If you wish to personal that battery, and also you don’t need to go to swap stations, your automobile will value you roughly $58,500. If, alternatively, you like to lease the battery, you’ll pay slightly below $50,000 up entrance, plus a month-to-month charge of $135. (The prices are all a bit larger in the event you go for the 100 kWh battery, however the concept is similar.) For that month-to-month charge, you get a few swaps or a set quantity of speedy charging.
It will take you simply over 5 years to start out paying extra within the month-to-month charge than you’d have paid with the up-front choice, and most EVs on the roads right now have battery guarantee protection for eight to 10 years.
The implications
I’m fascinated by this potential shift in possession for batteries, and I believe if the imaginative and prescient seems to be the truth, there are plenty of potential upsides.
The power to lease batteries may imply much less stress about battery degradation for drivers, in accordance with Fei Shen, the VP of energy administration at Nio. “It isn’t needed for them to fret about it in any respect, as a result of they’ll swap this battery at any time, at any time when they need,” he says.
And for the corporate, it’s simpler to trace and repair batteries. “If we discover some potential issues, we are able to hold this battery in our swap station and do the upkeep,” Shen says. The identical goes for reclaiming batteries for recycling on the finish of their lifetime, he provides.
Then there’s the potential of customization: drivers may go for a smaller-capacity battery and improve solely earlier than longer journeys, for instance. That might lower prices and even scale back the entire amount of supplies wanted to construct batteries for EV fleets.
However on the flip facet, some EV consultants aren’t so positive the battery-swapping image would end up fairly so rosy.
