In 2007, Better Place said to recharge an electric car in five minutes. This is the story of a loud failure

Nio and Catl have reached an agreement to implement the largest battery exchange network in the world. “The most extensive and advanced,” Catl announced in a statement collected by The avant -garde.

The project comes from afar. In 2020Nio already presumed that he could change the battery of his electric cars in three minutes. Since then, we had not known the project beyond In 2022 The electric cars company made noise with this issue.

By then, the competition seemed served. The Geely Group, also Chinese, assured that In 2025 5,000 stations would have deployed of battery exchange. But, again, little has been known again on the matter.

Until Catl has decided to trust the child project, investing 314 million euros in its battery exchange system. But although they explain that they aspire to have the “most extensive” network, the truth is that no stations numbers data have been provided.

However, Nio and Catl’s proposal is not alone. In China, other companies have also tried to standardize this system and Bloomberg He calculated in 2022 that for this year some 26,000 battery exchange stations in the Asian country would have available.

It is clear that there is some interest in China in keep investing in the system and technology. However, everything indicates that if there are certain recharge times of byd and are economically viable their stations, A 400 km load in five minutes You can kill the concept.

If so, the system would go to a better life. A system that has already been touched almost 20 years ago and that failed irremediably when, ironically, more fault.

A little context with a battalion

When a person tells me that an electric car does not serve to travel and, above all, he tells me that they will not be in a long time, I usually tell an experience.

At the end of 2019 I participated a project to join all the provincial capitals of the Iberian Peninsula by electric car. It was about demonstrating that the network had advanced and that the second generation of Nissan Leaf was a much more capable car. Turning among colleagues, it was late as little as possible.

We get it yes, but it is also true that the challenge took us Almost seven days Although we stopped just and necessary to recharge the car. We ate as the car was loaded and slept while the car drank from the plugs. I remember calling a gas station to ask please open a plug even though we arrived after the service station had closed.

We had no choice. For Todo Teruel there was only one public charger available. That charger had to open with a key the employees of the gas station. They asked us that at the end we would leave the hidden key. Once the load was finished, Nissan’s electric should have almost 400 kilometers available on a 62 kWh battery. The truth is that we stopped every 200-250 km to take advantage of the fastest part of the recharge unless we would like to sleep in the middle of the trip.

Today, in Teruel and its surroundings, there are More than 25 public plugs available according to Electromaps. A few kilometers from the city, next to the highway, one carries 100 kW. Two other closest plugs can load a maximum of 350 kW if your car admits it. That Nissan Leaf, tells us Km77it would have taken 90 minutes to go from 0 to 80% of the battery charge. Today, most cars with 60-70 kWh battery capacity would recover the load up to 80% in about 20 minutes.

I count all this battalion because, believe me, if I had had a Better Place battery exchange station on hand, I would have used it. Too bad that when we got into that jaleo, the project had been dead for six years.

In just over a five years, the electric car market in Spain has changed completely. And although the recharge network You have to keep improvingright now it is easy to travel to any point in the country if the car has more than 60 kWh battery capacity. The minimum required to travel if we are going to make the recommended stops every two hours or 200 kilometers.

What happened to Better Place?

We explained all this because it is important to know the context. Having an electric car and traveling with him makes just over a five years ago was a real headache. Now, imagine that you are in 2007 and someone has said that those cars that barely do 200 kilometers in the best case and take a whole night to load are the future.

What would you think? You have to look for ways to reduce loading times. And that same idea had Shai Agassi. This Israeli businessman saw that there was a business road. The electric car began to make its way but without recharge points and with times of the same too extensive, the project was unfeasible.

He decided that he would create something as simple and as groundbreaking as a battery exchange station. The theory was perfect on paper: you arrive with your car and you don’t have to worry about standing for hours. In a few minutes the car would be ready to travel another 150-200 kilometers.

In practice, the car was something like taking it to a wash tunnel. You entered the station after saving a barrier. Inside, The machine extracted the car battery and “sealed” it with another already loaded. An auxiliary space was needed to recharge the batteries that were interspersed.

The proposal received immediate support. Different investors came to put 650 million euros in total. In 2013 the company declared bankruptcy after raising just over five million euros.

Along the way, yes, I had attracted Renault’s interest. The French company adapted its Renault Fluence to function as an electric car. He put the surname ZE and the car was compatible with the battery exchange system. It could only be used in Israel and Denmark, which was where the company began operating.

But years later it became a failure. The system had everything to give a good result but there were many inconveniences along the way to save. In Motorpasion They explained that customers believed that the process was too complex even though it should eliminate friction with the electric car. Of course, plug in the car was more practical.

And that was one of his big problems. With such a brief autonomy, the exchange of batteries seemed especially interesting but the truth is that Almost no one dared to travel with the car. It was rare for someone to use the car in a range of kilometers higher than their autonomy. For what if the real savings were found to leave the house with the car loaded, plug it all night and have it ready the next day.

To this we had to add that the accounts did not come out. The car owner rented the battery, which chealed the vehicle, but had to pay between (between 225 and 375 euros per month), they explain in Yorokubo. That is, it is not only that the car (17,000 euros the Renault fluence ze those days) was more expensive than the gasoline competition. In addition, the monthly payment was more expensive than taking advantage of a combustion engine. Where was the advantage?

And to all of the above, the technical difficulties must be added. Better Place adapted to Renault Fluence Ze but would have to adapt, again, to another vehicle if he wanted to continue exchanging batteries for new models. It would force, in case of climbing, to install new service stations or modify the existing ones, making the most complex and expensive system. Without a standard, the project lost all meaning because I could not live in a single model.

That was exactly what happened. In 2013, Renault already confirmed that he stopped betting on the battery exchange system. Better Place had managed to convince a single manufacturer and that manufacturer said he left. It was a death wound that the company could not overcome. That same year it was declared in bankruptcy.

By then they trusted that sales of electric cars in Israel and Denmarkwhere they had opted for them, they would have fired. Nothing is further from reality. Until 2013, in fact, Renault did not put the Zoe on the market. A car that drank from joint development to Nissan Leaf thanks to the alliance that both companies already maintain those that can be considered the first successful electric in Europe.

But, for that, It would have to pass almost the whole decade. A decade in which the electric car barely left the city and in which the owners had their own loaders at home. A system that only lived from a single electric car that was also not very capable, had the days counted as it finally happened.

Photo | Villy Fink Isaksen and Better Place

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