Battery-swap sector ramps up as NEV owners seek alternative
Industry website says sales of compatible vehicles are up 54 percent in the first four months this year
A growing number of companies are moving into the battery swapping segment with new models and services. The companies vow to offer electric car owners a quicker and easier way to dispel their anxiety over mileage restrictions.
Getting electric vehicles fully charged usually takes hours, while empty batteries can be swapped for full ones in just minutes. Thus, battery swapping has become a major alternative to charging pillars.
Dozens of models, from carmakers including Nio, BAIC and FAW, are now capable of battery swapping.
Their combined sales in the first four months this year reached 42,000 units, up 54 percent year-on-year, according to battery website GG-LB.
Livan Automotive said last week that it is planning to launch at least six battery swapping EVs in three years. The carmaker already has two such models in the market.
Its latest model, a compact coupe SUV called RL 7, makes its debut at an ongoing auto show in Chongqing, where the carmaker is headquartered, and production will start in 2023.
Lou Yuanfa, Livan’s chairman and CEO, said the carmaker is dedicated to battery swapping, which he believes holds the key to the future of the EV segment.
Livan also unveiled its battery swapping architecture last week. The architecture consists of a complete vehicle platform, a battery swapping power supply platform and a cloudbased big data platform.
The architecture adopts a unified battery that offers different packs ranging from 50 kilowatt-hours to 100 kWh.
Vice-president Yang Quankai said the battery has been proven to support 2,500 charge-discharge cycles, which allows a car to drive up to
800,000 kilometers over a span of eight years.
By the end of this year, Livan is expected to have over 200 battery swapping stations in the country.
A number of companies including CATL, Nio and BAIC have also explored the battery swapping segment.
Nio, a New York-listed EV startup, has built more than 900 stations for battery swapping vehicles.
Guo Dongqiang, a Nio ES6 owner in Beijing, said he has yet to charge his vehicle since buying it in late 2020.
“There is a power station near my apartment and I always get the batteries swapped, which is a pretty fast process,” Guo said.
Nio plans to set up more than 1,300 battery-swap stations by the end of this year and add 600 more stations annually between 2022-25 in China, it said.
Unlike Nio, BAIC’s battery swapping models are mostly taxis. They spend time on the road so charging is not an optimum choice, the carmaker said.
Aulton, China’s largest battery swapping company, plans to build 10,000 stations that could serve more than 10 million EVs by 2025.
The company’s stations are compatible
with nine EV models from seven volume automakers.
Chinese battery giant CATL is exploring the market as well. Last week, its battery swapping service, called Evogo, became available in Hefei, Anhui province.
The battery-swap station is the size of three parking spaces, and each houses 48 battery blocks. It allows the swapping of a single battery block in around one minute.
There will be three fast batteryswap stations in Hefei at first, and it is estimated to reach 20 by the end of this year, the company said.
Evogo’s development came within two months of the company’s first stations opening in Xiamen, Fujian province. A total of 30 such stations are expected to be available in the coastal city.
China FAW Group’s Bestune has launched models capable of swapping batteries at Evogo stations.
Chen Weifeng, general manager of CATL’s battery swapping arm CAES, said the new solution will solve range anxiety problems as well as the inconvenience of recharging.
“As a business model of sharing and providing good service to our customers, we consider the battery a shared product instead of a consumer product for personal use,” Chen
said.
In May, local authorities in Chongqing released their new energy vehicle battery swapping pilot plan, saying that the city will set up more than 200 power stations and promote more than 10,000 NEVs capable of battery swapping by 2023.
Chongqing is one of a number of cities selected by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to run a pilot program and speed up the construction of battery swapping infrastructure.
In Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province that borders Chongqing, the number of battery charging and swapping stations will hit 350 by the end of this year.
Earlier this month, a car hailing company in the city, called Xiaoma Chuxing, ordered 7,000 battery swapping vehicles from Dongfeng Nissan.
There were 1,519 battery swapping stations across the country by the end of May, according to the China Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Alliance.
Analysts at Founder Securities estimate that there will be 3.2 million battery-swap cars across the country by 2025, with more than 28,000 power stations.