Battery swapping is a technology that could solve one key barrier for EV adoption: consumers’ range anxiety and the long waiting time for battery charging. Wouldn’t you feel more assured on a weekend trip if you knew you could stop at a swap station and replace depleted battery packs with fully charged ones in five minutes? But this isn’t easy to do, as Tesla and Better Place’s past failures. In China, however, battery swapping has been a reality for a couple of years. How did Chinese companies like Nio make it work with 2,300 swapping stations nationwide? What can companies outside China learn from the Chinese experience?
You might be underestimating how much power a car consumes while driving. For example, a Tesla model 3 has an efficiency of about 130 Wh/km in mild weather at highway speeds. Assuming that on the highway you’ll travel 100 km/h, that means you’ll use 130*100 = 13.000 Wh/h, a constant power draw of 13kW. That’s enough to power perhaps 8-12 houses on average.
A km of road could have, let’s say, 200 cars on it (4 lanes, 20m per car). That means you’d need to pump about 2.6 megawatts of power into every kilometer of road to keep them all topped up.
EDIT: fucked up math
And that doesn’t seem to take into account transmission losses. Even the best wireless phone chargers are maybe 70% efficient. This may hit 40% if you’re lucky. So double that figure.
Does using a period in your number not cause confusion? 13.000 vs 13,000. I first read it is 13 since the zeros mean nothing following a period where im from. No shade, just curious.
Apologies. I’m from a country where the meaning of the period and comma is reversed compared to the US, so I did it this way out of habit.
No need to apologize. I didn’t know they were reversed. Do yall do periods for three digits? 1.000.000,00?
Yup, just like that