Is it possible to invent a liquid that a car can run hundreds of kilometers in 4-5 minutes?
This should be a cold joke that many pure electric vehicle owners have seen. Indeed, from the development of pure electric vehicles to the present, the speed of replenishment and the convenience of use have always been the most controversial places. Especially in the just-concluded Spring Festival holiday, many car owners choose to drive home, and the drawbacks of pure electric vehicles will be infinitely magnified at this time.
Although most car companies now advertise THATC has a range of more than 500 kilometers, but throw away its own endurance shrinkage, the battery consumption will accelerate under high-speed driving, and the power consumption of in-car facilities such as air conditioning, which also leads to the single high-speed mileage of pure electric vehicles is usually about 200-300 kilometers, and finding charging piles on high speed has become a "century problem". Even if found, the voltage and charging speed of different charging piles may be different, and the actual experience is not good.
Netizens in the group of car friends shared their Spring Festival homecoming journey, "Originally more than 8 hours of travel, it took nearly twice as long. Many charging stations have a phenomenon of charging in a pile, it can be said that charging 1 hour queue for 4 hours, during the period people do not dare to go away, you do not know when to go forward, and too many people in line are afraid of cutting in line, and after the holiday travel also have to plan the charging route in advance. ”
By the end of 2021, the number of charging infrastructure in the country will be 2.617 million units, while the number of new energy vehicles will be close to 8 million, and this data will grow rapidly in the past two years. Energy replenishment anxiety has become a "roadblock" in the development of the new energy vehicle market, in this case, another way of replenishment - "power exchange" has been re-put on the table for discussion, becoming a hot word in the industry.
At present, the power exchange is mainly used for heavy trucks and operating vehicles, and only Weilai in the C-end market insists on changing the power. Recently, CATL, Geely and other brands have also entered the game, the future with the increasing maturity of power exchange technology, and the establishment of industry technical standards, the power exchange model is expected to continue to accelerate the promotion, to the industry to provide a lot of imagination space.
【·The power exchange market continues to mature】
How to understand the pure electric vehicle power exchange? Simply put, just like the mobile phone we used more than ten years ago, after the battery is gone, you can open the back cover, you can freely remove the battery, and you can continue to use it when you change the full power, eliminating the time of charging.
Power swapping is not a new technology in the field of electric vehicles, the first "crab eating" was the Israeli company Better Place, which began operating battery swapping in 2007 (only supports the Renault brand). However, at that time, the ownership of pure electric vehicles was very low, users did not accept such products, coupled with the high cost of batteries and operating expenses, resulting in the company declaring bankruptcy in 2013. In the same year, Tesla also tried to replace the power, due to policies and unprofitable reasons, and finally decided to develop towards fast charging.
In fact, China has been studying and developing the power exchange model, the first stage from around 2008, mainly to the demonstration base, used to enhance the acceptance of domestic users for electric vehicles, and then gradually used in commercial and operational vehicles, but rarely seen in the C-end market. Judging from the experience at home and abroad, the policy environment, technical level, cost factors and market size have restricted the development of the previous power exchange model.
To make the public users truly realize this energy replenishment model, it is the BaaS battery rental plan released by Weilai in 2020, the owner can drive the car that needs to replace the battery into the replacement power station, and the fully automatic robot arm will help remove the old battery and reinstall the new battery, as well as the follow-up self-test work. Compared with electric brands such as Xiaopeng, Tesla, and WM, power exchange has become a unique competitive advantage of Weilai.
Subsequently, at the end of 2021, the China Automobile Association officially issued the "Construction Specification for Electric Passenger Car Sharing and Replacement Power Station", marking the establishment of the power exchange standard template. The formulation of power exchange mode standards can effectively solve the problems of previous power exchange platform and device technology, power exchange battery pack communication protocol, battery pack technology, power exchange mechanism technology, etc., promote the unified standards of main engine factories, battery suppliers and third-party operating agencies, and jointly expand the power exchange market.
Yu Xiang, co-founder of Fast Power, said that in the future, every electric vehicle should have the ability to change power, and power exchange is not only a way of energy supply, but also changes the energy structure. The future charging and replacing power station will not only be a supply network, but also a node of the vehicle network linkage, as well as a node network of green electricity, energy storage new energy, and renewable energy networks, which is a vital part of the overall energy transformation in the future.
【Solve the pain points of replenishment】
Traditional charging takes a long time and the layout of charging piles is unreasonable, which is the main reason for the resumption of the power exchange mode, which can better solve the pain points of electric vehicle development. Xin Guobin, vice minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, once said that we should support the innovative development of new technologies, new formats and new models, encourage enterprises to develop new charging and power exchange technologies, and explore the application of vehicle-electricity separation models to meet the needs of different markets.
Only from the perspective of the energy replenishment mode, the power exchange has many advantages over the traditional charging mode. The first is to increase the convenience of user travel, the entire power exchange process of the current power exchange station takes a short time, which is similar to the refueling time of traditional gasoline vehicles, and Aodong New Energy has released a 20-second power station replacement. In the highway service area, the number of charging piles is small, the charging speed is slow, and it is impossible to meet the needs of a large number of new energy vehicles for long-distance driving, and the replacement power station can make up for the gap of charging piles and solve the mileage anxiety.
Second, power exchange helps to extend the life of the power battery and improve safety. Due to the characteristics of ternary lithium batteries, fast charging will inevitably cause certain losses to lithium batteries, shorten battery life, and make the mileage shrink continuously. The battery in the power exchange mode will be uniformly managed by the supplier, which is more effective than the user's own maintenance, and the loss of the battery is minimized to a great extent, which not only prolongs the life, but also improves the safety.
The third point is also very important, that is, to reduce the user's car purchase threshold. Taking Weilai as an example, users who choose baas battery rental business can save up to more than 100,000 yuan when buying a car, while the monthly battery rent is only about 1,000 yuan. Due to the characteristics of pure electric vehicles, power batteries account for about 40% of the overall price, if the separation of vehicles and electricity in the power exchange mode is adopted, the first purchase cost of electric vehicles can be effectively reduced. At the same time, the continuous advancement of electric vehicle battery technology has led to a very high discount rate for second-hand cars, and the residual value of electric vehicles can be better retained in the power exchange mode.
Huang Chunhua, general manager of the marketing center of Aodong New Energy Group, said in an interview, "The power exchange model may only be left with two or three or one or two standardized specification batteries in the future." In this case, users no longer have to think about batteries when buying a car, and buying Weilai, SAIC, and Hezhong is just buying a car frame. In the future, the cost of using electric vehicles will be greatly reduced, and in the vehicle-electricity separation mode, more runs and more payments, less runs and less pays. ”
In addition, it can also solve the problem that the old community cannot install charging piles, resulting in inconvenient energy replenishment. Like the main market of electric vehicles in the north, Shanghai and Guangzhou, there are many users living in the old community, in the community planning 10-20 years ago, certainly did not consider the construction of charging piles, and after laying charging piles will increase the power load of the community, the construction of charging piles in the old community is a social problem, it is difficult to do. If the power exchange mode is used, the use of charging piles is fundamentally reduced, and this problem can be effectively solved.
epilogue:
The power exchange model may be the same as the original development of new energy vehicles, from the beginning of the operating market, it will eventually enter the C-end users. The biggest difficulty of the power exchange mode at this stage lies in how to perfectly integrate technology and business model in the embryonic stage of the industry, and seize the reasonable distribution point in advance, as well as the user's mind.
From a macro level, the state has always adhered to the national strategy of developing new energy vehicles, promoting the accelerated integration of automobiles with energy, transportation, information and communication industries, promoting the development of intelligent networked vehicles, and in the context of optimizing energy structure, carbon neutrality, etc., the power exchange model will certainly have a strong space for development.
In the past 13 years, the power exchange has experienced no one after its debut, that is, the peak, and has become a new outlet with the help of the spring wind of the industry. In the future, whether power replacement can become the main theme of energy replenishment cannot be easily concluded, and the rapidly changing new energy industry will always be handed over to the market to give the answer. In this industry-wide competition that integrates car companies, suppliers and operators, a new big war is about to start.