Nio is a Chinese auto maker that offers an alternative to charging: just swapping out the whole battery whenever you need it. I borrowed one of their cars. ■...
I don’t know why you’d trust a giant battery, absolutely vital to the operation of your car, to some random 3rd party service. To be arbitrarily replaced. And need to rely on it for X miles. Particularly when your use case where you’d even want a quick swap is traveling outside a regular charges’ range.
Edit - forgot the potential for catastrophic failure. Batteries can go boom.
Only in this instance it’s not a third party, it’s the car manufacturer. It’s just like Tesla and their super chargers. Only these guys are replacing the battery instead of charging it.
Does the car warranty extend to cover the replacement battery just as if it was the original battery? Given an EV battery is a pretty significant part of the cost of the entire vehicle I wouldn’t trust a swapped battery unless the manufacturer made it very clear that they would treat it as if it was the original battery if any issues arose with it. The last thing I would want is to have to fight with Tesla or whoever if the replacement battery fails and they claim it’s not covered by their warranty.
Uh. It’s literally a 3rd party company that’s currently doing a single manufacturer atm, with explicitly (detailed in the video) plans to expand to other manufacturers.
For how much people seem to know about catalytic converter theft, they seem eager to have an easily removed battery. And full trust in no bad actors finding a way to exploit these stations for the metals in the batteries.
I don’t know why you’d trust a giant battery, absolutely vital to the operation of your car, to some random 3rd party service. To be arbitrarily replaced. And need to rely on it for X miles. Particularly when your use case where you’d even want a quick swap is traveling outside a regular charges’ range.
Edit - forgot the potential for catastrophic failure. Batteries can go boom.
Only in this instance it’s not a third party, it’s the car manufacturer. It’s just like Tesla and their super chargers. Only these guys are replacing the battery instead of charging it.
Does the car warranty extend to cover the replacement battery just as if it was the original battery? Given an EV battery is a pretty significant part of the cost of the entire vehicle I wouldn’t trust a swapped battery unless the manufacturer made it very clear that they would treat it as if it was the original battery if any issues arose with it. The last thing I would want is to have to fight with Tesla or whoever if the replacement battery fails and they claim it’s not covered by their warranty.
If you watched the video, you would know you don’t actually own the battery but lease it from the manufaturer.
All I did was watch a video at way to late at night.
Uh. It’s literally a 3rd party company that’s currently doing a single manufacturer atm, with explicitly (detailed in the video) plans to expand to other manufacturers.
For how much people seem to know about catalytic converter theft, they seem eager to have an easily removed battery. And full trust in no bad actors finding a way to exploit these stations for the metals in the batteries.