 years or less, so for those people, renting would be the best option. Additionally, If you're a full time Uber driver, doing 50-100K miles per year, renting is the best option since owning a single battery for that many miles would probably end up failing in just 3 to 4 years.
@@thelimitingfactor I thought that if I rode the swappable battery car for about five years and resold it as a used car, I could sell it for more than an all-in-one battery electric car, not as much as a new car. The key to an electric car is a battery, and I think it would be good to exchange a 5-year-old battery for a new or new-like battery by paying few hundred dollars. This is because the battery in the battery swap station are checked the battery performance to replace through the battery management company. Isn't it?
You could do another 30 minute video on battery swap if you took a protagonist pov! You barely scratched the surface and may be a little biased towards Tesla.
There are too many unknowns to decide a winner between swap and fast charge. Consider this, for example: if taking a battery cell out of circulation is trivial, you can make the batteries basically of lower quality, plausibly cheaper, maybe much cheaper. Spreadsheets will decide the winner.
So glad that Tesla didn't go too far down the battery swap rabbit hole. It looks like a nice party trick but not a great overall solution. Thanks for the deep dive!
How far do you have to drive to change your battery pack. If you have a station around the corner and a rental contract you will use it. NIO must collect and bring all old and new battery packs to and from the station, in addition to the local kw/h rate. What about the people who change regularly to a new car, do you need a new contract or not, and how mutch did you loose on your old contract due to low mileage. In other words a lease contract for the entire car...
If Robo taxi becomes really commercialized in the next few yeas, I wonder how Elon will modify Tesla's thousands of charging infra? cuz Nio's unmanned battery swap stations are already ready for robo taxi.
It sounds like your assumption is that all taxis are working all the time. The reality is that there are rush hours and peak usage times for vehicles. That means there will be down time for charging.
2 points that I think were not mentioned: the swapping packs will degrade just as the owned one over the years. Yes, you might be lucky and by chance get a new one years down the road but that’s just Chance. Also, they will have the “electric scooter problem”. Meaning that since they are not owned, they will likely be looked after far less and likely abused. Temperature, charging, charging rate, SOC. I don’t have to care about the battery if I can get a new one whenever I want. So degradation over time will likely be higher than with the average owned pack.
@@Martinit0not fast charge it so much? Not charge or discharge outside recommended limits so much?not take care of preconditioning before charging or discharging? People just don't look after things they don't own as well as things they do. That is a well known principle that has been around since well before you were born. Surprised that you don't seem to be aware of it.
Excellent video. I didn’t have enough information about battery swapping to make a difference in my opinion but after this video, I will never recommend it. So expensive with no guarantee of return on investment. Glad these are primarily found in China and not in America otherwise I would have to convince my family and friends not to go this route.
The comparison is wrong unfortunately, how could you compare buying vs renting battery without adding the cost of recharging the battery during the lifetime of owning it !!
I think that between 25 minutes and 5 minutes is a sort of "uncanny valley" for vehicle charging. That is, above 25 minutes I can plug in and walk away, go to the restroom, get a bite to eat, etc. Between 25-5 though, I start to feel rushed and uncomfortable with leaving the vehicle, especially in the current climate of chargers being in the far back 40 of a huge parking lot. So that time feels like it's wasted because I am waiting around for my car to charge. Below 5 minutes, though, would be fast enough to not feel impatient. Granted, this is based on my current time of life and the level of tech available and any of these factors might change to make this issue disappear. I do think charging companies need to recognize though, that making the charger faster might make the experience feel LESS convenient until a certain threshold is reached.
Funny how you talk about 140kW being not fast charging when the Tesla Model 3 RWD does 170kW max and nobody seems to complain about that. I think for charging we need to move towards talking about average charge speed rather than peak, since the vast majority of EVs don't charge at peak for very long, and often charge around 100kw for more than half of the charging time.
Funny how you don't seem to know what c rate is. What matters is the charging input versus the size of the pack, not the magnitude of power provided in isolation. If you look at the charging speed of the 170 kW standard range model 3 versus the larger pack that can accept 250 kW, the total charge time is the same. Derp
It's a Great idea for rental scooters and bikes, but for millions of passenger vehicles? Fast Charging is a much more scalable and less resource intensive as battery swap stations need to have a couple dozen batteries just sitting there.
@17:00 you suggest that a swapping station might offer free upgrades from 50kWh to 70kWh packs... This only works if the packs are exactly the same form factor. A compact vehicle with only 50kWh pack would be very inefficient if it was designed to carry around a battery enclosure sized for 100kWh.
I've heard about battery swapping as the alternative to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in the application of (heavy) commercial vehicles with 100% uptime. Thoughts?
You did such a good job with all this detail, and we appreciate it! ❤ I’m still confused: if I purchase NEO’s battery pack and take good care of it, and everything is hunky-dory - then I go on a road trip and need to swap batteries. How will I get my own battery back, the one I’ve taken such good care of?
@@thelimitingfactorthats not true. The difference is that you pay more at the beginning because you are buying the entire vehicle and if you rent the battery the vehicle costs you less at the beginning but in the long term the price is higher.
@@thelimitingfactor the last points about interest on the potential loan or investing the money instead of buying a battery are so important that the analysis that came just before it about the pay back periode is much less meaningful because it leaves those very important points out
Setting aside the thorough analysis of the business model's finances, I want to raise a safety concern. The hot-swappable battery concept has a major design flaw that makes it a disaster waiting to happen. A normal EV battery sits on the FLOOR of the car, INSIDE the structure, securely fastened and sealed from the outside environment. But a swappable battery is just HANGING UNDERNEATH, on the OUTSIDE of the car, held in place by a few bolts/screws, exposed to the elements. A thousand pound projectile handing on by its fingernails to the bottom of the car. But it gets worse because it doesn’t merely hang there. It’s attached/detached, fastened/unfastened repeatedly. This is the opposite of secure. It is precarious by design because the swap station needs quick and easy access to the battery Invariably some of the batteries at swapping stations will have damage, either from normal wear & tear, or from the swap procedure/mechanism itself. They might be scratched, dented, corroded, or be sub-standard in a hundred other ways. How serious will minor damage have to be before it’s no longer considered minor and be taken out of circulation? Who makes that decision? A person or a robot? Someone at the swap station or someone at a desk a thousand miles away, or an algorithm in a data center? A battery could have caked-on dirt or mud that interferes with the power or data connection. It could have a small dent or the slightest of warps, undetectable to the naked eye, which prevents it from fitting perfectly. How willing will an employee be to flag sub-standard batteries, especially when trying to meet budget or performance targets, or angling for a big year-end bonus? People do stupid things. People are lazy. People cheat and cut corners. People lie to cover up their cheating. It is inevitable that, sooner or later, a battery will simply fall off a car on the highway because it wasn’t installed properly, or the attaching bolts became corroded from months of storms and road salt, or the threads were worn or broken by constant swapping. Even batteries that don’t fall off are at increased puncture risk from flying debris, potholes, etc. Some version of this headline is guaranteed to happen: “Thousand-pound battery falls off an EV in fast highway traffic, causing 20-car pile up. Two deaths and multiple injuries reported. Criminal investigations and lawsuits pending.” Forget about range anxiety. People will soon have “will my battery kill me?” anxiety. Imagine if filling up a regular ICE car at a gas station required you to replace your tires every time. This is a high tech automated tire-swapping gas station where robot arms slide out from the walls and go whirr whirr and replace all of your tires. You get back on the road with a full tank and four newly swapped tires. A slew of questions would occur to any normal person, such as: How good are these “new” tires? Have they been pumped to the correct air pressure? Did the robots tighten the bolts properly? Would it be safer to take the bus instead?
This RUclipsr explains everything as an EV owner' perspective who lives in a house with a home charger. I am a Tesla Model 3 RWD owner who lives in an apartment without any charger infra in my building. Even though there are so many Tesla super chargers in Los Angeles where I live, I need to line up for my Tesla to be charged 5 out of 10 times and I need to stay there for an hour to finish charging from 10% to 100%. This video mostly talked about costs over the long-term ownership of an EV. Lithium-Ion batteries was first invented since 1970s and we had at least last 50 years to develop the charging speed but we still haven't come up with a good solution. The video mentioned, it will take less than 10 mins after 10 years but I really doubt it unless Solid state battery comes out but I don't think they will become available any near future. There are 40% of people in the U.S who don't own houses. Once EVs become more common and distributed to millions of people, it is crucial to adapt the battery swap system at some point, and they will need to coexist with traditional charging stations.
Pack swapping only makes sense for semis and long distance buses, and even then it might actually make more sense to swap vehicles instead of the battery pack, especially with buses. Just an extra semi/bus waiting fully charged and ready.
I would think a whole vehicle is a lot more cost than just a battery pack. Then again that ignores the cost of the swapping machine but that might be an investment they can recoup with time. I wasn't thinking semi's myself as much as police cars and ambulances. :)
@@TheEvilmooseofdoom well, you also get an extra spare vehicle also. It can alreaey be filled and ready to swap in seconds unlike a battery swap that takes minutes. It becomes a relay with an extra vihicle, the driver arrives back at Pepsi, as an real example, switches to the other Semi that is fully loaded and charged already.
@@SkepticalCaveman True, but if it's 2-3x the cost to have a full vehicle vs a spare pack then 4-5 mins to swap is a pretty small amount of time and would potentially allow you to have all your fleet in use all at the same time vs. having vehicles sitting and earning nothing. I guess it really become industry or even perhaps company specific. I don't see it as a broad solution to anything just a small niche thing for those small numbers of companies that operate fleets around the clock.
@@TheEvilmooseofdoom it's only one spare vehicle. So if you have 20 you need 21 Semis instead for this. They will save back the cost of that extra truck fast, if they can reduce the wait time 1h every day. This will be much easier to implement if they all pick from the same place as is the case with Pepsi. The best thing is that they only need one fast charger, the can slow charge all the vehicles during night fully and only fast charge when they swap vehicles.
Interesting video. It's nice to have some figures sttached to this concept, although they tend to confirm my suspicions that this probably wont really be viable as a long term technology. You've pointed out quite a few long term gotchas from the company's perspective which only get worse with scale if the rollout is widespread, which it would have to be in order to attract the customers in the first place. You hear a lot of claims for this concept from eco warriors, but never any hard facts, so it is very refreshing that you have done the grunt work to collate some real data on a real world attempt to bring the concept to fruition. It will be interesting to see whether this and other attempts thrive or fail, and what factors ultimately cause their demise (bit pessimistic as you can tell😊). If the figures of approx 4 minutes for a swap and 1 hr fast charge are correct , then you need around 20 batteries per station to be able to keep up with a constant rush hour throughput. If any incoming batteries diagnose bad and have to be removed from inventory, you will soon get to the point where customers have to wait for the swap battery to complete charging (loss of 5 batteries?) That scenario will only increase with time and degradation. If you send out customers with already failing batteries, it wont take long for reputational harm to take hold. Personally i think that the battery swap model has many potential ticking time bombs , that could be managed successfully if the company has very switched on management. But there seems to be many scenarios that could be terminal if they are not actively managed right from the start. Not an enterprise for drifter 9-5 managers. It would be interesting to see how they acheive the battery swaps just from an engineering viewpoint. You see a few tantalising graphics , but not enough detail to get a good understanding of the process. Keep up the good work. I am a bit of an EV sceptic, just dont see that they are ready for the average joes use case, but am interested in discovering the technical truth behind the hype. Ive delved into a couple of your other videos on batteries and found them very useful in understanding the reality of these items. Another site that is worth while is weber auto. It is a mechanics school that tears down EVs for the trade and it shows that the ecowarriors myth of only one moving part is as bs as you can get. But for anyone interested in technology , it shows you the nitty gritty of what is actually in an EV. A very interesting site, which i would recommend thoroughly. Be prepared to spend a lot of time there though😊
Appreciate the video Jordan, and agree pretty much entirely with your general conclusions. I have 2 minor points of contention, the first I already left a comment about. The second is the claim that charging the batteries at 1C is not going to be better for them than high power charging, which would typically be as much as 3-6C. Calling a 1C charge 'brutal' also seems hyperbole, sure its probably not as good as 1/2 or 1/4C but still not too bad for a battery. Another suggestion for use-case would be for high mileage taxi companies that need to keep the vehicles on the road and rarely if ever can slow charge. Cheers
There may be a market for that in 200 years. As long as there are 200 car manufacturers, the stations would need to support 100 batteries and 100 changing systems. Wasted money. Battery changing may make sense for Trucks, but even there, too much different Truck-manufacturers.
swapping batteries is a stupid idea... and there is no way Nio gets an advantage but has to bear the enormous costs for complex stations, and there will never be enough of them for a large country... and WHY replace a battery when you can charge it? a simple unanswered question for Nio....
back when they first started doing this i realized one massive disadvantage over a Tesla station with 10 stalls was throughput of cars, no matter what you could only process 1 car every 5 minuets per location. if 5 cars show up they will be in line for up to 20 minutes meanwhile if 5 cars show up at a super charger station they can immediately all start charging and get the range they need to complete the trip and only spend some 10-30 minutes at a stall each. now what if 15 cars show at both? Tesla users are going to have a better experience.
3:02 that is the profit, not the profit margin and not the gross margin. Margins are expressed as a percentage (Gross margin = profit / selling price).
It's not a clearcut win for swapping over regular charging bcos it depends on use cases. If someone lives in an appartment and has no access to a night charger, then battery swapping is a no brainer. Also don't forget the worry free battery degradation that comes with Nio swapping. We all remember the Tesla dead battery that cost 25k to replace. Well that's a non existing issue with Nio.
I was just informed that the EU has enforced a law that requires batteries to be user removable in all appliances starting 2027. I wonder how this will affect the structural pack..
@@thelimitingfactor whatever. I prefer paying for the pre charged battery to wherever upper limit it is, rather than change 10 to 80 percent on a traditional electric car. Batteries are not meant to be fast charged. California doesn't have the infrastructure to offer super fast charging during peak hours.
Looks like an overengineered solution. Meanwhile NIO announced the end of free battery-swapping services to new buyers and slashed prices about $4,200 or ~10%. Not sure how they can be profitable at this point.
I’d guess arbitrage has minimal dollar value, puts unnecessary wear on chemistry designed for cars, not utility. Just delaying charging during peak events is enough. Otherwise great analysis, as always.
love your work and dedication. I have a question: I posted a comment below the video when it was patreon-only, but now since it has gone public, it disappeared. What happend?
I had to repost the video. If everything isn't absolutely perfect people lose their nut, lol. I said V3 instead of V4, for example, so I had to correct it... Even though everybody knew what I meant
thank you for this analysis. This will be amazing. Ppl cant wait 30 mins + when they need to go to work or wedding etc. plus the most expensive part is the battery imagine if you don't need to pay for that by choosing the renting option you will always have the most up to date battery tech and you are not responsible for battery degradation
Battery swapping as we currently see it today is a poor application of an idea that nonetheless makes sense. Battery swapping ought not be a convenience that substitutes for charging. That is an extravagant misuse of resources. But, there is still a sensible rationale for quick battery swaps. If there is any question over the condition of a battery pack it should be removed (and replaced) without delay. Why? Because safety must be the leading consideration where there is a fire hazard and there is such a hazard with defective or poorly performing batteries or batteries that may have been damaged in a crash. Now, what are the technical requirements for easy and quick battery swaps? Skirting over the finer details the most important thing is that battery packs must be designed to be easily decoupled from a vehicle. So, there must be a standard and reliable attachment interface for every connection - physical, electrical, electronic and cooling system connections - between the vehicle and the battery. NIO isn't misguided to be thinking about these things although marketing battery swapping as a convenience and as an alternative to charging is hair-brained. How does this align with other important design ideas like use of the battery pack as a structural component in an EV? It is compatible with Tesla's idea of a structural battery pack but assumes a more traditional cabin capsule. So, the fully formed vehicle cabin and chassis could be readily separated from the battery pack even if the battery pack remains a key component for the ultimate structural rigidity of the chassis/vehicle. I believe CATL approaches the design of its packs in this way these days. Tesla, too, uses BYD and CATL packs in some of its vehicles. I suspect that these packs serve similar structural purposes to Tesla's structural packs and both BYD and CATL describe their packs as structural packs. Nio's approach to battery detachment (although not the associated marketing of battery swapping as a convenience) in arguably on the right track. It may mean that optimising for EV vehicle weight is a bigger challenge, though.
Note 1: Nio just announced that the vehicle now comes with Zero free pack swaps.
Note 2: Given that the Model S was released about 11 years ago, we don't know how long the average Tesla battery will last. They should last, on average, at least 12-15 years, but it could be much longer. Of course, individual experiences will vary depending on the battery pack and how well the battery is looked after.
The exception is of course extreme conditions where the battery might only last about a decade. That might be another situation where Nio pack swapping might make more sense for the consumer (living in the desert).
Note 3: Some people are saying that no one owns a vehicle for that long. Yeah, they don't, but people will factor these things in when buying and selling used vehicles.
Battery lifetime is not measured in years, but in number of complete charge/discharge cycles. That number is itself affected by a) how well the battery management system is designed (great on Teslas, appalling on Nissan Leafs...), and b) how much care, respectively abuse, the car owner puts on the battery.
Some Tesla battery packs are over 500k miles "old" and still above 80% of charging capacity!
@@st-ex8506 Actually, since battery lifetime exceeds 3 years, calendar aging is a very important factor to take into account regarding battery degradation.
@@neutronpcxt372 I am no battery expert, just someone who reads/watches videos quite a bit on the matter.
But I can calculate. So, I'll walk you through my reasoning, and you'll tell me where I err.
Assumption 1: We are dealing with a Model 3 with an initial real-world range of 300 miles (for simplicity of calculation).
Assumption 2: That battery's capacity will degrade down to 70%, in a straight line fashion, over 1500 full cycles.
Therefore, the number of miles that the car can accumulate until its battery hits the 70% arbitrary limit is:
300 * 1500 * 0.85 (the mid-point capacity degradation) = ca. 382'000 miles.
The average US motorist drives 13'500 miles per year. So, the car will last him or her (provided he or she is a "keeper", of course) 28 years!!!
That's what Teslas' are designed for... roughly of course.
I am ready to believe that there is also a calendar time component to the battery's aging, but it is unlikely to be the driving one!
Having said this, there are plenty of examples of cars with over 500k miles, whose batteries are not below 80%. Those cars are obviously driven a lot, so the calendar aging impacts them little... that MAY explain things...
The biggest drawback IMHO is customers don't arrive in exactly 5 minute intervals, that arrive randomly. This will require you to queue so you don't miss a turn, no plugging in and walking away like at a SuperCharger.
When you goto an "In and Out" burger after work the line can be 20 cars long, you queue for 15 minutes for the 45 seconds it take you to accept you food and pay.
Compare that to the people who park walk inside, place an order go to the bathroom and get a served in 5 minutes.
@@st-ex8506 That's why I used both. Because both are important. It's a big focus of research right now because scientists have realized it's neglected in favor of cycle life. Chemistries that use more silicon are showing calendar aging issues that weren't expected, for example.
The thing that concerns me about pack swapping is that the undercarriage is not always going to be nice and pristine, corrosion, mud, snow, dings from road debris, etc will interfere with the fasteners and mating surfaces. Just keeping the mechanical connections in good shape for 10+ years is a rather difficult task.
Precisely!
Especially the connectors!
Electric + cooling at those loads & dirt levels is no joke, how do they even do it?
A solution for that is to install a plate cover over the bottom of the battery
@@coz2j69 what holds that cover plate on? it's just another layer of the same problem
@@davidelang Now that I have thought more about it. Rubber cap over on the battery screws is a better and easier solution
Great analysis and very well explained. I've always assumed that swapping wouldn't make sense from a cost perspective knowing how incredably focused Elon is on costs. One of the reasons I've had very high conviction in Tesla is not because of Tesla (as I'm not really a car person), but because I've seen his approach and success in cost cutting at SpaceX.
When I saw the title, I initially wasn't as interested in watching this video compared to your usual ones - however, it's excellent and I'm glad I did watch.
Great work as always!
I've seen video of Drew Baglino, Tesla CTO talking about why Tesla abandon Swapping. It's mostly about cost and I think it's also about engineering (both is link of course). You want no moving parts, high reliability which you can't get that from swapping.
Excellent work Jordan. Your final conclusion was was well reasoned though for me personally I would have never considered renting out the battery unless I was in a very specific situation. Years ago this option of battery rental was given in Europe in the early days of EV, but quickly people realized it wasn't a good deal for them. Of course many in Europe at the time buying an EV had off street parking and were probably also reasonably well off and did the math. Reno was one that offered battery rental but after about two years or so they dropped it. It was especially difficult for those who owned the car but not the battery when they wanted to sell their car... it was a nightmare. This also led to changes being made and of course more data on battery life.
You're most welcome! And thanks for the insights 🤜🤛
Hi drk, Virgin galatic its starting comercial flights, how are you bro?
I've caught a lot of flack from nio fans for saying battery swap is dumb, been saying that when the share price was ATH. Every way you look as an engineer bat-swap is a fat cost pig. Did you mention the chassis design is complex, bloated & kills torsional stiffness? Just thinking of the cooling fluid couplings gives me a headache. Oh yeah, the nio club house is even dumber.
The cost of renting vs owning the battery pack for the owner doesn’t make sense to analyze over 18 years because most owners don’t keep their vehicles for 18 years. We are not interested in the cost for the life of the vehicle, but in the cost for the life of ownership. So it makes more sense to calculate over the course of 3-9 years that most people keep their cars
Incorrect, that cost will be ammortized over all the people who own the vehicle because it will be taken into account with resale values
You are too confident the market will accurately price in the ownership advantage over the rented battery as I doubt people will choose to pay the premium required to cover the amortization costs
He didn’t include the charging cost of owning the battery vs renting the battery, which results in saving 4K USD per year for renting the 75kwh battery
17:05 Regarding the free upgrade: I doubt that the 75 and 100 kWh packs would fit into a compact vehicle. In that case, the upgrade would only work for 75->100.
Max swap station throughout mentioned was over 300. I think it is an assumption that should be questioned. Just because you can swap every 4minutes and hold 20 or so packs doesn’t mean you can charge them at the same time in parallel. 20 x 100kw is a lot of power to pull at the same time. I don’t think the swap station can provide storage and power and cooling for that many packs.
The Pony Express managed comparatively high speed mail delivery by doing horse and rider swaps on a cross country route.
The Pony Express was in operation for only 18 months. It kind of made sense in the brief period before transcontinental train service was available, and there was enough demand for $5 per letter delivery. (That was $5 in 1860 dollars.)
There may be customers that can economically justify battery swapping today. I am sure the market and technology will rapidly evolve to destroy those few niche situations.
Australia had 50 years of Cobb & Co stagecoaches, but horses are modular, just add more. Look up 60 seat Leviathan.
I agree it will be niche, Cop cars, ambulances, even some taxi services. Of course I could simply lack the imagination required to see how those things could work by charging and I am not saying that it couldn't be done...
What a cool little thread, I just learned a lot, lol
Battery swapping sounds sort of ok until you dig into the costs longer term. In that its similar to buying an ICE vs an EV 😂
Excellent analysis. Totally agree.
I think your final throughput number to get to the 50:1 wastage calculation are far too optimistic. Getting to 50% use would mean cars queueing for 12 hours a day, or arriving permanently all day and all night. Superchargers can easily see a 10:1 ratio between peak times and night. Unless you want hour long wait time (Bufferbloat in queueing theory terms), I would be surprised if even an ideally placed station can do more than two hours worth of peak throughput a day - maybe 30 total. That reduces your number to 10:1 and still assumes one common pack design and well-placed, highly used stations. You can take a look at networking or payment systems for similar throughput vs. queue vs. peak capacity rates.
In addition, 36% of Superchargers have 6 stalls or less, and 34% are in the awkward 8-10 stall size that would require two lightly used swap stations to match. That means that until you have tens of millions of cars on the roads, integer size requirements easily reduce efficiency by 50% or more.
Excellent summary. What we have seen here in Norway is that swap stations can be offline for days because of problems.
I didn't know that! Interesting
Do you know why? I'm guessing snow, salt, sand and freezing temperatures can play hell on those.
I've had a few cheap Chinese ebikes, and they were clearly not designed for a climate where things simply never dry out for months on end.
To me, Nio is to electric vehicles what Redbox is to movies. It's a cool concept that would be really useful if you couldn't just get the same result sitting on your couch at home by streaming it through a wire in the wall
🎯🔥
At busy times I’m sure you will be queuing, removing the major advantage…
Great deep dive. I home charge to 72% nightly. Neo can keep their beat-up battery swapping schnaviggians 🙂
Another great job Jordan!
This topic is important and I believe the benefits of battery swap have been over sold or compared against older battery tech. The pace of battery tech is moving along at a rapid pace and if we realistically consider the time it would take to build out a swapping station network, it will be a decade or longer before it is anywhere near where it truly needs to be. The flexible footprint of charging stations makes them easy to put into most communities. The only reason Tesla would need larger footprint for a charging station is if it was a combo of battery backup, solar, and charging station, thus making it an off grid option station, which would be great for many reasons including when the power grid is knocked offline. Tesla could become the emergency power supplier in natural disasters or if some crazy political mess cuts oil supply way down. EVs will keep things going by using the charging stations Tesla built with battery backup and solar.
Back to the topic of this video, thank you for hammering the supplies and management issues with swap stations. As you noted, all those moving parts creates a high likely hood of failure. Which means the station not only go off line, but Nio will have to have contractors or staff costs to go fix those stations. Not only is there repair costs, but all that maintenance will need to be managed, which adds to their costs. Not to say charging stations do not need repairs or maintenance, but it is much lower levels.
It does seem like fans of swapping are using a very skewed view of things to make it seem like battery swap is a clear winner. If Tesla does release their costs on their current generation charging station costs, I am guessing it will be surprisingly low. As you noted, the volume of chargers being built is helping to lower costs with economies of scale, but then add in Tesla endless cost cutting redesigns and approach, I could see them cutting the $40,000 per charging station down to $20,000 while boosting output which will shorten charge times for many users.
Looking at Nio as a company, they feel like they use gimmicks to try and stand out. The Nio lounges, those hang out places in high rent neighborhoods in Europe and other places, seems like a massive waste of money. The little dash robot head is cute and some love it, but I just see that as something that requires repairs down the road and for me, it adds nothing to the appeal of their vehicles. Unless there is a massive shift in the way Nio operates, I believe they will be one of the first big EV brands out of China to fail. Only if the CCP decides it will fund Nio to keep them going will they have a long future. They may surprise me, but I just have not been impressed with how they manage their business and their doubling down on the whole battery swap system.
🎯
Very thorough video. I think beyond this analysis one has to simply look at fast charging trends, cell advancements and long pack longevity that already exist to see that any advantage pack swapping might have now will be gone within 10 years anyway. Pack swapping has its negatives with the one positive of slightly faster pack charging. Once that one advantage is lost then what you have left is a huge charging infrastructure sitting there as a massive stranded asset for Nio.
I think NIO gives us more choices, while comparing the advantages and disadvantages of charging and battery replacement options, it is important to discuss that NIO is also building a large number of charging stations and developing battery technology
Thank you for talking me out of the notion of even considering the idea of ever purchasing a Nio. The costs are too much for any convenience it could provide. Any information regarding the Canoo subscription service costs would be welcome.
It never made sense, not once the pack became structural. This ain’t a propane tank for a gas grill.
Coincident with the release of your video, NIO reduced their prices and removed pack swapping as an included feature. You can buy it but I think that will probably end NIO pack swapping due to lack of buy-in by owners.
They just reduced the number of free swaps per month, but it's still there as a feature. Trying to become revenue positive. Agree witht the conclustion though!
Having driven a lowest range Tesla model 3 on a long drive, I was totally ready for break from driving each time the car wanted charging
There's no need for the speed of swapping
I can already hear the queuing avoidance; "Honey, it's getting late, you'd better go swap the battery while there's no line!"
I can already hear the queuing avoidance; "Honey, it's getting late, you'd better go charge the battery while there's no line!"
One long ass comment.
Given how much false information this video has (listed below), take all the analysis with a huge grain of salt. But I have to say nice video and conjectures, though many are wrong because Nio is kinda bad at marketing and has no real intention to explain all the technical details to people. People also have a tendency to overestimate the cost of swap stations vs fast chargers. This is natural but wrong. Nio is also very capable of deploying their new 800v 500kW chargers thanks to these battery swap stations. These swap stations need a lot of power (>630kW) and is ideal to also add 500kW chargers so people who have 800v cars can enjoy these when the swap station isn’t busy charging. Right now in China it is not easy to find these 800v fast chargers.
4:16 you got the price wrong. It’s actually 136 USD for 75 kWh and 235 for 100 kWh. And coming up with a price for owning is kinda absurd since you just buy it when you buy the car and who knows how long a user is going to keep it for. In terms of cost per swap for users in China it’s about the same if not lower for charging at a fast charger.
11:45. Most of the 2500 swap stations are 2.0 (probably more than 2200) and Nio is planning to add 1000 3.0 stations this year.
11:51 swap speed is about 5 mins including having the car move in and out of the station. There are plenty of videos online in China filming the whole process, in Europe it seems to be taking a little longer right now for some reason.
12:01 one swap station takes up four parking spaces.
14:30 drawback no.1, Nio is already doing very well with swapping, you don’t need to worry about this.
15:29 drawback no.2, yes but so what? At one 2.0 station per 350 vehicles this is only 4% more batteries. 3.0 has more batteries because it would support Nio’s cheaper brand which has a different type of battery pack. And the more battery a station has the more it can act as an energy storage device and the better it is at taking in cheap electricity at night and sell (swap) when electricity is expensive in the day.
15:50 it should allow batteries to last longer because Nio does not necessarily need to charge them so quickly. They have a complex algorithm to estimate demand and they swap stations and run checks on batteries that can’t be done in vehicles.
18:50 so all Nio vehicles have to use the same pack size with the same connectors. So Nio can’t build small cars which they don’t plan to do. So Nio can’t do CTC but hey you can refuel in 5 mins.
19:47 Okay getting a little frustrated at this point with how much misinformation you are presenting (not exactly your fault). Nio’s cars actually are capable of charging at very good speeds. A test done recently in China shows Nio’s 400v car can charge about as fast as Xpeng’s 800v G9. Both using the latest chargers under ideal situations (being the only car charging). Nio has not focused too much on charging speed because they don’t need to. But Nio’s next gen 3.0 platform will be 800v and should charge very fast. Sigh, can go on a bit more but probably not necessary.
20:43 This is wrong. Nio has never disclosed the cost of their battery swap stations. There is a very good estimate (with recognition from the boss of Nio Power) that puts the price of a 2.0 swap station in China at 175k USD without batteries (and the author claims he confirmed with people in Nio’s supply chain and the cost is actually much lower). This is about the price of a supercharging station with 1 480kW charger plus 5 120kW chargers in China. With batteries (assume 12 100kWh batteries) it should be about another 167k USD. So the absolute upper bound for Nio’s 2.0 station would be 342k USD with batteries, not 435k USD without, and the actual price should be lower.
22:00 I doubt the price of superchargers will decrease. The true expensive part was never about the chargers but just how much power is needed and the cost associated with the electrical grid. And the bottleneck is forsure both the infrastructure and the battery or else you should already be seeing 800v 500kW chargers getting deployed everywhere.
1) Pack price depends on the country, as I said in the video. I used the most up to date info I could find for a comparable market to the U.S. Doubtlessly cheaper in China.
2) Yup, that doesn't conflict with what I said.
3) I used Europe. So the information here isn't wrong. I also didn't cover the multi-day outages that some swapping stations are experiencing.
4) Incorrect, you have to include ingress and egress, exactly as I said.
5) See point #3. These stations go out of order and aren't repaired in a timely fashion.
6) Already covered later in the video.
Anyhow, I'm at #6 here and it seems most of the issue here is that you didn't pay close attention to what I said in the video. Probably not worth covering the rest for that reason.
@@thelimitingfactor 4) When you arrive at the battery swap station, the battery replacement will proceed in order, so you can park nearby if it is not your turn. Therefore, no separate space such as ingress and egress is required. The same is true of charging stations. Just as space is needed only for vehicles being charged in charging stations, but no separate entrance space for another vehicle is needed.
Great input, Zhang, thank you, thank you, thank you!
Your base confusion, @thelimitingfactor, is conflating "battery swap" with "Nios offering as of 2023".
I am not a fan of Nio etc. but the argument that Tesla´s supercharging with 450kW is leading to only 25min charging time and will improve in the future is a little bit utopical when we assume that there will be a big rollout of EVs in the future. The limiting factor (hah) is the power infrastructure of the surroundings. Battery swapping only makes sense to increase the battery charging load of the station to 100% all the time. The fact that Nio is fast charging their batteries IN the swapping station completly misses the point...
Here in Germany, especially on the Autobahn, the gas stations have up to 10 pumpstations that can be occupied at the same time. There will be very large infrastructure costs if the gas station owner needs to build a 5MW powerline...Also ignoring the fact that 10 charging stations will not be economical viable. 20-30 probably more realistic leading to 15MW of power drawn.
The charging load for chargers or a swap station will, like always, depend on the amount of vehicles flowing through. Power lines vs. digging and installing tanks.. Nothing comes without a trade off
I'm not sure what your point is, that's why Tesla is adding megapacks to large stations.
For smaller stations, the infrastructure isn't an
NIO actually has to sell some cars here in Europe before the issue of battery rental or outright purchase becomes pertinent. The consensus here is that Tesla is the one to beat and the independent reviews of NIO have been less than glowing. Finally the prices of Chinese EV imports do not compare well with those of Tesla or other manufacturers such as VW, Audi, Skoda, BMW and Stellantis. It may come as shock to many Americans but Stellantis actually sold 288,000 EVs in Europe last year. It’s European subsidiaries, Vauxhall, Peugeot, Citroen, DS, Opel and Fiat are all producing inexpensive small EVs.
🤗THANKS JORDAN …I am no expert …but it never made sense to me ,from the beginning 🤷♂️💚💚💚
Something not mentioned , queuing for a swap, time to get to swap stations and back also if not on one way journey
Couple advantages of battery swapping: it's super easy to replace a bad battery, Tesla costs $20k but NIO can do it at $10/(2 swaps) and the bad one failed health check at the station and get recycled by NIO. Also the batteries in the station play a role in grid balancing when no one wants a swap at low traffic time. And most importantly, when larger battery size come out, like NIO's 150kwh one, you can easily upgrade it.
You clearly didn't watch the video.
@@thelimitingfactor watched it full..
@@dada373678229 @Joey Z The limiting factor in the video said that the cost of replacing a Tesla battery is about $5,000 to $10,000, and the article I read says it's $16,000 for the Model 3. In a survey conducted by Slash Gear, a high-tech media outlet last year, it was reported that 65.7% answered that they were not willing to buy a Tesla despite the expensive battery replacement cost. For the Model 3, Tesla's cheapest model, which offers a battery warranty of eight years or 100,000 to 150,000 miles, battery replacement costs reach $16,000.
Regarding the cost comparison. One quick note, the life of the battery is kinda irrelevant. What matters is it's resale value. Likely after 80k miles it will be worth almost nothing despite having many useful miles left.
That statement doesn't make sense
Thanks for the facts. Nice to have something to back up my long time view that car battery swaps was a stupid idea
Comprehensive video on a divisive subject. Nice work.
When you mention it's a niche case, I got the impression you're referring it more with a US state of mind?
Urban dwellers, who can not possibly charge easily is very common in China...
Nio have completed close to 26m battery swaps to date. This is a staggering number that clearly shows adoption acceptance.
You mention about charging time with Tesla but I'd mention it's worth highlighting this will change significantly for Tesla now they are opening up their network. Wait times will undeniably increase.
You focus a lot on the numbers & rightly so but the most often overlooked aspect I feel is optionality. In China they really enjoy going on long road trips. The ability to change your battery to 50% and soon to be 100% more range is a considerable advantage to their peers.
While lastly, Tesla are the clear EV leader & will more than likely remain. In a world that is saturated with EV offerings being able to differentiate yourself from your peers is of the utmost importance. Branding is king.
BaaS achives this in spades.
And as mentioned earlier 26m swaps to date highlights the acceptance
Yes! Good point I could have used more precise wording there.
I'll be interested to see the actual increase for Tesla. It will be a year before other automakers switch over, and that fleet will pale in comparison to Tesla's fleet. Some are using the magic dock, but that's at limited locations.
Fair point over all
It is definitely interesting to observe how different automakers arrive at different solutions based on the requirements of their home market. Then we'll see how well that transfers to the other markets.
My guess is NIO could do ok in urban Europe where we have lots of apartments without dedicated garages but I see them fail in the US.
@4:41 This is only true if one buys the car and owns it for 18-22 years. Most people own a car for 5 years and then sell it. The depreciation when they sell it after 5 years results in not getting all their money back from purchasing the battery which drives up the real cost of what they paid per month for the battery over 5 years. Not sure it would result in a cost still less than renting or similar but just something to factor.
@11:00 I have found that when traveling between cities or long distances using Superchargers at gas stations that it usually takes much longer than 5 minutes for people to get out of their car, plug in, get everybody out of the car, walk inside, use the bathroom, get snacks, pay for snacks, walk back out to the car, get everyone back in the car and take off. Typically I find that in order to get my family to do all this without being a tyrant it takes 15-20 minutes anyway. But we can all do this at the same time with the car sitting there plugged in.
Interestingly with ICE cars it isn't as convenient. One person usually has to stay behind anyway and pump the gas until full and finish the payment transaction and then get in and drive to a parking spot and park again so then they can go in and do their business. This staggered overlap of people doing their business offset by around 5 minutes makes the process even longer.
Pack swapping will result in similar stops as an ICE since again one person will have to stay with the car while the pack swaps while everyone else does their business, then when done swapping they will have to pull out, look for parking, park a second time and go inside and do their business while everyone else waits in the car.
So ultimately single drivers without a place to park at home that has any power like street parkers will find that pumping gas and battery swap will be faster than DC fast charging at this point in history. But long distance driving it likely isn't really any faster. But in 10 years DC fast charging will likely be so similar in time that there will be no reason for complex mechanical battery swapping.
Yes, each owner won't keep their car for 18 to 20 years, but it will affect the resale value.
Another NIO beat-up by a pro-Tesla youtube site. Why can't people give credit where credit is due? Swapping is incredible and will go hand in hand with standard charging at home and by public pole ... Battery swapping will suit some and not others.
Notably, no counterpoints.
If I were pro-Tesla, I wouldn't sing the praises of CATL and BYD, which are also Chinese companies.
What's different about Nio? They've adopted a dumb strategy if they want to compete with BYD and Tesla at a super-massive scale.
Thanks for the work collating the information. Except for the luxury customer who values novelty there seems to be no business case for NIO to operate. Even the long haul driver would soon see a policy change to limit battery swaps to help keep NIO in business. I wonder if you could extend your video or make another one about the big factor I hoped you'd cover:
Given many companies making EVs will go bankrupt (leaving a few giants), how would you recommend valuing company viability in the EV purchase decision? For NIO, the rental makes for an interesting twist. Assuming they'll go bankrupt but being able to get the use of an EV without paying for the battery up front, what value does that present? Also, not paying for the battery allows the sale of the car should a step change in batteries at scale occur (sodium? sulphur?). Your depreciation would be less compared to owning the battery and could then buy a newer EV with the better battery. And maybe if NIO hangs on, you might be able to get that newer battery chemistry as part of the rent.
TL;DR: Taking company viability into account it may look like only 1 or 2 companies would be able to support their warranty over 20 years...and what discount should that put on all the other EV offerings?
The underlying limiting factor is nobody wants somebody else's abused battery.
can you tell me how you can abuse a battery? put a bomb under your car and blow it up?
Producing more packs than vehicle number is hilarious. Nio thinking that battery pack come naturally like leaf on trees. Lol.
This is talking about Nio of today like it was the endgame. That's like evaluating EV:s from a 2008 Tesla.
About 1/3rd of all drivers only keep their cars for 3 years or less, so for those people, renting would be the best option. Additionally, If you're a full time Uber driver, doing 50-100K miles per year, renting is the best option since owning a single battery for that many miles would probably end up failing in just 3 to 4 years.
And you're assuming it won't affect the resale cost? You're going to pay one way or another.
@@thelimitingfactor I thought that if I rode the swappable battery car for about five years and resold it as a used car, I could sell it for more than an all-in-one battery electric car, not as much as a new car. The key to an electric car is a battery, and I think it would be good to exchange a 5-year-old battery for a new or new-like battery by paying few hundred dollars. This is because the battery in the battery swap station are checked the battery performance to replace through the battery management company. Isn't it?
You could do another 30 minute video on battery swap if you took a protagonist pov! You barely scratched the surface and may be a little biased towards Tesla.
Make a video and show me how it's done
There are too many unknowns to decide a winner between swap and fast charge.
Consider this, for example: if taking a battery cell out of circulation is trivial, you can make the batteries basically of lower quality, plausibly cheaper, maybe much cheaper. Spreadsheets will decide the winner.
So glad that Tesla didn't go too far down the battery swap rabbit hole. It looks like a nice party trick but not a great overall solution. Thanks for the deep dive!
The environmental reason is there too. We, as a world, are battery-constrained. Therefore it doesn‘t help to store more batteries in shelves.
I covered this in the video
How far do you have to drive to change your battery pack. If you have a station around the corner and a rental contract you will use it. NIO must collect and bring all old and new battery packs to and from the station, in addition to the local kw/h rate. What about the people who change regularly to a new car, do you need a new contract or not, and how mutch did you loose on your old contract due to low mileage. In other words a lease contract for the entire car...
If Robo taxi becomes really commercialized in the next few yeas, I wonder how Elon will modify Tesla's thousands of charging infra? cuz Nio's unmanned battery swap stations are already ready for robo taxi.
It sounds like your assumption is that all taxis are working all the time.
The reality is that there are rush hours and peak usage times for vehicles.
That means there will be down time for charging.
@@thelimitingfactorBut someone needs to go and plug in the cable right?
2 points that I think were not mentioned: the swapping packs will degrade just as the owned one over the years. Yes, you might be lucky and by chance get a new one years down the road but that’s just Chance.
Also, they will have the “electric scooter problem”. Meaning that since they are not owned, they will likely be looked after far less and likely abused. Temperature, charging, charging rate, SOC. I don’t have to care about the battery if I can get a new one whenever I want. So degradation over time will likely be higher than with the average owned pack.
What exactly is it that you do when you "care" for an owned battery?
@@Martinit0not fast charge it so much? Not charge or discharge outside recommended limits so much?not take care of preconditioning before charging or discharging? People just don't look after things they don't own as well as things they do. That is a well known principle that has been around since well before you were born. Surprised that you don't seem to be aware of it.
Excellent video. I didn’t have enough information about battery swapping to make a difference in my opinion but after this video, I will never recommend it. So expensive with no guarantee of return on investment. Glad these are primarily found in China and not in America otherwise I would have to convince my family and friends not to go this route.
The comparison is wrong unfortunately, how could you compare buying vs renting battery without adding the cost of recharging the battery during the lifetime of owning it !!
Looks like you didn't watch the video. But thanks for commenting, it helps the channel!
He is heavily biased and always comments with “looks like you didn’t watch the video” instead of elaborating..
I would be curious to hear your opinions on NIO's affordable EV with new LFP/Ion hybrid battery
I think that between 25 minutes and 5 minutes is a sort of "uncanny valley" for vehicle charging.
That is, above 25 minutes I can plug in and walk away, go to the restroom, get a bite to eat, etc. Between 25-5 though, I start to feel rushed and uncomfortable with leaving the vehicle, especially in the current climate of chargers being in the far back 40 of a huge parking lot. So that time feels like it's wasted because I am waiting around for my car to charge.
Below 5 minutes, though, would be fast enough to not feel impatient.
Granted, this is based on my current time of life and the level of tech available and any of these factors might change to make this issue disappear. I do think charging companies need to recognize though, that making the charger faster might make the experience feel LESS convenient until a certain threshold is reached.
Funny how you talk about 140kW being not fast charging when the Tesla Model 3 RWD does 170kW max and nobody seems to complain about that. I think for charging we need to move towards talking about average charge speed rather than peak, since the vast majority of EVs don't charge at peak for very long, and often charge around 100kw for more than half of the charging time.
Funny how you don't seem to know what c rate is.
What matters is the charging input versus the size of the pack, not the magnitude of power provided in isolation.
If you look at the charging speed of the 170 kW standard range model 3 versus the larger pack that can accept 250 kW, the total charge time is the same.
Derp
It's a Great idea for rental scooters and bikes, but for millions of passenger vehicles? Fast Charging is a much more scalable and less resource intensive as battery swap stations need to have a couple dozen batteries just sitting there.
@17:00 you suggest that a swapping station might offer free upgrades from 50kWh to 70kWh packs... This only works if the packs are exactly the same form factor. A compact vehicle with only 50kWh pack would be very inefficient if it was designed to carry around a battery enclosure sized for 100kWh.
Exactly, it's just completely fraught
So battery swaps means you pay both for the pack and the swapping infrastructure, which is more than just the pack.
I've heard about battery swapping as the alternative to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in the application of (heavy) commercial vehicles with 100% uptime. Thoughts?
You did such a good job with all this detail, and we appreciate it! ❤
I’m still confused: if I purchase NEO’s battery pack and take good care of it, and everything is hunky-dory - then I go on a road trip and need to swap batteries. How will I get my own battery back, the one I’ve taken such good care of?
I don't think you can swap if you buy the battery.
You're most welcome! Lensflare is right, if you buy the battery you can't swap it
Thanks for telling me that. I missed that part of the explanation. I watch your Limiting Factor religiously!
@@thelimitingfactorthats not true. The difference is that you pay more at the beginning because you are buying the entire vehicle and if you rent the battery the vehicle costs you less at the beginning but in the long term the price is higher.
This is why I didn’t hold Nio stock for very long. It just didn’t make sense.
I would anticipate that the packs and swapping stations would be problematic in snow/salt/rust belt.
6:04 important points that make the analysis before much less meaningful
This isn't a complete sentence, I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
@@thelimitingfactor the last points about interest on the potential loan or investing the money instead of buying a battery are so important that the analysis that came just before it about the pay back periode is much less meaningful because it leaves those very important points out
@@thelimitingfactor very good en thorough video nonetheless!
This is an interesting concept(battery swapping) but does not seem like the mainstream.
Setting aside the thorough analysis of the business model's finances, I want to raise a safety concern. The hot-swappable battery concept has a major design flaw that makes it a disaster waiting to happen. A normal EV battery sits on the FLOOR of the car, INSIDE the structure, securely fastened and sealed from the outside environment. But a swappable battery is just HANGING UNDERNEATH, on the OUTSIDE of the car, held in place by a few bolts/screws, exposed to the elements. A thousand pound projectile handing on by its fingernails to the bottom of the car. But it gets worse because it doesn’t merely hang there. It’s attached/detached, fastened/unfastened repeatedly. This is the opposite of secure. It is precarious by design because the swap station needs quick and easy access to the battery
Invariably some of the batteries at swapping stations will have damage, either from normal wear & tear, or from the swap procedure/mechanism itself. They might be scratched, dented, corroded, or be sub-standard in a hundred other ways. How serious will minor damage have to be before it’s no longer considered minor and be taken out of circulation? Who makes that decision? A person or a robot? Someone at the swap station or someone at a desk a thousand miles away, or an algorithm in a data center? A battery could have caked-on dirt or mud that interferes with the power or data connection. It could have a small dent or the slightest of warps, undetectable to the naked eye, which prevents it from fitting perfectly. How willing will an employee be to flag sub-standard batteries, especially when trying to meet budget or performance targets, or angling for a big year-end bonus? People do stupid things. People are lazy. People cheat and cut corners. People lie to cover up their cheating.
It is inevitable that, sooner or later, a battery will simply fall off a car on the highway because it wasn’t installed properly, or the attaching bolts became corroded from months of storms and road salt, or the threads were worn or broken by constant swapping. Even batteries that don’t fall off are at increased puncture risk from flying debris, potholes, etc. Some version of this headline is guaranteed to happen: “Thousand-pound battery falls off an EV in fast highway traffic, causing 20-car pile up. Two deaths and multiple injuries reported. Criminal investigations and lawsuits pending.” Forget about range anxiety. People will soon have “will my battery kill me?” anxiety.
Imagine if filling up a regular ICE car at a gas station required you to replace your tires every time. This is a high tech automated tire-swapping gas station where robot arms slide out from the walls and go whirr whirr and replace all of your tires. You get back on the road with a full tank and four newly swapped tires. A slew of questions would occur to any normal person, such as: How good are these “new” tires? Have they been pumped to the correct air pressure? Did the robots tighten the bolts properly? Would it be safer to take the bus instead?
Don't forget the once every so often damaged battery in the swap station that ignites and starts a major conflagration with all its cozy siblings.
This RUclipsr explains everything as an EV owner' perspective who lives in a house with a home charger. I am a Tesla Model 3 RWD owner who lives in an apartment without any charger infra in my building. Even though there are so many Tesla super chargers in Los Angeles where I live, I need to line up for my Tesla to be charged 5 out of 10 times and I need to stay there for an hour to finish charging from 10% to 100%. This video mostly talked about costs over the long-term ownership of an EV. Lithium-Ion batteries was first invented since 1970s and we had at least last 50 years to develop the charging speed but we still haven't come up with a good solution. The video mentioned, it will take less than 10 mins after 10 years but I really doubt it unless Solid state battery comes out but I don't think they will become available any near future. There are 40% of people in the U.S who don't own houses. Once EVs become more common and distributed to millions of people, it is crucial to adapt the battery swap system at some point, and they will need to coexist with traditional charging stations.
It looks like you didn't watch the video before commenting
👍
If there was still any doubt about battery swaps, this puts all the nails in that coffin.
🔨
Pack swapping only makes sense for semis and long distance buses, and even then it might actually make more sense to swap vehicles instead of the battery pack, especially with buses. Just an extra semi/bus waiting fully charged and ready.
I would think a whole vehicle is a lot more cost than just a battery pack. Then again that ignores the cost of the swapping machine but that might be an investment they can recoup with time. I wasn't thinking semi's myself as much as police cars and ambulances. :)
@@TheEvilmooseofdoom well, you also get an extra spare vehicle also. It can alreaey be filled and ready to swap in seconds unlike a battery swap that takes minutes. It becomes a relay with an extra vihicle, the driver arrives back at Pepsi, as an real example, switches to the other Semi that is fully loaded and charged already.
@@SkepticalCaveman True, but if it's 2-3x the cost to have a full vehicle vs a spare pack then 4-5 mins to swap is a pretty small amount of time and would potentially allow you to have all your fleet in use all at the same time vs. having vehicles sitting and earning nothing. I guess it really become industry or even perhaps company specific. I don't see it as a broad solution to anything just a small niche thing for those small numbers of companies that operate fleets around the clock.
@@TheEvilmooseofdoom it's only one spare vehicle. So if you have 20 you need 21 Semis instead for this. They will save back the cost of that extra truck fast, if they can reduce the wait time 1h every day. This will be much easier to implement if they all pick from the same place as is the case with Pepsi. The best thing is that they only need one fast charger, the can slow charge all the vehicles during night fully and only fast charge when they swap vehicles.
@ who are you talking to?
Interesting video. It's nice to have some figures sttached to this concept, although they tend to confirm my suspicions that this probably wont really be viable as a long term technology. You've pointed out quite a few long term gotchas from the company's perspective which only get worse with scale if the rollout is widespread, which it would have to be in order to attract the customers in the first place.
You hear a lot of claims for this concept from eco warriors, but never any hard facts, so it is very refreshing that you have done the grunt work to collate some real data on a real world attempt to bring the concept to fruition. It will be interesting to see whether this and other attempts thrive or fail, and what factors ultimately cause their demise (bit pessimistic as you can tell😊).
If the figures of approx 4 minutes for a swap and 1 hr fast charge are correct , then you need around 20 batteries per station to be able to keep up with a constant rush hour throughput. If any incoming batteries diagnose bad and have to be removed from inventory, you will soon get to the point where customers have to wait for the swap battery to complete charging (loss of 5 batteries?) That scenario will only increase with time and degradation. If you send out customers with already failing batteries, it wont take long for reputational harm to take hold. Personally i think that the battery swap model has many potential ticking time bombs , that could be managed successfully if the company has very switched on management. But there seems to be many scenarios that could be terminal if they are not actively managed right from the start. Not an enterprise for drifter 9-5 managers.
It would be interesting to see how they acheive the battery swaps just from an engineering viewpoint. You see a few tantalising graphics , but not enough detail to get a good understanding of the process.
Keep up the good work. I am a bit of an EV sceptic, just dont see that they are ready for the average joes use case, but am interested in discovering the technical truth behind the hype. Ive delved into a couple of your other videos on batteries and found them very useful in understanding the reality of these items.
Another site that is worth while is weber auto. It is a mechanics school that tears down EVs for the trade and it shows that the ecowarriors myth of only one moving part is as bs as you can get. But for anyone interested in technology , it shows you the nitty gritty of what is actually in an EV. A very interesting site, which i would recommend thoroughly. Be prepared to spend a lot of time there though😊
Thanks for the well written and well considered comment.
Glad the video was useful!
Appreciate the video Jordan, and agree pretty much entirely with your general conclusions. I have 2 minor points of contention, the first I already left a comment about. The second is the claim that charging the batteries at 1C is not going to be better for them than high power charging, which would typically be as much as 3-6C. Calling a 1C charge 'brutal' also seems hyperbole, sure its probably not as good as 1/2 or 1/4C but still not too bad for a battery.
Another suggestion for use-case would be for high mileage taxi companies that need to keep the vehicles on the road and rarely if ever can slow charge.
Cheers
There may be a market for that in 200 years. As long as there are 200 car manufacturers, the stations would need to support 100 batteries and 100 changing systems. Wasted money. Battery changing may make sense for Trucks, but even there, too much different Truck-manufacturers.
Additionally, NIO battery packs will also degrade over time so they will not always perform like a new better.
swapping batteries is a stupid idea... and there is no way Nio gets an advantage but has to bear the enormous costs for complex stations, and there will never be enough of them for a large country... and WHY replace a battery when you can charge it? a simple unanswered question for Nio....
back when they first started doing this i realized one massive disadvantage over a Tesla station with 10 stalls was throughput of cars, no matter what you could only process 1 car every 5 minuets per location. if 5 cars show up they will be in line for up to 20 minutes meanwhile if 5 cars show up at a super charger station they can immediately all start charging and get the range they need to complete the trip and only spend some 10-30 minutes at a stall each. now what if 15 cars show at both? Tesla users are going to have a better experience.
Why 75 kWh pack have only 250k mileage? There's NCM/LFP hybrid.
Doesn't adhere to lean principles.
3:02 that is the profit, not the profit margin and not the gross margin. Margins are expressed as a percentage (Gross margin = profit / selling price).
It's not a clearcut win for swapping over regular charging bcos it depends on use cases. If someone lives in an appartment and has no access to a night charger, then battery swapping is a no brainer. Also don't forget the worry free battery degradation that comes with Nio swapping. We all remember the Tesla dead battery that cost 25k to replace. Well that's a non existing issue with Nio.
Probably watch the video before commenting.
Good to know but we still have time to enjoy gas fill up at the gas station and buying our lottery tickets...who knows what's coming in the future
Won't the megacharger for Cybertruck and Semi charge 200 miles in 4 minutes?
You need to include number of stalls available when talking about throughput
No, you don't, think about it
Nio will go bankrupt
I was just informed that the EU has enforced a law that requires batteries to be user removable in all appliances starting 2027. I wonder how this will affect the structural pack..
It can be removed.
@@thelimitingfactor wonderful
Hoping for the terminator armour inquisitor to get a entry when the do forge world models
Here's hoping they move on to industrial equipment.
Great video !
4:58 you are getting fully charged batteries ON DEMAND, without worrying about wasting my time charging in a lot /home.
But it's not fully charged
@@thelimitingfactor then to what level then?
@@thelimitingfactor whatever. I prefer paying for the pre charged battery to wherever upper limit it is, rather than change 10 to 80 percent on a traditional electric car.
Batteries are not meant to be fast charged. California doesn't have the infrastructure to offer super fast charging during peak hours.
@@Vamanos46 in the video he said 77% I think.
Charging at home you don't wait for charging. You also might have to drive out of your way to a swapping station, which takes time and range.
Looks like an overengineered solution. Meanwhile NIO announced the end of free battery-swapping services to new buyers and slashed prices about $4,200 or ~10%. Not sure how they can be profitable at this point.
They weren't before and still aren't, but mother CCP may float them for some time.
I’d guess arbitrage has minimal dollar value, puts unnecessary wear on chemistry designed for cars, not utility. Just delaying charging during peak events is enough. Otherwise great analysis, as always.
love your work and dedication. I have a question: I posted a comment below the video when it was patreon-only, but now since it has gone public, it disappeared. What happend?
I had to repost the video. If everything isn't absolutely perfect people lose their nut, lol. I said V3 instead of V4, for example, so I had to correct it... Even though everybody knew what I meant
Thanks!
thank you for this analysis. This will be amazing. Ppl cant wait 30 mins + when they need to go to work or wedding etc. plus the most expensive part is the battery imagine if you don't need to pay for that by choosing the renting option you will always have the most up to date battery tech and you are not responsible for battery degradation
NIO for people with a smaller budget? You must be kidding.
Analysis here of cost was from a customer perspective. That perspective is not sustainable. Nio needs to charge a lot more to break even.
Battery swapping is CCP policy. Subsidies skew the model.
This made my brain hurt
If you rent it, you don't own it. But if you rent it until you own it, you paid a lot more to own it.
I think you'll never own it even if you rented it for 100 years.
@@Martinit0 Like a time share? That's what comes to mind. (Maybe that's a bit harsh, but screw renting a battery anyway. I want to own what I use!).
Can NIO have extremely good cooling when they fast charge their batteries because of no weight and bulk concerns?
They can, but do they? And if what you're getting at is that that's one way to extend cycle life in comparison to home charging, it's bunk.
👍👍
Battery swapping as we currently see it today is a poor application of an idea that nonetheless makes sense. Battery swapping ought not be a convenience that substitutes for charging. That is an extravagant misuse of resources. But, there is still a sensible rationale for quick battery swaps. If there is any question over the condition of a battery pack it should be removed (and replaced) without delay. Why? Because safety must be the leading consideration where there is a fire hazard and there is such a hazard with defective or poorly performing batteries or batteries that may have been damaged in a crash.
Now, what are the technical requirements for easy and quick battery swaps? Skirting over the finer details the most important thing is that battery packs must be designed to be easily decoupled from a vehicle. So, there must be a standard and reliable attachment interface for every connection - physical, electrical, electronic and cooling system connections - between the vehicle and the battery. NIO isn't misguided to be thinking about these things although marketing battery swapping as a convenience and as an alternative to charging is hair-brained.
How does this align with other important design ideas like use of the battery pack as a structural component in an EV? It is compatible with Tesla's idea of a structural battery pack but assumes a more traditional cabin capsule. So, the fully formed vehicle cabin and chassis could be readily separated from the battery pack even if the battery pack remains a key component for the ultimate structural rigidity of the chassis/vehicle. I believe CATL approaches the design of its packs in this way these days. Tesla, too, uses BYD and CATL packs in some of its vehicles. I suspect that these packs serve similar structural purposes to Tesla's structural packs and both BYD and CATL describe their packs as structural packs.
Nio's approach to battery detachment (although not the associated marketing of battery swapping as a convenience) in arguably on the right track. It may mean that optimising for EV vehicle weight is a bigger challenge, though.
How many more car Nio could have manufactured with those battery packs they have at charging station
For batteries alone, another 2%. But the engineering talent diverted - priceless.
Thanks. Great to see analysis, not just comments.
How about swapping on long haul trucking?
Thanks James! In 10 years due to advancements in charging and energy density, it would be obsolete.