Battery Swapping Desperately Tries to Stay Relevant

Battery swapping is that curious legacy solution that just refuses to die. And now one of the leading players, Ample, has debuted a station promising “recharge” times of 5 minutes!

We previously spoke about the battery swapping phenomenon and arguably its most high-profile failure. Startup Better Place raised about $900 million in venture capital, but the cost of each battery swap station ballooned up to $2 million apiece, and the Palo Alto firm declared bankruptcy in 2013. Similar attempts by bigwigs like Tesla went nowhere.

And you’d think that’d be the end of it, especially with fast-charging stations gaining traction. No matter how you parse it, battery swapping is a stop-gap solution, and it’s only viable because, as Ample points out, their solution is 3-10 times cheaper than a fast-charging station.

But battery swapping is alive and well, including in China where, for example, the automaker Nio has 1,400 battery-swap stations up and running. Nio has also expanded into Norway, and their entire business model is seemingly based on the general public’s agita over expensive EV batteries.

Take the Nio ES8 – if you want to buy the vehicle and the battery outright, with no visits to swap stations, it’ll run you about $58,500. Or you could pay $50K and lease the battery, with a $135 monthly fee that includes a couple swaps or a certain amount of rapid charging.

Eventually, the upfront option becomes more cost-effective – about five years, apparently – but that’s if your purchased battery goes the distance. So Nio is playing into driver fears over battery deterioration.

And now the San Francisco-based Ample is making the case for battery swapping in the U.S. by completing the process in roundabout the same time it takes to fill a tank with gas.

But how’s this song and dance any different? We’ve still got the massive overhead of stocking and maintaining a voluminous backlog of expensive batteries.

There’s also the issue of compatibility – Ample claims their modular battery packs can be integrated into any EV, but that would require installing the swappable Ample batteries at the factory level, and that would assume a level of cooperation amongst automakers (who may want to just focus on quick chargers).

Ample’s promo video offers no hints towards solving the same fiscal issues that plagued Better Place. Instead, it plays on the nation’s impatience with renewable energy in general – battery swapping offers an immediate solution (never mind e-waste).

So is battery swapping suddenly more viable in the U.S. than it was a decade ago? I’m going to say no.