Tom Scott
7 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2023–2025
5:24 · 2.2M views · Dec 11, 2023
Tom Scott borrows a Nio electric car in China and shows its automated battery swap station replacing the whole battery in minutes. He explains how swapping serves as an alternative to charging.
Go-to reference in EV threads for showing that battery swapping already works in practice.
7 comments from Hacker News
Both upthread replies seem to evidence approximately the same level of effort to me; "It won't be faster" isn't wildly less effort than "what if it will be faster?" Nio has fewer Nio battery swap stations operating in the entire world than just the state of New Jersey has filling stations (not dispensers, entire stations). Nothing in the video above made me think "oh wow, that looks like that process will be a lot faster than filling up!" and several segments made it seem like there would be more time involved in just getting the car into and out of the battery replacement service bay than filling up takes. (Nio's claim of a 2.5-3 minute battery swap seems to be measuring only the swap time while the car is stopped in the bay.) That's all before we consider the travel time to one of the stations (which is unlikely to be as close to your trip as a typical filling station because of the rarity of stations), time waiting for the car [or cars] in front of you to complete their swap (which if Nios ever became popular would likely be longer than waiting for one of the typically eight or more dispensers to free up at a filling station), nor to account for the "all long range batteries are out of stock at this location, because it's the Friday before Christmas and everyone is road tripping to visit family" NACKs that are liable to occur in a Nio-only battery swap system. For me the killer line in the video that will make it hard for Nio to solve all of these is at this video : "Building
As of last May, they had 1360 battery swap stations across China, where in less than 5 minutes the battery can automatically be swapped out for a fully charged one. They are also starting to build stations in Europe. So they really are trying to make the experience better. And to be fair, Tesla is also working on this to a lesser extent in the US. Source for the battery swap data: [LINK] Edit: here's Tom Scott's youtube video about his experience using the battery swap service: this video
NIO just did the expensive-to-automate part, it's not just theory... this video (Tom Scott demo/walkthrough.) Press release from April says [LINK] "it completed 40 million battery swaps" across 2300 stations. It still has to scale up from there and get traction from other car vendors beyond paper-only "partnerships"... but they've gotten vastly farther than [LINK] did before it failed 10 years ago.
I just watched this Tom Scott video this morning about a Chinese company that created a "pod" where you can replace the battery instead of charging it. this video You can buy the car and rent the battery. Each time you need to "recharge", you change it.
Obviously a trailer would not be a clever idea, but Nio already has cars with swappable batteries, for short distances you could just install a battery pack which is maybe 20% battery and 80% empty space this video