Electric Motorcycle Batteries

An insight into the direction of travel for electric motorbike development - Honda has signed a letter of intent with KTM, Piaggio and Yamaha to set up a Swappable Batteries Consortium.

It seems standardised swappable batteries could be the way forward for electric bikes and maybe one day your Honda battery will just slot into your KTM at the weekend.

Read more here

sound good to me, hopefully there'll be battery exchanges so you can swap a flat one for a fully charged one and extend your range enough to make them usable for extended journeys

The swappable idea makes so much sense. The car industry seems to have discounted it as being too hard (the swap-over process at Leicester Forest East, or whatever). Remarkable really, they've solved much greater challenges than that.

I suspect it's more about standardisation than swapping out batteries to customers.

The Other PaulG said:

The swappable idea makes so much sense. The car industry seems to have discounted it as being too hard (the swap-over process at Leicester Forest East, or whatever). Remarkable really, they've solved much greater challenges than that.

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To much infrastructure in too many places to be practical. Plenty of available chargers is what's needed and what is currently not the case.

cookie said:

I suspect it's more about standardisation than swapping out batteries to customers.

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Good, then I hope the bike industry, a little later to the game (on any meaningful scale) can take the lead and sort that out.

There were lots of schemes for swappable batteries for cars when I was involved some 10 years back. There are all sorts of issues, technical & commercial, that seemed to make it mor3 hassle than it’s worth, from a manufacturer point of view. If there were a single battery leasing company, who defined the interfaces, and created the battery exchange stations in sufficient numbers, provided batteries in huge quantities and who could define a payment model that people would sign up to, you’d be in with a chance.

But batteries are still expensive - like “How much?!?!” expensive, and the interchange and charging stations are also not cheap, so they’d need huge capital outlay to make it happen. Now if a large trading bloc like the EU or the USA funded it (the UK alone is simply too small to matter) were to invest it might be possible.

Otherwise...