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> It won't make sense to swap a battery pack when you can just park one truck on the charger and let another take its place.

I'm guessing an operator would want 100% utilization from a truck.

If a battery discharges at the same rate as charging, then you would need 2x the number of batteries. You would need more batteries if charging is slower than discharging.

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More accurately, an operator will want lowest cost of operation. You can add complexity, cost, and failure modes to every single truck by making the battery swappable, then build infrastructure to swap the batteries, or you can just build more trucks. Given that wheels and axles are likely to be the cheapest part of the equation, I'm betting they'll buy more trucks.

I remember hearing there is not enough lithium in the world for all of Tesla's ambitions. They're hoping for battery revolutions

I found an excellent Quora answer that dealt directly with this. Well worth a look-over.

https://www.quora.com/Is-there-enough-lithium-in-the-world-t...

tl;dr- Lithium supply (in terms of raw quantity of element available) is not going to be an issue, ever. Economical extraction might be.

And you can make batteries out of other materials. At current prices lithium might be best, but more demand will lead to different prices; and if lithium supply doesn't pick up, people will substitute.

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