Sure, technically you can get a battery from whomever you like for your car so long as it's compatible - but the Manufacturer has put DRM on the battery interface. All in the name of safety, you see - they don't want to see their cars catching fire on national news because of some shoddy batteries.
However what it'll mean is that unless the battery maker is willing to fork out a large chunk of cash per battery to the car maker, the car maker won't certify it as compatible.
At a guess, the connector would be the cheapest and easiest place to come up with some patentable novelty that doesn't actually matter. It could be physical OR an electronic interface of some kind. Then it's a case of "Well, yes, you can license the connector design... for $xxx per unit"
That came to mind also, though "OEMs to sell batteries separately or with subscription models" might just of covered that aspect.
Batteries are already standard cell sizes, it's the packaging of those cells that makes things interesting. Now will they end up standardising that aspect across cars is the crux here. Certainly be interesting how this all pans out.
>Also, by incentivizing vehicle designs with removable (and thus swappable) batteries, it makes taxis and other high demand use cases more practical without needing widespread fast charging infrastructure.
That is a big plus as allows more control when batteries are topped up, so enables the ability to shift demand to off-peak usage and equally add grid storage/supply for grid stability thruout the day in a battery form factor that's competition driven price-wise. Lot's of potential here and the first step in that direction has been made.
That's a really good point! As India builds more intermittent renewables, there's an opportunity for independent storage to help stabilize the power grid that battery rental suppliers would be well placed to take advantage of. (Assuming their regulations keep up with this idea... it's been so painful watching Australia's energy regulators fumble their way towards the concept that widespread grid-tied batteries might be a GOOD thing.)
So, decoupling battery from the car and allowing better competition in the battery space might fly. Car makers need not be bothered by the battery tech and can just focus on making good electric motors, since most of the car parts are from other vendors anyways.
However, the decoupling might not be all that rosy as Musk has demonstrated that safety is best achieved with total vertical integration. Even Tesla tried battery swapping but gave up.
This might work really well in 2 wheelers though. The existing bike manufacturers won't have to retool their factories by much to replace the engine with a motor and the batteries can be probably swapped in and out of the under seat space or something like that.
I believe it’s a killer flaw to over-interpret the failure of a novel technology and/or business model.
Yesterday’s miserable failure may be tomorrow’s runaway success given some refinements or the better availability of component technology and/or the readiness of the market.
Over the decades I’ve experienced a few - one of the more memorable examples for me is the Apple Newton. A pretty miserable failure at the time. Fast forward a couple of decades, and most of us are now carrying the logical evolution of that device in our pockets, whether it be made by Apple or others.
Also, the changing business model resulting from the battery and the vehicle separation will most certainly lead to innovation in batteries. So cars can innovate on motors while battery makers can innovate on batteries and who knows a third market might emerge for those battery swapping robots.
It'll be interesting to watch out how this will plays out - Tesla as the all integrated electric vehicle (Apple) v/s the rest of the industry which might go the independent vehicle/battery/swap robot (wintel) route.
My assumption is that when designing the Model S, it wasn't yet clear that charging speeds would eventually become good enough that it made battery swap unnecessary.
Tesla wrote the playbook for a modern EV, so it's easy to look back in retrospect and assume they had a single clear vision, but battery swapping could easily have looked like a credible path back then.
Although I'm pretty sure that by the time they publicly announced it they knew it was a dead end, and its only use was publicity and ZEV credits.
Removable batteries for cars has a LOT of bulk and weight to deal with. More a "service interval" like action rather than a daily event. Still handy to have but not nearly so much incentive in the market.
But for motorbikes and scooters, maybe it could work. Especially small city scooter(125cc equivalent) work.
Mind you, I am picturing a dystopian future whereby all the UberEats-like delivery scooter people keep getting their batteries stolen...
edit: streamline
Thank you.
They also spent money on useless operations and had serious internal politics. They were financed and controlled by a known rent seeker and shouldn't be taken as an example for what the technology can or cannot do
I think the failiure was down to tree or four things:
- electric cars were still a novelty - low range, very few and unreliable battery changing stations. - expensive cars. - Only one model, a saloon car which is one of the least sold car types in denmark. People mostly go for microcars or stationwagon type cars plus SUV's.
IIRC it was Renault with the Fluence Z.E pairing with a company named Better Place
It will get sorted I'm sure, but there are often technical details that change when changes like this are made.
They will even need to standardize connectors and possibly protocols to really do this well.
Just imagine a country that did not allow you to buy a laptop with pre-fitted batteries. A heavy user like me would like a standardized external battery in that case, but many won't. The limitations on the design are huge. I am not arguing against swappable batteries.
With electric cars being approx 2 times costlier in India, I do not think taxis would be a use-case for that. They are a business and they need to look at practical cost-benefit and they will not be the first ones to jump to electric.
On top of that only 5-10% of India's population can afford to be generally environment friendly in an impactful way. And only 1 or max 2% can afford the huge upfront premium on electric cars.
The Indian government needs to create less restrictive and less taxing policies towards electric but it creates policy quagmires, has a very small tax base and hence is tax-greedy overall.
I bought a Prius once because I thought I was clever and I was going to get a great car with great gas mileage. I read on the Internet that despite what everyone says about the battery that it is actually very rare for it to die. Well... turns out either that's not true or I got unlucky. My battery died. Not only did it die, but it died an hour and a half way from my house... So during the height of rush our in stop and go traffic my Prius, while it would still run, would take forever to accelerate. I wound up just driving home with my hazard lights on.
When I finally made it home the first thing I did is look it up to see how much it would cost to replace the battery on my car. Well, turns out that when I was trying to replace it (was a few years ago) that the only people authorized to change it was the Toyota dealer. The Toyota dealer would only replace the entire battery though, and that battery was $3,000 to replace. There was no freakin way I was going to pay that.
So after some Internet sleuthing and lots of research I discovered that it is actually possible to replace an individual module in the battery(The battery is actually wired in series of 18 modules). Granted, you would have to replace another one soon if the battery modules weren't balanced with each other. To balance the battery modules though you had to use some funky looking third party charger that wasn't really designed for it and in order to do it in a reasonable amount of time it would cost about $500 because you would have to buy multiple chargers, plus the cost of however many dead modules you had. Then you had to ensure that you could safely remove a 250lbs battery, without shocking yourself with 3,000 volts of electricity. I wound up just replacing the one cell to see how long it would take for the battery to give up on me. That saved my recharging the modules, but the rest of the work I had to do still.
So $34 and 6 months later and I was still driving it. It was only when my wife actually didn't change the oil in the car that it wound up dying (a story for another day).
Which leads me to my point. Toyota had engineered the car so that if there was any battery failure there was no ability for the user to really upgrade it without risking serious injury of death, unless you know... they spend two weeks reading about it and learnings in the ins and outs (which I did). Considering that the battery was ALREADY modular it would have cost them a tiny bit of effort to ensure that users could easily do this themselves. Not only that, but they insisted that the entire battery needed to be replaced because they were also too afraid to allow even their technicians to touch it. All of this could have been prevented if a law like the above existed.
So yeah... I think this is a great idea.
Though I was also telling a story and exaggeration tends to be a part of story telling.
It's like saying I saw an alligator as big as a house. Sure, probably didn't happen, but you get the point.
You will get there! I just landed my first well-paying gig. Keep at it and you will, too :)
> The amendment will allow OEMs to sell batteries separately or with subscription models, and will also encourage private players to join in as well, boosting the grass-roots of the electric ecosystem.
So it's about allowing competition in battery providers and allowing battery leasing. This is a good move because not only does it open up the industry and hopefully drive overall prices down, but it decouples the prices of vehicle and "fuel", making it easier to compare directly with petrol-powered vehicles.
Also, by incentivizing vehicle designs with removable (and thus swappable) batteries, it makes taxis and other high demand use cases more practical without needing widespread fast charging infrastructure.