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They are too heavy to swap them by hand


The comment you replied to said minimal tools.

In practice this would probably mean something like: a vehicle hoist, a suitable lifter, a couple of sockets and a racket handle, and a screwdriver or two.


Tesla actually had a battery swapping machine at one point, I think it was at the Kettleman City location. There's no reason the battery and charging infrastructure can't be leveraged for all passenger vehicles. The battery on your electric vehicle should be like the propane tank on your gas grill - just swap it out when you need to. (This doesn't preclude recharging it)

Not to mention, when the battery reaches the end of its normal life cycle. Just goes straight into the recycling pipeline.


Tesla's swapping machine was just for tax credits. It was never built to be something they'd sell to customers. They built that one demo location and then abandoned battery swapping completely as not viable.


If they legitimately cared instead of faking it they could probably do better. Especially if the target is a maintenance-style machine setup rather than a 30 second gas station rival setup.


Nio's cars support battery swaps:

https://electrek.co/2021/07/09/nio-plan-open-battery-swap-st...

You can rent the batteries and upgrade and downgrade the capacity as you like. It also makes it easy to replace the battery in the future if you buy it outright.

They offer 70 and 100 kWh packs now. They're aiming for 150 kWh packs next year:

https://insideevs.com/news/465188/nio-150-kwh-solid-state-ba...




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