Current battery swap networks like Nio’s have principally included a single firm’s gear, giving the producer management over the automobile, battery, and swapping gear. That’s as a result of one of many keys to creating battery swapping work is fleet commonality—a base of many autos that may all use the identical system.

Happily, supply drivers have shaped one thing of a de facto fleet in New York Metropolis, says David Hammer, co-founder and president of Popwheels. Roughly half of town’s 60,000-plus supply employees depend on e-bikes, in line with metropolis estimates. A lot of them use bikes from a model known as Arrow, which embrace detachable batteries.

Comfort is essential for supply drivers engaged on tight schedules. “For lots of people, battery charging, battery swapping, it’s simply expertise. However for [delivery workers], it’s their livelihood,” says Irene Figueroa-Ortiz, a coverage advisor on the NYC Division of Transportation.

For the New York pilot, Popwheels is constructing battery cupboards in a number of places all through town that may embrace 16 charging slots for e-bike batteries. Riders will open a cupboard door utilizing a smartphone app, plug within the used battery and take a recent one from one other slot. Primarily based on the corporate’s modeling, every cupboard ought to be capable to assist fixed use by 40 to 50 riders, Hammer says.

“Perhaps it results in a fair bigger imaginative and prescient of battery swapping as part of an city future,” Hammer says. “However for now, it’s fixing a really actual and fast drawback that supply employees have round how they will work a full day, and earn an affordable dwelling, and do it with out having to place their lives in danger for battery fires.”

A rising drawback

Lithium-ion batteries energy merchandise from laptops and cellphones to electrical autos, together with vehicles, vehicles, and e-bikes. A serious advantage of the battery chemistry is its vitality density, or means to pack quite a lot of vitality right into a small container. However all that saved vitality may also be harmful.

Batteries can catch fireplace throughout charging or use, and even whereas being saved. Typically, fires occur when temperatures across the battery rise to unsafe ranges or if a bodily drawback in a battery causes a brief circuit, permitting present to circulation unchecked. These components can set in movement a harmful course of known as thermal runaway.

Most batteries embrace a battery administration system to regulate charging, which prevents temperatures from spiking and sparking a hearth. But when this method malfunctions or if a battery doesn’t embrace one, charging can result in fires, says Ben Hoff, who leads fireplace security engineering and {hardware} design at Popwheels.