Is an EV Worth Buying? #5: 74 Batteries, Two Motorcycles — The Otemachi Site That Sets the Price

Last time I wrote about renting a battery rather than owning one — Gachaco's rental plan going nationwide, and the point that the most expensive and most reliably degrading component on an electric two-wheeler no longer has to be yours. This time the story is that the renter is no longer only a motorcycle. On August 20, Honda announced a demonstration project with the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and Kanamoto Co., Ltd. The site is the Torch Tower construction project in Otemachi 2-chome, Chiyoda City, Tokyo, with cooperation from Mitsubishi Estate, Mitsubishi Jisho Sekkei and Shimizu Corporation, who handle the development, design and construction. The run is from August 2026 to March 2027, carried out under Tokyo's FY2026 program to promote machinery using standardized batteries. It is a test of whether an entire construction site can run on swappable packs.

Look at the numbers. Deployed: 74 Honda Mobile Power Pack e: units and four Honda Power Pod e: storage units. Against that, the equipment being powered is two GYRO CANOPY e: electric two-wheelers, two self-propelled carts, and six high-pressure washers and floodlights. Ten machines in total. Seventy-four batteries for ten machines — a ratio of 7.4 packs per machine. That, I think, is the most important figure here. A swap system is fundamentally a way of covering charging downtime with battery inventory. Keep the inventory thin and swappable degrades into "a fixed battery you happen to be able to remove." Put the other way round, 7.4 is a working estimate from the field of how much inventory a swap system actually needs. Stated in numbers rather than feelings: the convenience of a swap system is set not by the vehicle's specification but by how many packs are lying around it. For comparison: with a fixed battery, you need exactly as many batteries as you have vehicles. Ratio 1.0. This site is running more than seven times that. The extra 6.4 packs per machine are the price being paid to drive charging downtime to zero. And who carries that cost is the real battleground for whether swapping catches on — on a construction site it is the rental company holding the inventory; in a city it is the station operator.

Convert that to money. The MPP e: is rated at 50.26V, 26.1Ah / 1314Wh, weighs 10.2 kilograms, and delivers 2.5 kW of continuous output. Honda's suggested retail price is 108,900 yen including tax, per pack. Seventy-four of them puts over eight million yen of battery on a single construction site. Now look at the motorcycle side. The EM1 e: carries exactly one of these packs. In Gachaco's December 2023 announcement, the EM1 e: was quoted at 97,200 yen including tax for a Tokyo resident after subsidies. That figure reflects the incentive scheme of the time, but it means the reversal had already happened: the pack's list price exceeded the price of the vehicle it goes into. Technically, that says less about batteries being expensive than about two-wheelers alone not generating volume. The same pack has been fitted to Komatsu's PC01E-1 electric micro excavator since March 2022. Construction machinery, washers, floodlights — only once demand outside motorcycles stacks up can this standard sustain mass production and a swap network.

So what should a buyer be looking at? My conclusion is this: before you read the spec sheet, find out what else besides motorcycles has adopted that battery standard. Whether you can still buy a replacement pack in five years, and whether a swap station still exists within range of your daily life, will be decided by total shipments of the standard, not by motorcycle sales. Let me separate fact from opinion. The fact is that Tokyo, Honda and Kanamoto will run this trial until March 2027, circulating 74 packs among ten machines. No results are in yet, and it may well not work out. The opinion is that regardless of the outcome, the direction — a motorcycle battery ceasing to be only a motorcycle battery — is not going to reverse. One more thing worth noting is the design of the trial itself. It covers not only the electric two-wheelers but self-propelled carts, high-pressure washers and floodlights — machines that do not necessarily need to roam. There is only one reason to fit a removable battery to something that mostly stays put: to share the same inventory. The more devices draw on a pool, the thinner the stock each machine needs. Built into this is a design philosophy that two-wheelers alone could never support. Is an EV worth buying? At this stage, the answer is: buy the breadth of the standard, not the vehicle.