Wei Lai is not a ＂lone brave man＂ from a lonely man to a power exchange alliance.

The replacement of new energy sources with electricity is actually nothing new.

In 1896, Hartford Electric Light Company, born in Hartford, Connecticut, USA, introduced an electric van with replaceable batteries. The buyer only bought the vehicle, but did not include the battery, and then paid the charging and maintenance fee by mileage when using it.

The specific business model is that vehicles are sold to users by GeVeCo (a subsidiary of General Electric), and HELCO is responsible for holding and providing battery packs to consumers. As for users, they buy HELCO’s power exchange service in the form of monthly fee. From 1910 to 1924, HELCO’s power exchange service provided electric trucks with a cruising range of more than 6 million miles.

Nowadays, looking at the power exchange technology of new energy vehicles is more like a "technical revival" that lasted for nearly a hundred years. In the field of commercial vehicles, there are State Grid, Yutong Bus, Beiqi New Energy and other enterprises, while in the field of passenger cars, there are Weilai.

Today, most new energy vehicles have not yet achieved "separation of vehicles and electricity". In 2017, the technology of power exchange was explored, and the first power exchange station was put into operation in 2018. In more than six years, Weilai has built 2,435 power exchange stations nationwide. In these six years, many car companies only chose to follow up on a small number of models.

Even so, Weilai iterated the power station changing technology to the fourth generation. The fourth generation power station, which was officially launched in Guangzhou not long ago, comes standard with six ultra-wide-angle laser radars and four Orin X chips, and supports one-button automatic power exchange and independent power exchange when leaving the vehicle.

Compared with the previous generation, the speed of power exchange is increased by 22%, the fastest time is only 2 minutes and 24 seconds, the number of battery positions is increased to 23, and the maximum number of daily services can reach 480 times.

Moreover, the new power exchange station can also support multi-brand sharing power exchange, including Ledao, which makes many people daydream about the power exchange of more models.

However, in order to make more models have the ability to exchange electricity, it is necessary to build a large enough stage to introduce other car companies and ecological partners.

On November 21, 2023, Changan Automobile announced that it had reached a cooperation with Weilai, and the two sides would jointly research and develop battery-changing vehicles, battery-changing technologies and unified standards. Weilai’s battery-changing camp was expanded for the first time.

However, people’s real re-examination of this alliance may have originated from the dialogue between Li Bin and He Xiaopeng in early May this year. At that time, He Xiaopeng personally visited Li Bin and said that when Weilai replaced more than 5,000 power stations, he would consider joining the power exchange mode.

Soon after, FAW announced that it had reached a strategic cooperation with Weilai for charging and replacing electricity.

Today, the power exchange alliance has seven car partners, including Changan, Geely, Chery, Jianghuai, FAW, GAC and Lotus, as well as energy and power enterprises such as "Three Barrels of Oil", Shell, State Grid, China Southern Power Grid, Wanneng Group, Zhongan Energy, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited, Zhongchuang Singapore Airlines and Longji Green Energy, with considerable influence.

However, Yang Chao, assistant vice president of Weilai and head of energy product development, told Leifeng. com "New Smart Drive" more than once that Weilai hopes to realize the scale of power exchange infrastructure and share the power exchange mode with the whole China automobile industry, hoping that more brands will join the TV exchange family, so that more users can enjoy the more convenient experience of adding power than refueling.

The efficiency of energy supplement has always been an important factor for consumers to buy new energy vehicles. From the market feedback, the sales growth rate of plug-in hybrid extended-range new energy vehicles has also obviously accelerated.

According to the statistics of the Association, the sales volume of hybrid (including extended range) new energy vehicles in May this year was 308,773, a year-on-year growth rate of 61.1%; The sales volume of pure electric new energy vehicles was 495,825, with a year-on-year growth rate of 27.6%.

In Yang Chao’s view,The reason for the slowdown in the sales of pure electric vehicles is the fuel tank (energy replenishment efficiency).However, there are different technical paths for pure electric vehicles to improve the charging efficiency, such as overcharge +CTB(Cell To Body), battery replacement and so on.

The reason why Weilai set up a power exchange alliance and cooperated with many car manufacturers is actually that it hopes to conduct some benign discussions on the future development direction of pure electric vehicles.

At first, this kind of discussion only existed inside Weilai, focusing on several managers from the State Grid and some Weilai suppliers.However, after more than a year’s efforts, the leaders of all enterprises in the power exchange alliance have reached a consensus and will seriously consider this issue.

Yang Chao believes that this is only the first step, but even so, it has great positive significance:Because through Weilai’s efforts, at least more car companies will realize that what kind of energy supplement scheme pure electric vehicles will adopt in the future requires not only serious thinking, but also pre-research in the next generation of vehicles, and more importantly, how to realize applications more quickly in the current scenario, which will have a chain effect on the whole industry.

However, in his mind, he still has his own ideas about the form of changing power stations in the future.

He told Leifeng. com(WeChat official account: Leifeng. com)"New Smart Drive", just like gas stations, has formed a complete power exchange network in the whole country, which can be operated by the state, enterprises or third parties. The battery also has a set of standard system, and there are several different types of batteries to choose from for different models or mileage requirements. Under such a system, car companies develop models without unnecessary consumption of batteries.

On the contrary, car companies can carry out in-depth exploration in the dimensions of safety, application service, reliability, vehicle intelligence and automatic driving, and hand over the matter of energy replenishment to social resources to solve. Only in the specific practice process, Wei Lai’s team found that the choice of social resources-overcharge scheme can not solve the problem of power grid, nor can it solve the problem of sustainable development, and Wei Lai believes that changing electricity will be the "ultimate scheme" for new energy.

Of course, behind this kind of industry recognition, in fact, different manufacturers compete for battery standards.

In the communication with many car companies, Yang Chao was asked countless times such as "Tesla and BYD have no power exchange business, why others’ sales are very good". For Weilai, even if you tell these friends that your sales are really driven by the power exchange business, it is easy to be questioned.

Therefore, on the one hand, Weilai suggested that these friends conduct user surveys to see how many consumers chose Weilai out of the ability to change electricity.

On the other hand, it launched a new brand-Ledao. Since its birth, Ledao has been highly anticipated, because its sales will influence the promotion of power exchange technology to a certain extent.

Launching vehicle models is an important strategic layout for Weilai to verify and promote its power exchange mode, while the previous experience of fast pile filling shows from another angle that in order to speed up the promotion of a new technology, the most important thing is to formulate industry standards.

According to Yang Chao, Weilai, as an organizational unit or an important participant in China, has participated in the formulation of more than 30 power exchange standards, including the formulation of key standards such as safety, system composition and terminology interpretation.

In addition, Wei Lai also presided over the formulation of some IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) standards together with State Grid. In IEC, it is rare for Chinese to preside over the formulation of standards.

Yang Chao explained that power exchange technology is a brand-new technology in Europe, and there is no specific standard. In order to ensure that all services meet local standards and regulations, Weilai and relevant European institutions jointly formulated industry standards, which gradually evolved into IEC standards.

Yang Chao said that all standards were originally formulated for safety reasons. Although there is a certain foundation in Europe at present, it is necessary to further strengthen this sense of existence to attract more European enterprises to participate in this process and jointly promote the improvement of standards.

Next, Weilai will further optimize the design of standards, integrate more excellent standards from different enterprises or institutions (such as China Power Research Institute and China Automobile Research Institute) for the market to choose from, and at the same time open its own Konw how to promote the unification and improvement of relevant standards for power exchange technology.

Yang Chao said,The establishment of many standards takes quite a long period. For example, the nature, size, capacity, connector, battery management, adaptability of the three power systems, etc., all need to take time to demonstrate and analyze.Different manufacturers in the alliance have their own design specifications, and if they want to reach an agreement, they need technical compromises.

"This is like a unified charging port for mobile phones. How many years did it take?"

Yang Chao said that it is not that anyone with a loud voice or a strong ability can complete it dramatically in a short time, but what Wei Lai can do is to verify it realistically and coordinate within the alliance until someone is willing (compromise). Just lean together as much as possible. Wei Lai hopes to prove that he can do it first and then help more people.

As we all know, whether it is a charging pile or a power station, the cost is often high when car companies directly participate in the operation. It is easier to "get what you need" with the help of social resources. According to Yang Chao, Weilai has already reached a cooperation with Zhongan Energy in Anhui Province to promote the construction of 1,000 storage, charging and exchange stations based on Anhui and radiating the Yangtze River Delta and the whole country.

The first power exchange station jointly built by Weilai and Zhongan Energy was officially launched in Luoji Service Area of G40 Hushan Expressway in Lu ‘an City, Anhui Province on June 13th, which is also the first Weilai fourth generation power exchange station launched in Anhui Province.

Yang Chao said that Weilai has been exploring the possibility of cooperation with the government. On the one hand, the operation and maintenance cost of changing power stations is high. On the other hand, besides economic benefits, Weilai has wider cooperation space with the local government and can get more policy or other support. Next, it may reach similar cooperation with the Wuhan Municipal Government.

Overseas, the layout of Weilai is also very suitable for the actual situation of the country.

For example, in Denmark, where the power grid construction is not perfect, the power exchange station originally used to serve the automobile business has also played a role in alleviating the pressure on the local power grid. By charging during the wave valley period and discharging during the peak period, many power exchange stations even achieved a profit of more than 4,000 euros per day. To this end, Weilai also specially adjusted the construction strategy of power exchange stations in Denmark, and built more power exchange stations in places where electricity consumption fluctuated to adjust the local electricity consumption situation.

In Hungary, Weilai was originally affected by the epidemic and the transportation cost was high, so it opened a local factory, and then completed some assembly tests of vehicles in China, and left the rest of the work to the Hungarian factory, which greatly reduced the cost.

Hungary was originally short of natural resources, so the government is very interested in the energy storage project derived from Weilai Power Exchange Station, hoping to further cooperate with Weilai, and Weilai also intends to promote the power exchange station integrating electricity exchange and energy storage to the whole of Europe through the pilot project with Hungary.

According to Yang Chao, Weilai has projects in Denmark, the Netherlands and Hungary, and has also cooperated with some universities in Germany.

As the batteries of the first batch of electric vehicles gradually reach the limit of service life, how to recycle and reuse the batteries reasonably has become the focus of the industry.

As an advocate of power exchange technology, Weilai will also face this problem directly, and the power exchange station, as a natural "battery maintenance center", can play a positive role in prolonging the service life of batteries through more reasonable and optimized management of battery storage environment and charging power.

According to Yang Chao, Weilai is currently promoting the life-cycle management technology of batteries to extend the service life of batteries as much as possible, and at the same time, it has also invested in research and development of technologies related to automatic disassembly and refined recycling of batteries to maximize the value of batteries. With the opening of the power exchange network, there are many stories told by Wei Lai to exchange electricity.

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