Japanese and European manufacturers will work together on an interchangeable battery system
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Japanese and European manufacturers will work together on an interchangeable battery system
For several years, some motorcycle manufacturers have talked about working together to create interchangeable batteries for electric motorcycles, but there has been little visible progress.
Will it finally change?
Perhaps. Honda, Yamaha, KTM and Piaggio have announced an agreement to work together to create “a standardized interchangeable battery system” for “mopeds, motorcycles, tricycles and quadricycles”.
Having interchangeable batteries is a solution to the main problem of electric vehicles: autonomy. One approach is fast charging stations and motorcycles that can handle fast charging, but the other approach is swappable batteries. Walk into a battery station, put the dead batteries from your motorcycle into the charger, and grab a couple of charged batteries. You're traveling as fast as you could fill an internal combustion motorcycle with gas. The system is already in use in Taiwan by a company called Gogoro, where the company has more than 2.000 battery swapping sites that it calls GoStation.
The goal of the new Japanese-European consortium is to define standardized specifications for interchangeable batteries so that they work in various machines.
“For motorized two-wheelers, the limitations of electric drivetrains regarding range, charging time and initial cost are still evident,” said KTM CEO Stefan Pierer. “To overcome these challenges and provide a better customer experience, an interchangeable battery system based on international technical standards will become a viable solution.”
On the one hand, this seems promising because an exchangeable battery system would be a convenient solution, especially in Asian and European cities where many people use scooters for urban transportation and may not have a good place to charge an electric scooter overnight. These companies sell a lot of scooters to those types of riders, so combining their influence behind one standard makes it more likely that other manufacturers will fall in line, rather than having competing standards that make things more difficult for riders.
On the other hand, swappable batteries have been discussed for several years , with little visible progress to the general public. Honda previously demonstrated its Benly E scooter with swappable batteries (seen in the photo above), and the four major Japanese manufacturers also announced an agreement to work together on swappable battery technology. But so far, the major internal combustion engine motorcycle manufacturers have been hesitant to enter the electric motorcycle market.
Will this announcement lead to anything more than a press release? It would be great to see electric scooters quietly swarm into Asian and European cities, where they make a lot of sense, and maybe one day even in the United States. For a two-mile trip across town, I'd rather drive a Benly than a Bird.
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