Swap scooter battery pulse5/30/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() That shorter range battery “can be quite the shock on your regular commute.” Kluge counters that “maybe that’s not such an issue if you could just go back and swap them again,” especially since scooter trips in the city tend to be quite short. (If such home charging is your bag, check out the $3,000 Genze.) EV owners, she argues, tend to be particular about how they treat their batteries. And Sexton argues that Gogoro is making a mistake by not offering customers the chance to own their batteries, and charge them at home, since they’re so light and easy to carry into apartments. First of all, finding the right balance between the number of battery stations and riders is hardly a given. “The utilities are gonna want this,” O’Connor says, because it could help them meet those requirements, and “it’s something that they don’t have to go build.”īut the battery swapping scheme is far from a lock to succeed. Now here comes a company that wants to stack up batteries that can be charged when energy is most available and cheapest, all over the place. California, where renewable energy production is capped by the inability to deliver it all, passed a law in 2010 requiring utility companies start storing power. "If we can find opportunities to store that energy when it’s oversupplied and release it when we need it, then you can start to smooth out the whole energy grid,” O’Connor says. The grid is designed to deliver energy, not store it, so it can be hard to line up supply and demand. The big challenge with renewable energy is that electricity from things like solar panels and wind turbines is produced sporadically. It helps that utilities have a reason to want these stations in place. Luke calls it “modular capital investment.” Each is roughly the size of an ATM, so installation shouldn’t be a major hassle, and stations can be added as demand increases. The reason he doesn't think that's a totally insane goal is this: Each station, which holds eight batteries, will cost less than $10,000. Luke wants to have enough stations in place to ensure riders can simply grab one and go. And they don't need complex automated systems to swap them. ![]() Scooters have far smaller, and cheaper batteries. The battery in an electric car can weigh many hundreds of pounds and cost many thousands of dollars. Scooters are smaller and simpler than automobiles, and require smaller, simpler batteries. Gogoro thinks it can avoid the same fate by downsizing. “When you have these huge stations, and really expensive batteries, and sophisticated swap out, it can be difficult to take market share and really penetrate,” O'Connor says. Try as it might, Better Place simply couldn't make it work, and declared bankruptcy in 2013. The stations were complex and expensive at $2 million apiece (the swapping mechanism alone cost half a mil), and required maintaining an inventory of expensive batteries. First, only Renault/Nissan was willing to work with the startup to develop cars with swappable packs. “The Better Place model was highly sophisticated but very expensive, and it wasn’t really accessible,” says Timothy O’Connor, director of the California Climate Initiative at the Environmental Defense Fund. ![]() But it sold fewer than 1,500 cars and failed to gain traction. Better Place raised $1 billion, lined up a deal to have Renault/Nissan build the cars, and even built a few dozen swap stations. We saw this with Better Place, Shai Agassi's audacious plan to jumpstart widespread EV adoption by selling electric cars that would use a vast network of automated battery swap stations that would cost $2 million apiece. The logistics are a hassle, and the infrastructure expensive. The problem with battery swapping always has been the execution. ![]()
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