If you need to personal that battery, and also you don’t need to go to swap stations, your car will value you roughly $58,500. If, alternatively, you like to lease the battery, you’ll pay just below $50,000 up entrance, plus a month-to-month payment of $135. (The prices are all a bit larger when you go for the 100 kWh battery, however the thought is identical.) For that month-to-month payment, you get a few swaps or a set quantity of fast charging.
It would take you simply over 5 years to begin paying extra within the month-to-month payment than you’ll 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 quite a lot of potential upsides.
The capability to lease batteries may imply much less stress about battery degradation for drivers, in response to Fei Shen, the VP of energy administration at Nio. “It’s not necessary for them to worry about it at all, because they can swap this battery at any time, whenever they want,” he says.
And for the corporate, it’s simpler to trace and repair batteries. “If we find some potential problems, we can keep this battery in our swap station and do the maintenance,” Shen says. The similar goes for reclaiming batteries for recycling on the finish of their lifetime, he provides.
Then there’s the potential for customization: drivers may go for a smaller-capacity battery and improve solely earlier than longer journeys, for instance. That may lower prices and even cut back the full amount of supplies wanted to construct batteries for EV fleets.
But on the flip aspect, some EV consultants aren’t so positive the battery-swapping image would end up fairly so rosy.