And soon, I might have another subscription to consider adding to that list: an EV battery. Instead of owning the batteries that power our EVs, some companies want to rethink our relationship and are pushing batteries as a service. Pay a monthly subscription fee, and you could consistently change out the nearly-spent batteries powering your vehicle for fresh ones in swapping stations. 

Some companies are working to make battery swaps a reality, and I wrote about their progress in a story that you should check out here. And for the newsletter this week, I want to dig in on an issue raised by these companies’ vision for the future that I can’t get out of my head: Should we own our own batteries? 

The vision

Picture this: It’s 2030, you’re on a road trip, and your EV battery is getting low. You stop in a city you’ve never been to before, and instead of plugging in, you pull into a battery-swapping station. You press a button on an app and the station platform raises the car, unscrews the battery powering your EV, and installs a new one in its place. In less than five minutes, you go from almost empty to 100% charged, ready to continue on your way. 

The battery you’ve picked up to power the next leg of your road trip isn’t yours. But then again, neither was the one that you dropped off. 

This is the vision for some companies, including Nio, an automaker based in China. Nio has about 300,000 vehicles on the road and about 1,400 of its own battery-swap stations up and running. 

If you drive a Nio, you do have the option to purchase the battery outright when you buy the car. Alternatively, you can get access to the battery-swapping network by basically subscribing to the company’s pool of batteries.

Nio recently expanded its operations into Norway, so let’s take that as an example of what the financials might look like here. (I’ve converted everything to US dollars here, using May 2023 conversion rates.)