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

Luckily, supply drivers have fashioned one thing of a de facto fleet in New York Metropolis, says David Hammer, co-founder and president of Popwheels. Roughly half of the town’s 60,000-plus supply employees depend on e-bikes, in accordance to metropolis estimates. Lots of them use bikes from a model referred to as Arrow, which embody detachable batteries.

Comfort is essential for supply drivers engaged on tight schedules. “For lots of people, battery charging, battery swapping, it’s simply know-how. 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 the town that may embody 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 contemporary one from one other slot. Based mostly on the corporate’s modeling, every cupboard ought to have the ability to help fixed use by 40 to 50 riders, Hammer says.

“Perhaps it leads to a good 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 quick drawback that supply employees have round how they will work a full day, and earn an inexpensive dwelling, and do it with out having to put their lives in danger for battery fires.”

A rising drawback

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

Batteries can catch hearth throughout charging or use, and even whereas being saved. Usually, 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 circulate unchecked. These elements can set in movement a harmful course of referred to as thermal runaway.

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