The number of people excited by battery swapping is out of all proportion to its economically viable use cases.
ChatGPT & DALL-E generated panoramic image of shipping container covered with computer circuitry and sparks being winched into a container ship at a shipping terminal
Except megawatt scale charging doesn’t take hours and a large percentage of trucks are parked at night, so slower charging is just fine. As an example of the first, China’s Windrose Technology and its partners, including BorgWarner New Energy Co., are delivering a 49 ton total truck — that’s 13 tons more than a Class 8 truck, with a 1,000 km range and megawatt scale charging that can add 400 kilometers of range in 36 minutes.
What are the downsides to battery swapping? One of the biggest is that anytime you are removing a big chunk of something from a vehicle and replacing it, there’s an opportunity for something to go wrong mechanically and there’s wear and tear on all connections.
Swappable batteries also have to be packed precisely for the hole in the specific vehicle. The vehicle has to be engineered with fail safes for removal and installation of the packs to reduce the problems outline above. Both add constraints. Meanwhile, a buffering battery is a shipping container or two that is delivered, plugged in, tested and then just sits there as a solid state lump of metal and chemicals charging and discharging.
Moving electricity between batteries from different manufacturers in different vehicles is as easy as standardizing on the plug, as has happened with the NACS plug in North America, where Tesla’s market dominance for EV charging made adopting their plug as the standard make sense. But swappable batteries require standardizing battery packs across all manufacturers who make trucks or buses and will use the charging station.
Reading this, you might be surprised to find out that I’m bullish on swappable batteries for shipping and trains. I’m bullish on containerized batteries for that use case simply because everything else required for them is already in place, unlike other battery swapping solutions.System that already plug containers in on shore and in ships or trains? Check.Container control systems that keep track of every container, its special needs if any and where it is? Check.
Sufficient battery energy to power trains across gaps in overhead connections will usually pencil out as the most cost effective solution. A couple of data points support this. First is the excessive cost of rail electrification in the UK, where powering bridges and tunnels has tripled the cost per kilometer for the system. Betting on batteries would have cut electrification infrastructure costs by two-thirds.
TCO comparison of hydrogen to battery electric container ground handling vehicles from report by APM Terminals However, that runs into a different problem. As Rashibeigi told me, there are only about 120,000 reach stackers, straddle carriers and terminal tractors running around the 900 or so major ports in the world. It’s a very small number of vehicles compared to the 4 million Class 8 trucks in the USA alone. The market is also fragmented, without a dominant OEM for the space.
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