Is Battery Swapping dumb?

My research suggests otherwise …

Full analysis video:

And a twitter thread

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The fastest superchargers today are more cost effective and scalable when compared to current $NIO swapping technology.

A $NIO station takes the space of 3 $TSLA stalls. At max utilisation superchargers serve 173 cars / day vs swap station 96 cars, despite higher KM/minutes.

On $NIO Day we’ll probably see new swapping technology:

- Unmanned & Fully automated
- Takes only 2 parking spaces
- Less cost
- Faster swapping (2-3 mins)

With those specs a $NIO 2.0 Station could serve more (192) cars /day than 2 $TSLA stalls (115) or 3 stalls (173).

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BUT is this economic or scalable?

The fact is, today $TSLA superchargers are more than 100% cost-effective than swapping! Big win for supercharging!!

But a 200K USD cost / station with specs as mentioned above would make swapping competitive in terms of investment payback time.

This of course partly due to the fact that $NIO users pay 9 cents more per KWh for swapping than for $TSLA supercharging in China.

Yet, we see phenomenal user adoption of swapping in #China in contrast to #Tesla’s early swapping tryouts: e.g.

40% take rate of BaaS in December

Therefore, it appears that in #China swapping could become a thing enabling a unique, defensible business model leveraging:

- Faster charging
- Upgradability
- Higher resale value
- EV acceptance
- Subsidies etc.

Are those specs enough for world-wide rollout? Questionable.

Yet, Battery Swapping Technology - in addition to battery technology, enables efficiency gains and decreasing cost curves for EVs.

This is why I am long both $TSLA and $NIO.