How Battery Swapping can further push electric vehicle sales in India: Explained

While presenting the Union Budget 2022, Finance Minister of India Nirmala Sitharaman announced that India will soon frame the ‘Battery Swapping Policy’.

Battery Swapping Station (Image: Gogoro)

On February 1, while presenting the Union Budget 2022, Finance Minister of India Nirmala Sitharaman announced that ‘Battery Swapping Policy’ will be framed soon. This is for the first-time government has officially recognized the Battery Swapping technology and spoken about it. The mere announcement of framing a policy in the near future has been welcomed by the Indian auto industry with open hands. So what exactly is this battery swapping and why there’s a need to form a policy? Here’s our explainer-

What is Battery Swapping?

With electric vehicles becoming more prominent, especially with the increasing use case in commercial vehicle space, various stakehokders are looking for solutions to make electric vehicles more affordable, easy to charge and economical to operate. One such technology that gives all these benefits to fleet operator is battery swapping.

Have you seen those boxes at various restaurants with portable batteries that you can pay and use and return? Something similar is being done for electric vehicles, more specifically electric 2 wheelers and 3 wheelers. A battery swapping technology, as the name suggests, is a method where user can swap a battery to keep the vehicle running.

A swapping station is installed at strategic location which comprises of multiple batteries getting charged constantly. An EV user can locate a swapping stations, replace the depleting battery with a charged one, put the empty battery on charge and can go to work. This technology has opened immense opportunities for fleet owners who wants to keep their vehicles running without worrying about charging time.

Why is Battery Swapping needed?

Battery Swapping is very much needed in modern day and age where fleet operators are relying heavily on increasing profit margin. Here are some of the reasons for using Battery Swapping-

High Cost of EVs

Electric Vehicles are the flavour of the season and have been growing at a rapid pace globally. However, they are no match to the ICE powered vehicles in terms of sales and one of the most important reasons is the high cost of ownership and acquisition. An EV, by industry standards, is 1.5-2x costlier than ICE counterpart and at least half the cost is from the battery pack. For e.g., Tata Nexon starts at Rs 7 lakh, while Nexon EV starts at Rs 13 lakh. However, these days, many manufacturers are offering batteries separately from a vehicle, reducing the cost. In that case, a fleet owner can buy vehicles without battery and utilize battery swapping to power their vehicles, reducing the initial cost.

Range Anxiety

Another major reason stopping people from buying EVs is range anxiety, or in simple terms, the fear of battery getting empty without finding a charging station. Unlike petrol pumps, EV charging stations are rare to spot and that further increases the range anxiety exponentially, especially while going on a road trip. Even if you find a charging station, the charging process is similar to charging mobile batteries. The best and fastest of charger will replenish 80 percent of battery in almost an hour, that’s quite long considering fuel pumps can fill up a tank in 5 min. In case of a Swapping Station, one can simply locate a station, go and replace the empty battery with a new one.

Key Players

A lot of private players and government backed agencies like EESL, BSES, Sun Mobility are now entering the battery swapping space to launch charging stations. On the other hand, fleet operators like Delhivery, Flipkart, Amazon, Dominoes has showed interest in utilizing the Swapping Battery benefits to reduce delivery cost and save the environment.

Ola has its own battery swapping unit in Gurgaon for e-rickshaws. The station has around 14 battery-swapping units with 20 battery packs per unit powering 100+ e-rickshaws. Further, more players are expected to enter the battery Swapping space as the technology promises to accelerate the adoption of EVs in India especially for the smaller vehicle segment.