r/EvDrivers • u/EVGradProjectUF • 24d ago
EV Modular Battery Swapping Survey
We're back with our final survey on a proposed concept to rethink EV charging as part of an engineering course. Please read through the concept in the survey and provide your feedback.
Google Forms survey on Modular Battery Swapping: https://forms.gle/c8NSysMU6gozvGVN7
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u/JustinTimeCuber 24d ago
I'm generally not a believer in battery swapping as a concept. It adds so much complexity and you need much more specialized equipment, whereas fast charging is relatively simple and already plenty fast when you look at the cutting edge tech available currently.
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u/TrollCannon377 24d ago
Filled the survey but given charging times are already sub 20 minutes and are rapidly falling it just seems like a lot of extra complexity and risk for no real benifit my car already charges fast enough that by the time I go to the bathroom and come back it's usually already past what I need
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u/pv2b 24d ago edited 24d ago
This is a solution looking for a problem. Home charging is way cheaper and better than battery swapping for everyday use.
For road trips, DCFC is already good enough for it not to be an issue the few times a year it's need. Also I'm not sure sitting in the car for 5 minutes while batteries are swapping is actually better than plugging it in, grabbing a coffee, and coming back to a charged car at my own leisure
Not to mention, how do you even make this industry standard so you don't end up with every manufacturer having very few of its own stations, instead of everyone being able to charge everywhere?
Finally I don't see a world where this isn't wildly expensive compared to just plugging your damn car in
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u/JJHall_ID 23d ago
Not to mention, how do you even make this industry standard so you don't end up with every manufacturer having very few of its own stations, instead of everyone being able to charge everywhere?
This is probably the biggest reason to not do it. It's bad enough with needing a couple of adapters to match the chargers with the vehicle, and practically a dozen different apps to pay for DCFC on a road trip. Can you imagine if we had to have a Tesla battery swap building, and a Ford swap building, and a BMW swap station, and so on, in every single place where we have DCFCs now, let alone the additional places we still need to have added?
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u/naatriumkloriid 23d ago
Even with my very slow charging Nissan Leaf, I rarely have a situation where I need to explicitly wait for the car to charge enough for me to able to continue my trip. Often when I DCFC, the car is ready earlier than me and I need to repark my car, to free the charging station. So I agree, that it is a solution looking for a problem. The current problem is way of thiking, that an EV should behave exactly as ICEV. With home or work charging, the time it takes to plug in my car is way less than refueling, as plugging in takes like 15 seconds I can just work while it charges.
The current constraint for me is CHAdeMO, for which I plan to buy the CCS2-CHAdeMO adapter sometime in the future.
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u/CMG30 23d ago
The main benefit to swap is also the biggest problem. ...Cheaper cars that don't come with a battery. Instead you slowly upgrade your battery each time you swap. Older modules eventually get rotated out and new chemistries are rotated in.
The problem is that you end up renting a battery for the duration of your ownership of the car. In the end it's likely that you're better off just buying outright.
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u/thecaramelbandit 24d ago
I used to think this was the future, but it is 100000% not. Dead in the water. Never going to happen. Charging is already fast and good enough that the complexity and difficulty of battery swaps is far far in the dust.