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?
That “substantially identical” is up for heavy debate.
Sure. If you’ve abused it in some way so that it doesn’t take or hold charge, then you might have to pay for a replacement battery. But I think there would be an implied warranty when you’re given a replacement, that the replacement was fit for service. And the company might just have to roll the cost or replacing batteries every so often into their electricity pricing models.