If you wish to personal that battery, and also you don’t wish to go to swap stations, your automobile will value you roughly $58,500. If, then again, you like to lease the battery, you’ll pay just below $50,000 up entrance, plus a month-to-month price of $135. (The prices are all a bit greater in case you go for the 100 kWh battery, however the concept is similar.) For that month-to-month price, you get a few swaps or a set quantity of speedy charging. 

It will take you simply over 5 years to start out paying extra within the month-to-month price than you’d have paid with the up-front choice, and most EVs on the roads at present have battery guarantee protection for eight to 10 years. 

The implications

I’m fascinated by this potential shift in possession for batteries, and I feel if the imaginative and prescient seems to be the fact, there are numerous potential upsides.

The power to hire batteries may imply much less stress about battery degradation for drivers, in line with Fei Shen, the VP of energy administration at Nio. “It is not essential for them to fret about it in any respect, as a result of they will swap this battery at any time, every time they need,” he says. 

And for the corporate, it’s simpler to trace and repair batteries. “If we discover some potential issues, we will hold this battery in our swap station and do the upkeep,” Shen says. The identical goes for reclaiming batteries for recycling on the finish of their lifetime, he provides. 

Then there’s the potential of customization: drivers may go for a smaller-capacity battery and improve solely earlier than longer journeys, for instance. That might minimize prices and even scale back the full amount of supplies wanted to construct batteries for EV fleets.

However on the flip facet, some EV specialists aren’t so certain the battery-swapping image would prove fairly so rosy.