I’m going on a long trip and don’t plan to use my hybrid’s battery. Can I remove it?
No, and please don’t try to. A plug-in hybrid might not be a fully electric car, but their batteries are still big and powerful. The biggest – the Range Rover P440e’s large 33kWh battery for example – has plenty of stored power and it runs at 400 volts, so if you try to remove it unsupervised, you will probably be very dead, very quickly.
But I thought batteries could be swapped?
The idea of battery swap-outs hasn’t quite gone away. A decade ago, battery swapping was considered to be the answer to fears of having to sit waiting on a slow charger when you just wanted to get somewhere in a newfangled EV.
Renault developed a prototype battery swapping capability for its Fluence EV in the early 2010s, working with EV expert company Better Place. However, the tech proved expensive, and that was before considering the expense of setting up nationwide networks of battery swapping stations so that you could call in on a long journey.
The idea has persisted though, and recently Chinese electric car maker Nio said it was going to start establishing battery swapping stations in Europe, with 30 stations opening up, mostly across Scandinavia.
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So swapping is possible these days, or will be soon?
The advantage over the old Renault Fluence is that with Nio’s current line-up, if there’s no battery swapping station available, you can just fall back on regular fast-charging points. Nio’s ET5 estate, for example, can cover 560km on one charge.
Rival Chinese company Geely has also shown interest in battery swaps, which means the tech could be coming to cars from Volvo and Polestar in the coming years. Nio claims it can swap a battery in about three minutes, and that the car’s battery capacity can be swapped out while you own it – allowing you to use a smaller, cheaper battery for your daily driving and then a big, long-range battery for holidays, for example.
Fiat too has talked about this for future electric models, giving you a cheaper purchase price up-front for a car with a small battery, but building its batteries in separate modules so that extra battery capacity can be bought or rented during your ownership of the car.
Each of Nio’s battery swap stations comes with a 2-megawatt storage capacity, which can feed power back to the grid at peak times, as well as using overnight wind energy to charge up, acting as a “power sink” for renewable energy.
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What’s the catch?
Sadly, none of this yet exists for plug-in hybrids, which is a bit of a shame, as actually it would be incredibly useful. A swappable PHEV system could work the other way – you’d use the bigger battery for your day-to-day driving, maximising your electric range, before swapping over to a lighter, more compact battery for long hauls, turning the car into a conventional hybrid and making it more efficient overall.
Why doesn’t this exist? Because plug-in hybrids – like their conventional hybrid cousins before them – are becoming ever more efficient at going on longer journeys. As batteries and electronic control techniques improve, PHEVs are edging closer to providing diesel-like fuel economy on long runs.
We’ve written before about the Toyota Rav4 PHEV’s near-mystical levels of long-haul fuel economy, but others – such as the new Prius PHEV, the big-battery versions of the Volkswagen Golf E-Hybrid and Skoda Superb, as well as the Mercedes E300e – are all able to provide impressive all-round fuel economy even if you’re hauling up and down the nation’s motorways.
Perhaps the most impressive of all is the Land Rover Defender P400e – which has 400hp from its combo of 2.0-litre turbo petrol engine and electric battery, a range of 50km on electric power, and which on long runs returns 9 litres per 100km. Which doesn’t sound all that impressive, until you realise that it’s the same long-range economy figure as you’ll get from the diesel-engined Defender, which has no electric range at all.
So swappable batteries for PHEVs? A nice idea, as it goes, but probably one which has already missed its mark.