A friend suggested I read this news article about battery swaps for EVs as a substitute for ordinary charging of the battery. In the article, an EV owner in Beijing pulls into a battery swap station and pushes a button.
[The car] lifts up a tiny bit, and jostles around, followed by a muffled, methodic clanking sound and then, silence. The gray metal floor under the vehicle opens, and a machine rises to the undercarriage.
The car’s entire battery pack, which weighs about 1,100 pounds, or about as much as a grand piano, is unbolted and whisked away, underground. It goes into a closed room on the side of the swapping station where it is plugged in to charge for a future user.
Under the car, there are a few clicks and clanks as a fresh battery is lifted into place and bolted securely to the vehicle. The system runs some diagnostic checks. And that’s it.
The swap is said to have taken “three minutes and eight seconds”. Here is what I think about it.
First, battery swap is old news. Tesla tried this in 2015 (Wikipedia article).
Second, most EV owners hate battery swap. The EV may have cost $50K or $80K, and the owner may be paralyzed with fear that after a few years the battery will lose too much of its storage capacity. There are two reasons that the fear has been misplaced. First, the car invariably has a warranty providing for a replacement battery if the original loses more than so much percent of its capacity within ten years. Second, the observed customer experience is that the warranty does not need to be used — the battery retains most of its capacity.
But EV owners hate battery swaps, because they worry that the newly swapped-in battery might later turn out to be a dud. What if the newly swapped-in battery stops working after a day or a week or month? And what if it stops working at some incredibly inconvenient time, or in some desolate location?
Third, fast charging now works fine. Fast chargers are fast now in 2026. In a recent cross-country trip, I had to charge several times (every couple of hours) but the charging time was only 15-20 minutes per stop. This is, I suggest, comparable to how long I would have stopped anyway just to be able to use the bathroom. Using a battery swap to cut this back to, say, 3 minutes instead of 20 minutes is like using a hammer to serve as a flyswatter.
Fourth, most charging happens at home while you sleep. It’s a mistake to purchase an EV if you can’t charge at home. We all understand that. This also means that 99% of the charging sessions happen at home while you sleep. Only 1% of the charging sessions happen anywhere that is not at home. When you are asleep for the night, you absolutely don’t care whether it takes six hours or three minutes to do the charging.
So what remains is that the battery-swap story linked above has no relevance to normal EV life for most people in the US.
The article describes a battery swap in Beijing. To the extent that there is a need for battery swap, it is pretty much limited to dense city centers (Beijing? Tokyo?) where I guess there are lots of would-be EV owners who don’t own their own garage and so can’t charge at home (and, I guess, who are so impatient that 20 minutes is too long to wait).
If you throw a dart at a map of the US, it will almost always land in a place where the would-be EV owner has their own garage and can charge at home.