Can Swappable Battery Packs Really Cure India’s Air Pollution?

 My country of birth is first in the world, although not in a category in which I take pride. India leads the world in the most air-polluted cities. But, according to IEEE’s Spectrum, help is on the way with fleets of electric-powered scooter cabs which will replace air-polluting vehicles.

“Transportation is still responsible for 24 percent of the world’s direct CO₂ emissions from fuel combustion,” says professor Anita Ho-Baillie, Deputy Director of the University of Sydney's Nano Institute in Sydney, Australia, quoted in the Spectrum article.

The Obvious Problem

The crime of air pollution has its usual suspects. It's the autorickshaws, of course. There's 8 million of these smoke-belching three-wheeled vehicles (also known as scooter cabs, three-wheelers, tuk-tuks, depending on the region) darting in and out of traffic congestion, their distinctive horns in constant use. The  smoke comes out of their two-stroke, oil-burning engines. 

Autorickshaws are immensely popular -- despite an abysmal safety and environmental record.  To ride on one, you hop on and hang on—there are no doors. Passengers have been observed to tumble out at roundabouts like bags of laundry. However, most of the time, the passengers are delivered in one piece, lighter by a cup of sweat (from fear and heat) and twenty to thirty rupees (about 50 cents).  

Autorickshaws can be, at times, seem to be every other vehicle on the road in big cities like Mumbai and Delhi, India’s capital. That Delhi regularly takes its turn at the top of the list of most air-polluted cities in the world[i] is no coincidence.

Although Delhi has tried to convert autorickshaws to compressed natural gas (CNG) power, most of the world’s autorickshaws are powered by two-stroke engines.

The Obvious Solution

The need for swappable battery packs has been recognized by several companies. Bangalore’s Ola Cabs, flush with venture capital, has one solution. Honda has an alternate scheme—and a decided advantage, having tested swappable battery packs in Indonesia and the Philippines. Wired magazine covered SUN Mobility’s battery-swapping technology in 2019.

And Why Wouldn’t it Work?

We can’t fault technologists for suggesting a technology solution. And India, best known for exporting technology in the form of IT workers all over the world, may be trying very hard to make use of its brain power domestically.

Employing first-world technology into third-world countries is almost always doomed to failure. Technology champions ignore the harsh realities of day-to-day life in crowded cities filled with people often living in poverty. Well-intentioned institutions pour billions of dollars into improving the life of the poor and sick—as do governments, and lately, a crop of green-minded venture capitalists.

But not all the money goes where it should. We are reminded of the Kibera slum in Nairobi, where well-meaning NGOs proliferate and compete with each other to teach hygiene—often resorting to a “sitting fee” to get people to attend. People have learned where to go to collect the fees, washing their hands several times a day.

Tech’s contribution to saving the world is somewhat mixed and sometimes misguided—but every now and then, it is successful. The LifeStraw, a $20 device to make water drinkable, is perhaps the best example of the latter. The BioLite stove reduces indoor pollutants, and is on exhibit at Autodesk’s Gallery.

However, we are also aware of venture capital that is generated to capitalize on well-intentioned trends. For example, so much capital was available in China for bicycle rentals that bikes littered the streets and sidewalks and had to be bulldozed into piles.

In order for swappable battery packs to be a viable and sustainable solution, the technology must be made affordable to the autorickshaw operators who typically buy their petrol by the half liter. Lithium-ion batteries are not cheap, and the largesse of government, well-intentioned NGOs and green venture capitals will not last forever. In the near term, an electrified autorickshaw—swappable battery packs or not—is still a prohibitively expensive proposition and without swappable battery pack changing stations being as common as gas stations, this technology appears too far down the road to be considered a solution.