One of the interesting things about my job is that I get to talk to engineers and product planners and designers and other Important People in the car industry. And, after well over a decade of carefully crafting a persona that many people would call, perhaps derisively, an “idiot” or more charitably, a “drooling simpleton,” I’m often in a place where I can offer suggestions or ideas to these sorts of people, and they’re very often surprisingly willing to listen to me, or at least pretend to.
One of the ideas that I can’t get out of my head and have brought up to these sorts of people on numerous occasions is the concept of battery swapping for electric vehicles. And, incredibly, at least to me, every single Important Person I have spoken with in the EV industry has told me, in pretty clear, straightforward terms, that battery swapping is a Bad Idea.
That may be why I was happy to see that Mitsubishi Fuso is planning a battery-swapping program in Japan, specifically for its line of eCanter commercial trucks. The swapping program is being done in conjunction with Ample, an American-based company that seems focused on modular batteries and battery swapping – two ideas that I have been championing for years.
I really love this approach; I’ve never really been thrilled with the idea of actually owning a battery in an EV– why do I want to have a major structural part of my car be something that is 1. Rapidly becoming outdated tue to developments and 2. Arguably a consumable, even if they do last a nice long while – and I’ve always thought that standardizing battery sizes and connectors could lead to more competition and commoditization of batteries that would lead to less cost to consumers, and that’s whose side I’m on, anyway.
Ample does seem to have this approach, at least based on what I saw on their website. Their partnership with Mitubishi Fuso is focused on the last-mile, in-city trucking and delivering market, and uses the Mistubishi eCanter truck as the platform. These trucks, introduced in 2023, have driving ranges between 62 and 200 miles or so, and EV light-duty trucks like these can take between a few hours and up to 10 hours to recharge using conventional means.
This battery swapping plan would reduce that time to minutes, five minutes if this diagram proves to be prophetic:
Oh, one quick aside about the eCanter; on Mitsubishi-Fuso’s site for the eCanter, the company has a funny way of naming its wheelbase options. Look at this:
So we have Short, Long, and Extra Super Long! That last one feels just a little too exuberant, but I like it. They could have done Extra or Super, but someone there was feeling it enough to say screw it, we’re doing both. Extra Super, mothertruckers!
Okay, back to the battery swapping plan. It seems the battery swapping stations will be built according to Ample’s current designs, and the trucks will be adapted to be compatible with Ample’s modular batteries, with a trial on public roads scheduled for this winter.
I’m excited by this, but also reminded of what all these CEOs and CTOs and engineers have told me over the years: if you tightly integrate a custom battery pack into an EV, everything can be lighter and more efficient; they’re worried about connector life with all the cycles of fluid/electric connection and disconnection; and they just all seem to be down on the ideas of standardizing altogether. But why?
I think while they have valid points – connector life is an issue, of course, and yes, you can design a more efficient overall vehicle with a custom, highly integrated battery pack – a lot of the resistance may come down to a certain sort of pervasive engineering hubris. Everyone thinks they can do it a little better than everyone else, and while they may all be right, maybe it just doesn’t really matter all that much.
Maybe people would rather have EVs that don’t become unsellable paperweights over time in rare and outdated in probably most cases, or would rather adjust how much battery they haul around based on their dynamically-changing needs [Ed Note: The weight change would alter the vehicle’s dynamics, which opens up a whole new can of worms. -DT], or have more options for battery replacement instead of a slightly more efficient, integrated battery design.
I think a last-mile delivery truck platform like these eCanters is an ideal test case for this sort of modular, swappable battery, because it’s a platform that would never really need structural batteries in the first place. Why not make them swappable, especially if the batteries are just big boxes slung between frame rails?
Maybe all those CTOs and engineers and everyone else are right, and I’m a big, sloppy moron with a lot of bad ideas. Fine. I’ve accepted that. But is Mitsubishi-Fuso an idiot, too? Or is it possible there’s some merit to the idea of standardized and swappable batteries? I guess we’ll see how it goes, and then I’ll just wait for all those bigshots in the EV world to send me apologetic fruit baskets. I’ll hold my breath.
Jason, this is so unrelated to this article. My you tube feed just had me watch the training film for the 1982 Chevy Celebrity. Jason, contain yourself, the tail lights had an amber turn signal, big as all get out! I’m still shivering from the orgasm…………..
Battery degradation happens in two independent ways, through usage and through time. This means that battery packs at a swapping station waiting for someone to come and use it is costing money because it is wearing out just sitting there charged. Money that in the real world will have to be paid for by the customer.
There is the possibility that the extra battery packs could be used for grid storage, but this adds a lot of complexity and more required batteires. There is no longer any benefit from a small grid connection because it needs to be big enough to sell as much power as possible. This all to compete in a very low margin business to make pennies buying at low demand times and selling at high demand times.
Once again I will leave this here https://www.januselectric.com.au/ They’ve spent the last five years developing and demonstrating an EV conversion & battery swap system for Class 8 prime movers (mostly intrastate stuff) in Australia. They’ve now done over two dozen trucks for various clients and setup seven (?) swap points. Their stats so far are a roughly 16% saving in annual operating costs and a pay back period of as little as eight months. Given the price of diesel can only go up over the next little while in Oz then these numbers will change. The swap setup is based on a subscription model.
Seems legit to me…and I don’t even own any of their shares.
I’ve heard many of these same fixed batteries are better/swappable batteries are bad arguments for cellphones yet my ancient LG V20 still works great and had pretty much all the bells and whistles one could get in fixed battery phones of the day.
“The weight change would alter the vehicle’s dynamics, which opens up a whole new can of worms. -DT”
Maybe that’s why so many pickup truck owners never use those trucks for hauling anything but air.
“ So Why Are So Many Companies Against Battery-Swapping?”
Because battery swapping is dumb. Who pays for the batteries? It is the most expensive part of the vehicle, so if a swapping scheme is implemented you will have to include AT LEAST one other battery in the price…. Maybe more.
It is also the HEAVIEST part of the vehicle… so now you have to design that to be secure in a crash.
What are you talking about ?
It’s like returning a propane tank to Walmart – you pay for it once, then you bring an empty one in and get a full one out, paying just for the content of the tank. Why would you pay for two batteries ?
I wouldn’t expect it to be the whole battery of the vehicle, but making a standardized battery that would account for half of the capacity would be great. It not only guarantees a full control of recycling it, but also opens the way to a whole ecosystem where the batteries would get remaunfactured.
Also opens the way to batteries that would last less, if that makes them less expensive, more efficient, etc. You wouldn’t buy an EV with a battery that lasts only one year, but if it was a replaceable one – what do you care.
And if you can make the whole battery swappable – more power to you. But it doesn’t have to.
And if you don’t trust a swapped battery – just never swap yours.
You pay for two batteries because you need at least two batteries. The one in the car and the one that is part of the pool that you are swapping into the car. That is the WHOLE POINT… that while you are using your battery the other battery is being charged. SOMEBODY has to pay for that second battery.
The batteries are expensive…. It is the most expensive part of an EV! It isn’t a cheap tank.
That tank that Menards sells you costs them $20 and they sell you $20 worth of propane in it. My Bolt has a 66 kw-HR battery that even at Electrify America’s inflated prices would hold $31 worth of electricity. All is a battery that costs thousands of dollars to make swappable.
Universal batteries sound like a great idea for trucks where totally universal batteries can easily be slung under the chassis. Not so great for the cars that need to squeeze battery into every last square inch of a particular vehicle to get the desired range out of it.
Swapping batteries can also have a great use case for a certain market. For commercial trucks that are likely to spend their entire lifetimes in the same area and will be using commercial accounts to swap on a regular basis things will work great. Get a tired old battery? Who cares, you’ll be swapping it back out by the next shift anyway. For privately owned vehicles that are most likely to use the service while on long-distance road trips like in the US you’re just asking for trouble when high-mileage batteries get swapped into the system. If I take my EV that’s spent the last year slow charging at home a couple of times per week I’d probably be pretty salty if I got home after a road trip to discover that I now have a battery with 500 fast-charge cycles under its belt.
Not an expert but letting someone swap out a damaged battery with no way to keep it from exploding tested or being inserted into a different car or causing a fire while giving some experimental idiot a new battery is a bad idea. In the case of propane tanks on a grill every tank is tested but your example for EVs allows no testing and fires extraordinary
Count me up as someone who sees more problems than benefits with swappable batteries. As others have mentioned already the batteries would need to be heavier and so would the vehicle structure they are mounted to. In addition the chemistries would either need to all be the same or the battery pack itself would need to include all the charging circuitry in addition to any health management requirement. Then the shape would need to be identical and all the connectors would need to be in same place so even if from a packaging perspective it would make sense to have a trapezoidal pack with all cooling lines or electrical connectors in the front, back or sides of the pack, too bad, you would need to adhere to whatever “standard” is agreed to or mandated.
And those are just the engineering challenges. There is also all the business challenges. First, who “owns” the pack? Are you just leasing it from someone and thus if you stop paying whatever the monthly fee is would you no longer have a battery pack? What if you want to change suppliers would you need to drive to one swap location and have the battery removed and then be towed to a different location for a different company’s battery to be reinstalled? If you own it you aren’t saving any money in the price of the car, instead you’re just potentially getting a worse battery the first time you swap it out.
Does a swappable battery mean we’d need to have a single company nationwide so you can swap a battery wherever you are? For example, if you are swapping in the middle of Iowa does that need to be the same company as your home area in LA or Charleston? Or would the battery swap companies be mandated to take anyone else’s battery as a valid swap? That is basically how it works now with propane tanks but those are cheap and really simple. As soon as something costs a little more money or gets slightly complicated I don’t think most rental companies would want to take their competitors equipment back. And if they are forced to take anything brought in the quality of the battery packs would be a race to the bottom. There is no reason to make your equipment nicer than your competitors’ if you have to take their lower quality product as an equivalent trade in. It would be like going to Enterprise renting a Mustang and then coming back a month later with Versa (that you traded the Mustang for at Avis) and expecting them to have to take it.
Also, what sort of quality controls would there be so one company doesn’t start flooding the market with inferior, dangerous, or counterfeit batteries (even unknowingly)? How much does swapping a battery cost compared to just charging the one in the car because it has to be more expensive? Finally do you trust whatever swap system is in place to get all the connections correct and fully seated? Automating something that is new and clean is way different from something that is pushing a decade old or more and covered in grime and rust.
The only benefit I see for private vehicles is during long road trips but mainly or only for the handful of people who drive for 12 hours straight with nary a stop to eat or pee. The only other potential short term benefit I can see being valid are for small to medium commercial operators. They could be in a situation where they don’t want to upgrade their base of operations to have chargers in all parking spots so I could see where they contract with another company to do battery swaps since that could be cheaper than running new high voltage electrical lines all over an existing parking lot. But even then long term I think it makes sense that charging would be cheaper overall.
*At a glance*, this seems expensive, risky and sort of minimally profitable, if at all profitable.
This seems more like something brought about by regulation or demand after seeing somewhere else succeed at it.
I think swappable batteries would be great, especially for trucks. They were certainly awesome in cell phones before they screwed us out of that. Unfortunately, manufacturers don’t want to be in the business of producing commodities and all the downward price pressure that comes with that, which is what the battery packs would become in a universally swappable scenario. When your battery pack goes bad, they want to charge you $7K for a replacement that you can’t buy from anyone else.
May I ask since every ICE car has a different battery and EVs are designed by many different companies are simply different batteries that replaceable?
The connection issue is easy to solve by adding one extra sacrificial cable that gets swapped out every 100 connections. Same can be done with fasteners.
I am 100% for battery swapping. The counter arguments can all be designed out.
Design out “who pays for the extra batteries?” for us.
Wait follow my thought here. You know they say it takes 10 minutes to change a battery with those sots of systems. And you have to load a truck at a hub location…. so what if you change it out when that truck comes in for a secondary load. In Japan they often ar eloading up for a region and then coming back for a second load. The idea that you get everything in one trip like in the US is not a thing.
I lived in Japan for 10 years and the Kuroneko shipping depo had the same small trucks cycle through more than you would believe.
My colleague in Europe has a NIO, and can’t say enough good things about battery swapping (and the vehicle overall).
Welcome to capitalism, you must be new here. Of course everyone thinks that, and we enjoy a bewildering variety of vehicles to choose from on the market because of it. That’s not to say I don’t support standardization, and I expect more will come as the industry matures, but it’s still the Wild West as far as EV development goes, despite the fact early lithium ion EVs are almost old enough to vote. Anytime standards are mentioned, I just think of the classic XKCD comic: xkcd: Standards
As an engineer, I see their practical points too: the car can’t use the battery pack as part of the chassis if that pack must be easily droppable. That means having a structure to support both the car sans-battery, plus the stand-alone structure of the battery itself, plus all the associated quick-swap mounts (which must be strong enough to withstand a collision, but also handle being made and remade thousands of times, which most bolts aren’t). The weight and packaging of all that are not as much of a concern on large trucks like the Fusos, which still use a typical heavy truck chassis.
Infrastructure is probably the biggest issue. We barely have a passable EV charging network in the US, forget about fully-automated robotic swapping stations. Each one would likely hold six-figure $ worth of battery inventory at a time. Super easy target for vandals/thieves, not to mention maintaining uptime if the system has an error. You can still charge with a typical wall dispenser or DC fast charger, but the swappable battery is only worth it if you can use it. China has a leg up here, though I’m not sure how widely available their pack swapping stations are, or if it’s more of an inner-city thing. Taiwan’s Gogoro system works well because Taiwan is tiny, and much of the population was already used to driving small 2-stroke scooters, so the battery capacity need is much smaller than a car.
I’ve though the Gogoro system could work well in the US if you could dock a small swappable battery into a BEV with a much larger standard pack. Think like the propane tank swapping stations at grocery stores. You aren’t getting a full 100+ KWh battery, but say you get 30miles worth or something to get you home or over to a larger DC fast charger. You could also just keep that swappable battery and use it for a little extra range, or take it out and use it as a portable power brick, like you can with power tool batteries. I’m thinking something that would fit in a trunk.
Of course, the issue there is getting sufficient power density to make it worth it, the ability to cool the battery if people leave it in their trunk all day in Arizona, etc, but keeping the swappable battery small would help lessen the automation complexity if it’s light enough for one person to lift and manage.