Honda is looking to expand a battery-swapping service from Asia to Europe, but the focus will remain on two-wheeled vehicles like mopeds and scooters.
The automaker currently offers battery-swapping in Japan, India, Indonesia, and Thailand, but in a Tuesday press release said it’s now working with Swedish scooter rental startup GoCimo on testing of the concept in Malmö, Sweden, for one year beginning in February 2025.
Honda battery swapping
The test program, which will utilize Honda EM1 scooters already sold in Europe, will look at the suitability of battery swapping for the European urban environment, as well as business feasibility, the release said.
Instead of entire battery packs for cars and trucks, as with other battery-swapping services, Honda focuses on smaller modules. The Honda Mobile Power Pack modules are about 1.5 kwh each, which should be adequate for scooters or perhaps for very small urban EVs if used in multiple. That makes each unit much more powerful than what’s used by the trendy Motocompacto the automaker aimed to ship out with some 2024 Honda Prologue EVs in the U.S.
Honda battery swapping
These modules are charged on a rack, and users simply check them out as needed. This allows urban residents to get by without home charging, may also be a particularly good solution in European cities, where parking and space constraints limit streetside charging options. To find out, Honda will supply 30 EM1 scooters, 60 Mobile Power Pack batteries, and three Power Pack Exchanger swap stations to GoCimo for the test program in Sweden’s third-largest city.
Honda has shown swappable-battery systems, essentially the same as this system, since CES 2018, and suggested it may be headed to some motorcycles, as part of a swappable-battery consortium with Kawasaki, Suzuki, and Yamaha. It’s since said—last year, most recently—that the Mobile Power Pack format will be used in “various electric products.”
