🔋 Battery as a Service

Could Battery as a Service (BaaS) really solve the anxiety issues of the Electric Vehicle Owners?

🚙 EV owners' main problem

Before starting, I highly recommend you check the previous blog on EV Vs ICE, where I have debated why EV makes more sense than traditional vehicles. It is a quick 4-minute read.

One of the major issues that I have discussed in that blog is the anxiety issues of the EV owners. In fact, EV owners might need to visit a therapist often after purchasing an electric vehicle (pun intended :P)

Let's discuss why.

Basically, there are 2 anxiety issues with EVs: The Range Anxiety and the Charge Anxiety.

• Range Anxiety is basically where people get afraid that the EV will NOT cover the distance to the destination and that it will run out of charge in the middle of nowhere. It is really scary to do long impromptu trips. Everything should be well planned while taking an EV right from the source and destination and pitstops to charge the battery.

• Charge Anxiety is when even though people plan their pitstops so precisely, there are high odds that the charging infrastructure is not working.

To solve this problem, the EV manufacturers came up with a solution - Battery Swapping aka Battery as a Service (BaaS).

BaaS is a subscription-based model of battery ownership, allowing EV users to swap out a depleted battery for a fully charged one at a service station. This business model is in the crawling stage and it comes with its own challenges which I am gonna disintegrate.

🏋🏽 Problem #1: The Hefty Battery

Each battery weighs 8-10 kg on average and a common layman will find it super difficult to lift an 8-kilo battery and swap it with another. And to add oil to the burning fire, there will be at most two 8-kilo batteries in a normal 2-wheeler EV.

While this problem wouldn’t be a big issue for commercial vehicles, fleet vehicles and mobility users like Uber drivers as they can easily swap a 10-kilo battery, this turns out to be a big issue for day-to-day common layman users.

🏍️ Problem #2: The New Vehicle Sentiment

People who buy new 2-wheelers wouldn’t be happy to switch a new battery with another one which is of poor battery health. Most of the time, in these battery swapping stations, the batteries aren't new and sometimes you can end up with poor battery health.

Let’s say, you buy a 2-wheeler EV on Sunday with a new battery and the next week Sunday, you run out of battery and you want to swap it. But you were able to swap this new battery with a battery of only 85% health. Customers will feel extremely unhappy after buying a new product while having an old or partially depreciated item within a week.

But I have a solution to tackle this problem and this is something that the OEMs have to fix it.

Since the battery costs 30-35% of the total vehicle cost, OEMs like Ola, Ather, and Tata EV could offer 2 portfolios of vehicles - Battery Ownership (with fixed batteries) and Non-Battery ownership (with swappable batteries) and let the customers pick their choice of product.

For instance, customers who want a premium product and don’t want to swap a battery that is partially deteriorated can opt for fixed-battery vehicles, where the battery has to be recharged at the charging stations.

And customers who want to cut the cost of the initial buying of the vehicle, (since 35% of the cost can be reduced by buying swappable battery vehicles) and won’t own the battery. They can switch the batteries at any battery swapping station by paying a cost and they are completely fine if they swap with a poor-quality battery since they don't own the battery anyway.