Forget it. Folks have been thinking about this battery swap thing for years and years, and it is not going to happen.
However what I like about NIO model is that you might be able to swap out a smaller, lighter city-driving oriented battery to a large 100kWh+ one when you go on a road trip. And then swap it back when you're back home.
What I however still don't understand is why this isn't at least offered in niches where it would make even more sense, like electric buses. If you have a fleet of these buses, minimizing the charging downtime should be a priority, right? Plus, in a bus it should be easier to find a suitable place for the battery pack where it can be accessed easily.
I happen to work in the bus industry and the way we work, at least, is the buses are all out working by day and in the depot at night - there’s a lot less demand for bus ops during the night.
For a variety of reasons, you don’t really want to have to fill up on either diesel or electrons while away from the depot, if you can avoid it. So what you really want from electrification is a battery that lasts all day.
So battery swapping doesn’t make a lot of sense in this regard since it would require multiple returns to depot during the day, or new swapping depots being built, or relying on someone else’s infrastructure. Of course all of this is possible but not ideal.
Tangentially, the overnight charging model introduces other problems - a large depot might have 100+ buses, all of which are charging simultaneously in one place. That’s a lot of electrons, and it is causing us a lot of trouble planning for it. And since the buses are charging at night, we can’t use solar to offset battery storage and in any case it’s not reliable enough - the buses have to run regardless of weather - setting aside the obvious commercial issues, in many cases it’s a safety issue too (eg school buses).
This is why H2 fuel cells have been viewed as potentially a better solution to BEVs in our industry, but H2 has its own (plentiful) problems and we appear to be shifting focus back to BEVs now and using H2 for energy storage and transport… that’s another story.
It’s not the cost of chargers or construction, or even the battery capacity, but the cost of transmission and delivery of the energy to charge them that has been the main problem.
Urban bus operations are just one aspect of the bus industry. I imagine it’s much easier for a municipal-owned bus company in a dense urban area to negotiate with the power company than it is for us.
However what I like about NIO model is that you might be able to swap out a smaller, lighter city-driving oriented battery to a large 100kWh+ one when you go on a road trip. And then swap it back when you're back home.