[irjustin]

The first point barely makes sense if you can have more than one bay. Also it's about how many can you swap in an hour vs charge? The base expectation is you'll be able to do way more cars since they don't have to sit and wait for an hour just like gasoline cards today.

Battery degrading is only an issue if I own the battery instead of getting it like a subscription. A 10% swing in range shouldn't matter in most scenarios as long as I only pay for the energy used.

All these problems here are solvable. I think there are way bigger issues for the company like now they need to own a bunch of batteries and house those on the books.

[sbradford26]

So I think a part that is forgotten about with battery swap station is that those batteries still need to be charged. Which gets into how many additional batteries does each station need stored to be able to keep up with demand. If it takes 1 hour to fully charge a battery and you want to be able to serve a car every 5 minutes then you are going to need to be able to send out 12 batteries within an hour. So now as a consumer you are going to pay for the electricity to charge those batteries, 12 charging stations, plus the overhead of 12 batteries sitting doing nothing but charging.

Companies could reduce that overhead cost by reducing charging times, but as charging times reduce it becomes more likely the consumer will choose to simply just choose to charge their own vehicle instead of swapping a battery. How much are consumers going to be willing to spend to save 5-10 minutes? I drive past Sam's Club every day after work where people wait in line easily 10-20 minutes to save 5-10 cents per gallon of gas.

[irjustin]

not sure if you'll see this, but agreed!

This is what I'm referring to as "housing on the books" you've got this insane infrastructure that goes beyond simply charging.

I also agree, how much time are people willing to spend to save money and the answer is, a lot. Grows quite rapidly lower on the economic ladder you go.

To be fair, it's not saving 5-10 minutes. A Tesla supercharger still takes ~15m for only 200mi. To go to full charge, you'd be saving an 30-45m easy. If all the bays are full, 2-3 hours?!

But to agree with you, if you put the battery swap next to a charging station and charged less for the charging station (because less infra), how many people would be willing to simply take the lower cost and wait a bunch of time? Quite a lot I'm afraid.

[sbradford26]

So the car I am most interested in is the Ioniq 5 which is rated at a 10-80% charge time of 18 minutes. Sure it is not a completely full battery but largely that isn't necessary. But I think the major issue is that technology advancement necessary to reduce overhead costs for battery swap stations will only make charging more appealing, because the only way to reduce the number of batteries required in stock is to be able to charge them faster. So even though right now it might save you 30-45 minutes right now for a full battery, it would cost significantly more. As charging times decrease it will start saving less and less time but still will cost a premium.