A health record for every pack in the pool

A battery swap station exchanges a depleted pack for a charged one in minutes. The pack stops belonging to a vehicle and becomes shared stock, owned by one party, charged by another and used by a third.

The job is to do enough swaps a day to make the station pay and to keep as many packs in the pool usable as possible. The value of the packs themselves also has to be protected.

Why the busiest hour runs out of packs while the screen shows full stock

Nobody holds a continuous record of what an individual pack has been through, because it moves between vehicles, chargers and owners. The station’s screen counts packs as available that are still charging, cooling down, faulty or worn out. A hub can run out of usable packs at the busiest hour.

Chinese heavy truck hubs do 50 to 80 swaps a day. A car station needs 60 to 70 to break even, and NIO’s European stations average about 14. Every spare pack above the minimum of 1.2 per vehicle is capital standing still.

In a modelled European truck network, 75 to 85% of the investment is in the batteries, not in the stations. A pack lives five to ten years, and falling prices for new packs erode the value of the ones in stock. The health of the packs is the value of the business.

BMB gives every pack a health record from its own data and a usage certificate when it changes hands. Battery swap settlement works out who pays what in every swap and sends each party its own invoice. Swap settlement like this runs today in China and does not exist yet in Europe.