JAC Motors, a Volkswagen-backed Chinese automaker, unveiled the first mass-produced EV with a sodium-ion battery through its new Yiwei brand. Although sodium-ion battery tech has a lower density than lithium-ion, its lower costs, simpler and more abundant supplies and superior cold-weather performance could help accelerate mass EV adoption.
also it’s not a trivial task to engineer for swapable EV batteries, doing so comes with a whole host of disadvantages / compromises that don’t make sense for most (I guess) consumers right now. It’s not very different from the phone battery issue, except on a huge scale and with much more severe consequences if things go wrong
Yes, you need to make the puncture proof, they are a fire hazard if stored at home, they degrade over time and if left empty long enough might not even work, etc.
The enginnering part is for sure one of the reasons we don’t see that idea in the wild (yet?).
The fire hazard at home and degradation when stored full or empty (speaking of lithion ion based batteries here) go away if you lean on the rental approach.
Wouldn’t it be nice to save investment and weight by using the required amount of battery capacity while still being able to extend the range of your car easily when needed?
I mean, US Cellular had a free battery swap program for a while. If you were a subscriber and your phone battery was low, you could go into any store and they’d swap you out for a fully charged battery for free. I presume they just ate the cost of damaged or degraded batteries as part of it. I only used it a couple times, but it was kinda nice.