Why charge an EV when you can just swap its battery?
Ample says it can swap an EV battery in just five minutes. | Image: Filmtwist Productions
We like to talk about range anxiety, but the reality is we’re dealing with charging anxiety when it comes to EVs. It’s great that an electric vehicle can cover 300 miles on a charge, but if the infrastructure is sparse and, in many cases, not working correctly, the ability to cover hundreds of miles on a single charge just means you’re hundreds of miles from home if things go sideways.
Yes, the infrastructure is improving, and a big driver of that is government-funded financial initiatives for charging station companies to improve uptime. Automakers are adopting Tesla’s NACS (North American Charging Standard) after the initial push by Ford — a company that sent employees out into the field to see how well the charging network was…