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 is why they make you lease the battery. You cannot swap out your old battery, just the battery you are leasing. Your lease payments include the cost of them replacing batteries.