Regardless of how much people love their electric cars, even the staunchest supporter of them would admit that charging can sometimes be a *bit* of a pain. From personal experience, when everything works – which, to be fair, is most of the time – running an EV is great. But there are still moments of frustration, whether it’s waiting for a charger and vehicle to speak to each other, slow rates of replenishment or hanging around in a queue to get some more miles in the tank.

But a revolution could be on the way: battery swapping. It’s something that I heard of many years ago being introduced (or maybe just trialled) in China – of course, where else?! Essentially, you drive up to a machine, your empty – or near empty – battery gets taken from the bottom of the car and a new one replaces it. And that’s it – you’re ready to go within seconds, with hundreds of miles instantly at your disposal again.

Sounds too good to be true? Well, if the guys at Contechs get their way, it could become the norm. The company has benchmarked different forms of battery swapping and switching approaches and developed modular electrical architectures adopting the famous ‘skateboard’ layout, to make battery swapping possible. Costwise, Contechs believes the cost of swapping could be half that of a conventional public charger. Factor in money saved on food, drinks and all other sundries while you’re killing time waiting for your EV’s battery to charge and you’ll REALLY be quids in!

Clearly, it’s very early days but, to me, there are a lot of questions raised around a number of areas of these ‘swap shops’ including: storage; charging of the replaced batteries; infrastructure; and the machinery to literally do the heavy lifting. It remains to be seen how the potential solution will play out, but from a convenience point of view alone, I’m right behind it!

Enjoy the issue.

John Challen Editor