Schematic diagram of the Ningde era substation.
Today, electric vehicles are popular enough in China. However, the key problem of BetterPlace at that time was still not completely solved - how to get as many OEMs as possible to accept a unified battery pack standard.
Reporter | Jiang Ruijie
Edit | Xiao Wenjie
The Ningde era also needs to change the electricity. On January 18, CATL released the power exchange service brand EVOGO (Lehang Battery Swap), as well as a set of overall solutions including battery packs, substations and Apps.
As electric vehicles become more and more accepted by the market, the NINGDE era has become more and more vocal in the automotive industry - occupying 55.6% of China's power battery market, and power batteries are the most expensive components on electric vehicles. The power exchange mode can theoretically make up for this component, or the biggest shortcoming of the entire electric vehicle - the energy replenishment speed.
A two-minute refueling can make the car run 500 kilometers, and the same mileage, the battery to be fully charged, even with the help of high-voltage fast charging technology, it takes tens of minutes. In contrast, power replacement is the best way to solve the "slow energy replenishment" - directly remove the original battery pack, replace it with a fully charged battery pack, the whole process is time-consuming and refueling, and the replaced battery can also be charged during the trough of electricity charges.
Ideally, this power exchange mode has the highest efficiency and the best user experience, plus EVOGO is launched by industry giants such as Ningde Era, which will naturally attract market attention.
However, at present, it is difficult to expect the rapid popularization of this brand, it is more likely to be one of the solutions in specific scenarios, because the power exchange is not only a matter for battery manufacturers, but also for the electric vehicle industry, it can be regarded as "pulling the whole body".
The core highlight of EVOGO's power exchange solution is the "chocolate power exchange block". A power exchange block is actually a standard-size battery pack, which can provide about 200 kilometers of endurance, and can be connected side by side with multiple pieces to increase the cruising range. Theoretically, it could be used with the same battery pack to meet different sizes of models.
The key to this model is to make as many electric vehicles as possible equipped with this standard "chocolate". In other words, this is to unify the design standards of car battery packs, and this is the most difficult part of the whole package.
At the EVOGO press conference, Zeng Yuqun, chairman of CATL, used a piece of chocolate as a metaphor for standardized battery packs.
As early as 2007, Israeli startup BetterPlace thought about doing this, trying to unify battery standards when electric vehicles were in the bud. But BetterPlace struggled to convince Nissan-Renault to adopt its own standards for replacing electricity. By the time Renault's replacement model was delivered in 2012, BetterPlace had raised nearly $1 billion. But the electric vehicle market at that time was far from enough to support the number of ownership required for the power exchange model, and the sales of models compatible with the BetterPlace power exchange service were less than 2% of the expected, and the company had to liquidate in bankruptcy the following year.
Today, electric vehicles are popular enough in China. According to the data of the Federation of Passenger Vehicles, in December 2021, the retail sales of new energy passenger vehicles (including pure electric and plug-in hybrids) accounted for 22.6% of the total sales. However, the key problem of BetterPlace at that time was still not completely solved - how to get as many OEMs as possible to accept a unified battery pack standard.
Compared with the self-made BetterPlace, the Ningde era has accumulated deeply in the automotive power battery industry, and almost all mainstream electric vehicle OEMs are customers of the NINGDE era. In terms of technology, the CTP moduleless technology of the Ningde era can effectively increase the energy density of the battery and allow the same size battery to store more power, which is also the technical base of its daring to enter the field of power exchange. But the problem is that in order to make a car compatible with the replacement power station of the Ningde era, it is necessary to accept its battery pack size and battery pack interface standards, which means that the Ningde era should be deeply involved in the definition of a model and early research and development, and the OEMs that are accustomed to dominating the automotive industry chain and the R& D process may regard it as a loss of discourse power.
Not only that, an OEM cannot have only one battery supplier, that is to say, to adopt the power exchange technology of the Ningde era, it must require its competitors to produce batteries in accordance with the standard of "Ningde Era Brand Chocolate". This kind of collaboration between competitors is extremely difficult.
In addition to the consideration of industrial chain dominance and competitive relationship, the power exchange itself is also a model that requires major determination for electric vehicle companies, which involves not only automobile manufacturing itself, but also the entire service system, which is why the vast majority of electric vehicle companies have not adopted this model.
NIO is currently the only mainstream electric vehicle company with a substation system. It began to lay out its own substation system in 2018, and as of January 21, 800 substations had been built. In these substations, consumers can also choose battery packs with different battery life specifications, but instead of removable chocolate swap blocks, they are all uniformly sized batteries. Nio's background can set the upper limit of each battery's charge capacity, so as to flexibly control the cruising range.
In order to cooperate with this power exchange model, WEILAI has set up a battery rental program, consumers can only buy a car and rent a battery when buying a car, so as to eliminate consumers' concerns about battery property rights when changing batteries. NIO also provides a policy of free battery swapping 4-6 times a month to increase the frequency with which car owners use the battery swap mode. In addition, NIO's app also has a module dedicated to booking power station swaps. It can be said that the power exchange model has affected all aspects of WEILAI's hardware, software and business model.
That's not even counting the economics. Once a large-scale power exchange is carried out, the upfront investment and operating costs will increase. In the recent report on the 2021 WEILAI annual conference, YiMagazine of the First Finance and Economics also analyzed the cost pressure of the power exchange system on Weilai through the analysis of the financial report.
According to the location of the battery, the mainstream power exchange technology can be divided into three types: chassis power exchange, sub-box power exchange, and side power exchange. Among them, the chassis power exchange can be fully automatic, the fastest power exchange speed, within 5 minutes can be completed. At present, Weilai and Aodong New Energy (hereinafter referred to as "Aodong"), which have the largest number of substations, use this route, and the same is true for EVOGO. However, chassis power exchange has a disadvantage, that is, the battery is not easy to share across models.
For Weilai, for the purpose of improving the brand experience, it can relatively disregard the cost, invest heavily in power replacement, and do not care about the problem of cross-brand battery sharing. But for a third party like the Cataline Times, to promote their own substations between different models, they have to consider the above problems.
Of course, cross-brand power exchange is not without a market, and the case of Aodong shows that online car-hailing is a feasible scene for power exchange.
Aodong is a start-up company specializing in the research and development of power exchange technology and the construction of power station replacement, and it has established a joint venture with BAIC BJEV to build a power station replacement for new energy network ride-hailing and taxis in Beijing. Unlike Weilai, its substation is larger, can accommodate more vehicles to change power at the same time, and emphasizes the speed of power exchange. The power exchange technology demonstrated by Aodong can theoretically compress the bicycle power exchange time to 20 seconds.
Ride-hailing rides far exceed the daily mileage of family cars and buses, and are only slightly lower than that of heavy trucks. Electric vehicles as operating vehicles have a natural cost advantage, in the same mileage, the cost of electricity is much lower than the cost of fuel. But the problem is that the online ride-hailing driver is also very concerned about the actual operating time, if each charge has to take an hour, it is a real loss of revenue, so the demand for power exchange mode is very clear, which is why companies like Aodong can find partners.
At present, the main customers of the power exchange system in the Ningde era may also be online car-hailing. At the press conference on January 18, EVOGO announced that the first partner model is FAW Besturn NAT, and the main customer of this car is the operators of ride-hailing cars and taxis. Similarly, the Ningde era also showed its power exchange speed, and the single battery pack power exchange time was 1 minute.
The power exchange model for online ride-hailing can be passed, but the size of this market is limited. By the end of 2021, the cumulative number of online ride-hailing vehicle transportation certificates issued by various localities is 1.558 million, and if this figure is used as the ownership of online ride-hailing vehicles, it will only account for 0.5% of the national car ownership.
Of course, neither Aodong nor NINGDE will claim that their target is only the online car market, they all claim to use this as a starting point to cooperate with more car companies to develop more passenger car models.
In the long run, the promotion of power exchange is definitely the trend. In the "Government Work Report" in 2020, it was mentioned for the first time that the new energy automobile industry should "increase the number of power stations", and policies to support power exchange have been released. The unified standard between different brands is also conducive to the recycling of batteries and the development of the industry. But the power to set standards is often the hardest to grasp.
As a leader in the battery industry, CATL will certainly not give up this market. But layout doesn't mean investing heavily right away, it's more likely to test the waters.
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