Recently, THE NINGDE times officially announced that it has entered the power exchange market and will release the power exchange brand EVOGO. EVOGO is evolution+go, which means that future travel will evolve to be more convenient. It is reported that the power exchange products launched this time will be for all car companies.
Power exchange, in fact, is the car and battery as a completely independent individual existence, when the electric vehicle needs to be charged, you can directly drive to the replacement station to remove the battery that has no power, and then install a fully charged battery. The whole process only takes a few minutes, which is similar to the time of refueling, which can effectively solve the mileage anxiety problems such as the long waiting time for charging of pure trams and insufficient charging piles.
As the promoter of power exchange technology, WEI HAS laid out more than 700 substations across the country. By 2025, NIO plans to deploy more than 4,000 substations worldwide. In East China, WEIlai basically realizes that there are substations within a radius of 400 kilometers, and theoretically there is no mileage anxiety in this area. But in fact, Weilai is not the inventor of power exchange technology, in 2008, the domestic pure electric bus has used power exchange technology, but due to policy, cost and other reasons, the technology has not been promoted on a large scale. In 2013, Tesla also tried to swap the power model, also for cost reasons.
So, why did the NINGDE era choose to enter the power exchange market?
Personally, I think there are many reasons. First, charging and battery technology currently encounters a lot of bottlenecks, and it is impossible to achieve long endurance, fast charging and low cost in the short term. Second, the market prospects are broad. According to Bloomberg's forecast, by 2040, the proportion of new energy vehicle electricity consumption in the total electricity consumption of the whole society will climb from 1.3% in 2020 to 8%, when the size of the mainland power exchange market will exceed 500 billion yuan.
However, there are also many drawbacks to the power swap mode.
The first is the consumer's perception. Many people think that spending money to buy a new battery, a change of electricity to replace the old, is their own loss, so more resistant to changing the battery. Secondly, the Ningde era is for the service of all car companies, which is different from the Weilai brand self-operated power exchange. Each car company has different pure electric platforms, battery models, etc., if you want to change the power, is the battery to be standardized? It's another long process.
The most critical point is that the cost of substation replacement is high. Data show that the load rate of a single substation reaches 50% to achieve breakeven. That is to say, a power station that can be replaced more than 200 times a day must complete at least 100 or so power exchanges per day to avoid loss. Referring to Weilai's data in 2020, there were more than 100 substations in the country at that time, with thousands of daily power exchanges and an average of dozens of stations per station.
Of course, with the more extensive use of a certain technology, there will be more manpower and material resources invested in research and development, and the supporting industries will be more perfect, which will promote the development of the technology. If swap modes become more common, it is also possible to reduce costs.
In fact, although power exchange and charging are two completely different ways of replenishing energy, they have their own perfect corresponding scenes. The advantage of fast power exchange is suitable for most scenarios that require uninterrupted use, such as urban transportation such as online car-hailing, buses, or high-speed long-distance rushes. But for the more regular commuting scene, the price of power exchange is undoubtedly higher than that of charging. For example, office workers drive 20 or 30 kilometers a day on weekdays, stop and charge when they get to the unit, and then drive away at night, obviously there is no need to change the electricity.
Therefore, before the power exchange becomes very cheap, or the five-minute battery life of several hundred kilometers is realized, it is difficult to replace each other. There is no best, only the most suitable.