Plug and play battery1/21/2024 ![]() When you did find a working plug, batteries took forever to charge.īetter Place’s alternative, through a contract with Renault, was the 2011 Fluence Z.E.: An electric sedan whose upright battery ate into trunk space and provided a piddling 80-mile range. Once range was depleted, reliable public charging barely existed, as I recall from my own anxious drives in San Francisco when I tested the original Leaf and BMW i3. ![]() Most newfangled EVs (Tesla excepted) could barely get beyond city limits on a charge, including the 2011 Nissan Leaf and its 73-mile range. ![]() In those quaint EV days, with Tesla taking baby steps with the Roadster (built from 2008 to 2011), battery swapping seemed to hold hazy promise. The Israel-based Better Place-founded in 2007 by smooth-talking Silicon Valley entrepreneur Shai Agassi-promised to change the world with robotic service stations that would pluck a battery from a car and pop in a fresh one, extending its driving range in a matter of minutes. The technology’s troubled history traces to Better Place, or Exhibit A in the case against battery-swapping’s future. That’s despite credulous media reports that coo over the (admittedly cool) spectacle of robots switching car batteries like greasy Rube Goldbergs-but tend to avoid asking tough questions about how it’s supposed to work in the real world. It’s a technical and market dead-end that seems more about separating green investors from their money than providing a solution. Here in 2021, Battery swapping in EVs has become an especially bad idea. Battery swapping has become a lot like hydrogen fuel cells for passenger cars: They’re automotive ideas that are never quite born, but just won’t die.
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