Range anxiety again? what are the prospects for car power banks?

For electric vehicle users, range anxiety is always a concern.

No matter whether the range is 500 kilometers or 1,300 kilometers, it seems that it is not enough to eliminate this looming and worrying mentality.

After becoming an electric car owner, I think the main source of this mentality is concerns about the convenience of recharging energy.

A Bilibili blogger recently posted a video about his experience of driving a Tesla in the United States and almost getting stranded on a snowy mountain.

The thing is this: He plans to go to the snowy mountains to play. According to calculations, as long as his car is fully charged, it will be enough to make the round trip without charging in the middle. However, it is not as good as God. On his way back, he encountered a temporary road blockade by the police and had no choice but to wait where he was. Under normal circumstances, the vehicle can be powered off and consumes almost no power. But in the snow-capped mountains, the temperature is below zero, so you must turn on the heater while waiting in the car.

"Originally, it was shown that there was still 100 miles of range left, but when the roads were unblocked, there were less than 30 miles left." Fortunately, the navigation shows there is a charging station 20 miles away. But in the end, he failed to reach the charging station and "broke down" halfway.

It was eventually towed away by a tow truck.

This experience left a "shadow" on him. From then on, he had an additional partner in his car - a diesel generator. "Although the power is only 2kW and it can only charge 5 miles in an hour, I feel very safe with it," he said.

Some people say that the charging facilities in the United States are imperfect and the country is vast and sparsely populated, making it unsuitable for electric vehicles. Then let’s take a look at the situation in China, the largest country for new energy vehicles. The charging facilities here are the most complete in the world, but at the same time, the number of electric vehicles is also the largest in the world. In other words, it is easy to find a charging station in China, but once you arrive, it is likely to be occupied by other cars.

Now, the Spring Festival holiday is coming to an end, and the high-speed nightmare of electric vehicle users has come again.

In recent years, every holiday, there will be news such as "waiting for 16 hours on the highway without charging". This year, Hubei, Anhui and other provinces have experienced special heavy snow weather. Therefore, snowy mountain encounters similar to those experienced by Tesla users will most likely occur during this year’s Spring Festival travel period.

Not to mention Spring Festival travel, as the penetration rate of new energy vehicles soars, it is impossible to easily charge in shopping malls and highway rest areas on ordinary weekends and holidays. Although the construction of charging piles has been accelerating, it is still not as fast as the growth rate of electric vehicles. What's more, the charging piles built in the past may break down.

Huajin Securities made statistics last year. Over the years, the ratio of new energy vehicles to charging piles has remained above 2, and it is expected that by 2025, the ratio of vehicles to charging piles will still be 2:1, that is, every two cars have 1 pile.

The statistics compiled by the Passenger Car Association are slightly better, but as of November 2023, the vehicle-to-pile ratio still reached 1.78:1. It is far from the ideal 1:1.

These data also include public charging piles and private charging piles. For more users, only public charging piles can currently be used. In this way, the vehicle-to-pile ratio will be higher.

Currently, many companies represented by NIO are promoting the battery swap model, which has alleviated the pressure on charging piles to a certain extent. However, the needs of the electric vehicle community are complex, and not everyone accepts the battery swap model.

In addition to charging piles and battery swapping, are there any other ways to replenish energy? Car power bank has received much attention recently.

For example, according to media reports, the Jiaxing service area recently provided a car power bank service. It does not require users to go to a fixed location to pick up a power bank and then move it to the car for charging. Instead, after scanning the code and filling in the license plate and parking space information, it will automatically leave the warehouse and move to your car. Its charging speed is not slow, and it is said that it can charge 30 kWh of electricity in 20 minutes. Calculated based on the electric vehicle’s power consumption of 20 kilowatt-hours per 100 kilometers, the range can be increased by 150 kilometers. Calculated according to power = work/time, the power is close to 100 kilowatts (30 kilowatt hours/0.33 hours), which is faster than ordinary fast charging.

In fact, car power bank is not a new thing. A British company released a similar product several years ago. However, the company's products, like the Tesla back generator at the beginning of the article, require a big guy to be carried in the trunk with the car. What’s even more embarrassing is that this power bank can only be charged through a charging pile.

Tesla has also made related attempts.

In 2015, Tesla invented a snake-shaped automatic charging pile, which was installed next to a fixed parking space and can automatically plug in and charge. But in the end, this product was not mass-produced because the problem was obvious. The core of the car power bank is actually to achieve free movement. Only in this way can we break through the limitations of venue, environment, vehicle type, and time, "break up" the charging and replenishing resources, and flexibly meet various car usage scenarios.

Nowadays, more technical routes in the car power bank market are like that in the Jiaxing service area, which focuses on automatic path finding and runs to the car to provide charging. Even some autonomous driving companies have used relevant experience in mobile power banks. In a closed parking lot, it is similar to a food delivery robot in a hotel. It will automatically sense roadblocks and identify the parking space and license plate number where the order is placed, without the need for staff to operate the whole process.

However, the car power bank business seems to have a bright future, but in fact its technical threshold is quite high.

The threshold is mainly reflected at the perceptual level. For example, there are issues such as accurate identification and positioning of charging ports in complex environments, whether the vehicle can be accurately found, and roadblocks must be avoided at the same time. More importantly, the relevant companies must also establish charging agreements with the OEMs.

Not only that, electric vehicles are heavy because the batteries are heavy, often reaching hundreds of kilograms. This means that the car power bank must have sufficient service capabilities, and it will also be heavy, which itself will consume a lot of energy.

On the other hand, car power banks are also filled with batteries. Given that the current safety of liquid power batteries is not so sure, if such randomly moving car power banks are flooded in parking lots and rest areas, how to eliminate safety hazards is also a big problem. question.

Therefore, although the market imagination of car power bank is huge, the prospect of becoming a "third pole of energy replenishment" in addition to charging piles and battery swapping stations is currently unclear.