EV battery replacement finds new life in China

Drive-through battery-changing technology killed by Tesla years ago now benefits Chinese electric car manufacturers and drivers as the world’s largest car market moves to adopt electric mobility.

Electric cars have been plagued by the time-consuming charging process since the birth of electric cars, while a battery replacement service can shrink the process from hours to minutes. Drivers only need to drive their cars, equipped with swappable batteries, in the battery exchange stations and their discharged batteries will be replaced within five minutes by fully charged batteries.

The service was first initiated in the US. In 2013, Elon Musk showed off Tesla’s battery-changing technology on its Model S, but two years after the idea, the plan did not work well. Only four to five of the 200 Model S owners he invited to try out the service were interested.

“Obviously it’s not very popular,” Musk said at his company’s shareholders’ meeting in 2015.

On the other side of the planet, however, things are very different.

“This is fast,” a Beijing driver named Wang told CGTN. Wang said the battery replacement service saved him the one and a half hours of downtime it would normally take to recharge his battery.

The driver’s cab is from China’s largest manufacturer of pure electric vehicles, Beijing Electric Vehicle Marketing Co., Ltd. (BJEV), a unit of the state BAIC Group. It has 206 battery exchange stations in 19 cities in China. The stations look like car washes and mainly serve the company’s taxi park.

Hu Jinyong, a senior engineer at BJEV, told CGTN via email that the biggest benefit of battery replacement is the technology providing “an easy and fast battery replacement service just like refueling a gasoline car.” He suggested that if the service were developed, it would also reduce the cost of electric cars (EVs) because the most expensive part of the cars would be shareable.

BJEV’s rival NIO, another Chinese EV manufacturer, provides lifelong free battery replacement services to those who buy new cars. According to NIO, 50.1 percent of its customers had used their battery replacement services since the end of July.

“I was actually not ready to change the battery in the first month when I got my new car,” Maggie Chen, a NIO ES6 owner, told CGTN. “I did not want to remove my battery. It was new!”

But soon enough, the ease of battery-changing Chen prevailed.

“I can see where available battery replacement stations are on my phone app and through these orders,” Chen said. “I’m barely loading my car right now.”

NIO built its first battery replacement station in May 2018. Each station has five replaceable battery spots. Nio Power’s marketing communications manager Xie Lili told CGTN via email that NIO had exchanged more than 700,000 batteries by the end of July.

Challenges cannot be ignored

China is the largest EV market in the world, with 3.1 million electric cars in active use. As part of its “Made in China 2025” plan, the world’s second-largest economy promises to become a global leader in new energy sources (NEVs), which also include plug-in hybrids and hydrogen fuel cells. It has set a target for NEVs to account for 205 of their total car sales.

The Chinese government has pushed for the development of NEVs. In March, it extended subsidies for the purchase of NEVs from the end of 2020 to 2022. According to the China Electric Alliance Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Alliance, China has built the largest charging infrastructure for electric cars, with 14.1 million charging stations nationwide.

In May, China stepped forward with the development of the battery switch in its “New Infrastructure” campaign, which is a national project to offset the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic and promote sustainable growth.

But there is a lot to be done for the popularization of battery replacement. As of June 2020, 40 percent of China’s 452 battery exchange stations were located in its capital Beijing, and the rest in the east coast, where the economy is stronger.

“As in [electric] car owner, we hope to have more and more battery stations, “said Chen.

Cost is the biggest challenge for businesses. The CEO of the bankruptcy of the Israeli EV technology company Better Place, Shai Agassi, once said that his battery exchange stations would cost 500,000 US dollars to build, and it costs about the same to build battery exchange stations in China, said insiders from the industry to CGTN. Agassi’s company went bust in 2013.

According to CCTV, a BJEV battery exchange station with the capacity to exchange 400 batteries per day must fulfill at least half of that amount at break-even. Zhao Xubo, general manager of Aulton, which works with BJEV in providing battery replacement services, told the station that taxi driver Wang does only 150 to 160 swaps a day.

Zhao said the transformation of gas cars to EVs is still in its infancy, and with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, the battery station has yet to make a profit.

In addition to companies, the Chinese government has been working on standardizing battery replacement services. The four major Chinese EV manufacturers that provide battery replacement services, including BJEV and NIO, have different battery models, which means that EV owners can only exchange their batteries in the drive of their own brand.

EV makers also compete aggressively with each other in the market. According to reports, NIO plans to set up an August battery management company to separate the car from the battery. There are also claims that China’s largest producer of car lithium-ion battery can invest in current Amperex Technology. Nie’s Xie, however, declined to comment on the matter when asked by CGTN.

(Video editor and cameraman: Zhao Yuxiang; Sun Siyi’s CG SiNi contributed to the story.)