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A robot just swapped my electric car's battery

60 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
Cited on HN 7 times, 2023–2025, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Go-to reference in EV threads for showing that battery swapping already works in practice.

Tom Scott borrows a Nio electric car in China and shows its automated battery swap station replacing the whole battery in minutes. He explains how swapping serves as an alternative to charging.

“(Tom Scott demo/walkthrough.)” (HN, 2024)

6 citations · 1 critical · Demos · partly dated

7 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@robin_reala Dec 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Tesla FSD Timeline
Nio have apparently 40k+ battery change stations in China, and a few more globally. Tom Scott did a video on it recently: [this video]
Tom Scott on Nio battery swap stations
@satiric Dec 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Chinese Tesla rival drives 1044km on a charge
As of last May, they had 1360 battery swap stations across China, where in less than 5 minutes the battery can automatically be swapped out for a fully charged one. They are also starting to build stations in Europe. So they really are trying to make the experience better. And to be fair, Tesla is also working on this to a lesser extent in the US. Source for the battery swap data: [link] Edit: here's Tom Scott's youtube video about his experience using the battery swap service: [this video]
Tom Scott's experience using the battery swap service
@eichin May 2024 Cites it
on HN thread How many EV charging stations does the US need to replace gas stations?
NIO just did the expensive-to-automate part, it's not just theory... [this video] (Tom Scott demo/walkthrough.) Press release from April says [link] "it completed 40 million battery swaps" across 2300 stations. It still has to scale up from there and get traction from other car vendors beyond paper-only "partnerships"... but they've gotten vastly farther than [link] did before it failed 10 years ago.
Demo walkthrough proving automated battery swapping works
@sokoloff Apr 2025 Pushes back
on HN thread Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic
Read more
Both upthread replies seem to evidence approximately the same level of effort to me; "It won't be faster" isn't wildly less effort than "what if it will be faster?" Nio has fewer Nio battery swap stations operating in the entire world than just the state of New Jersey has filling stations (not dispensers, entire stations). Nothing in the video above made me think "oh wow, that looks like that process will be a lot faster than filling up!" and several segments made it seem like there would be more time involved in just getting the car into and out of the battery replacement service bay than filling up takes. (Nio's claim of a 2.5-3 minute battery swap seems to be measuring only the swap time while the car is stopped in the bay.) That's all before we consider the travel time to one of the stations (which is unlikely to be as close to your trip as a typical filling station because of the rarity of stations), time waiting for the car [or cars] in front of you to complete their swap (which if Nios ever became popular would likely be longer than waiting for one of the typically eight or more dispensers to free up at a filling station), nor to account for the "all long range batteries are out of stock at this location, because it's the Friday before Christmas and everyone is road tripping to visit family" NACKs that are liable to occur in a Nio-only battery swap system. For me the killer line in the video that will make it hard for Nio to solve all of these is at [this video] : "Building

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