What is the biggest bottleneck of electric vehicles now? That must be the battery!
It can be said that if the battery problem is not solved for a day, electric vehicles will not be able to completely replace fuel vehicles. This is basically the most serious problem in the entire electric vehicle industry.
How do these car manufacturers want to solve the battery problem?
Tesla’s idea is to charge quickly,
So it has been developing fast charging technology!
But Weilai doesn’t think so. What they want to do is called battery replacement!
As the name suggests, when your car is about to run out of battery, you can drive to their battery swapping station and directly replace it with a fully charged battery. There are questions here:
Does this power swap technology have a future?
Will Tesla be unable to keep up in the future because it does not pay attention to this field?
Let’s talk about the advantages of battery replacement!
First of all, save money - when buying an electric car now, the battery is very expensive, and after using it for a few years, when the battery ages, you can replace it with a new one, which costs only tens of thousands of dollars. The money is still not available, this is a very high cost!
But if you replace the battery, you don’t need to bring the battery with you when you buy the car. You can just rent the battery at the battery swap station when you buy the car. In addition, the battery will be updated later and the performance will be better, so you can You can enjoy the latest results at any time, otherwise you can only watch helplessly.
Secondly, it’s fast. Nowadays, fast charging means it takes dozens of minutes to fully charge it, right? < /p>
Furthermore, thirdly, the burden on the power grid is small, especially in some old communities.
Nowadays, the power of these charging piles can easily reach hundreds of kilowatts!
As for the air conditioners and refrigerators in our homes, one kilowatt of power is considered a big item. The power of one fast charging station is equivalent to hundreds of air conditioners, and the power supply is not stable until eight or nine at night. At this point, everyone is charging together, and no one uses electricity in the middle of the night.
This puts a heavy burden on the power grid, but the battery swap station does not have this problem. It can be centralized and coordinated, and the power consumption is stable and controllable.
These are all advantages. Thinking about it, the future seems really good!
But! The shortcomings are also obvious!
The most critical problem is that battery specifications are not uniform. Battery standardization, interface standardization, and even battery management system standardization have not been realized. Everyone has his own model. When we build a battery replacement station, of course we hope that the battery will be of the same specification and you can replace it with any car you want, just like a gas station.
In addition, the investment in battery swapping stations is generally large. The basic investment plus battery reserves cannot reach even a few million. In addition, coupled with the subsequent operating expenses, this requires scale support. Otherwise, if there were ten battery swapping stations built there, there would only be about ten cars that could be swapped on the road, and no family would be able to resist being so spendthrift!
This is actually the advantages and disadvantages of battery swapping in electric vehicles.
The battery swapping technology promoted by NIO vs. the fast charging technology advocated by Tesla, which one is correct? What about the direction?
In the future, it is likely that the two will complement each other!
For example, in densely populated big cities, battery swapping stations should be a better way to make intensive and efficient use of social resources and avoid building charging piles everywhere;
But you have to If you want to run a long distance, then the charging pile is more suitable. So in many cases, it is not about me without you, or you without me, but complementing each other!
Only by properly solving the battery problem can electric vehicles really change the world as they are described...
Is it possible for Weilai to use its battery swapping technology to conquer the special world? Where is Silla? ——Very possible!
However, once the batteries, interfaces, and even battery management systems of various brands of electric vehicles are standardized and economies of scale are formed, battery swapping will have greater potential in first- and second-tier cities!