Then, if you need a charge, you pull over to a battery exchange, swap out batteries in a few seconds, and go on your way.
I have seen this in China with electric scooters, and it seems like it could scale well for cars too.
Would require a complete architectural shift. Also, they would be incredibly heavy and difficult to swap. Would require multiple smaller batteries. People would abuse them. Would require huge inventory of batteries all over the place. Imagine going on a long road trip, you wouldn't bring batteries with you. You'd swap them along the way. What if a particular vendor/station is out of batteries for the day? Or doesn't have your particular flavor of battery because (like we have seen with charging ports in this exact story) manufacturers couldn't agree on the interface/size? Or the batteries they have are abused and low quality / at end of life? This is very common with scooters. It would be a shit show.
On the other hand, electricity is essentially fluid. It does not require a container. As battery tech improves and as high voltage charging becomes more commonplace, plugging in to charge won't be so bad.
* Batteries are really expensive and have a limited life. If my batteries were wearing out, could I go to one of these swaps and hope for a fresher set?
* Different sized cars require different battery capacities (EV Ford F150 vs Nissan Leaf). Not a problem with charging cables, but a big issue with battery swapping.
* Battery swapping stations would be orders of magnitude more expensive than charging stations.
* This is not really useful for many (or maybe most) users. If you are driving around town or commuting, charging overnight at home should be good enough for most people. (The main hurdle here would be convincing landlords of the importance of charging).
* It is a lot easier to standardize on a charging port, than to standardize one a battery pack. A standardized battery pack would dictate how the car is structured.
* It would make innovation harder on battery packs. It could make it impractical to try a new battery chemistry or capacity, whereas these are fairly easy changes to make without changing the charging port.
In fact, Tesla's Head of Design and VP of vehicle engineering discussed this very topic just a few days ago in Jay Leno's video on the Cybertruck [0]:
[0]: https://youtu.be/BGDOKD7ZZqI?si=TR7Txex7qg5VGYar&t=3158
Nobody could use it. It was by invite-only. EV bloggers contacted them to ask if they could try it and were stonewalled. They only reason they built it was to get subsidies from a CARB program for cars that supported battery swap so they could technically say the Model S supported battery swap.
(now personally I don't think battery swap is ever going to be a solution for consumer cars [maybe for stuff like taxis or buses] but the Tesla effort did not appear to be done in good faith - I don't think they ever believed in it even when they were building it)
It would require a large increase in battery energy density combined with a large improvement in thermal efficiency to be successful on a large scale. Plug in chargers make way more sense. Solid state batteries are on the horizon that will charge as quickly as filling a gas tank.
Battery swapping exists in the forklift industry but it is complicated and dangerous. Forklift batteries are about a thousand pounds (less than car batteries) and often open cell lead acid (which has additional challenges that lithium doesn't like spills, watering, and gas discharge). In the type of forklifts I occasionally see, the batteries sit on rollers with a side access door and lockout. the tunnel the battery lives in is a little wider than the battery, has a gate that must be reinstalled, and the battery slides around a little during operation. Battery is connected to the system with a flexible connector.
Despite the electric forklift battery swapping industry being a lot smaller than the car charging industry it seems to be a reasonably dangerous affair. there are significant OSHA regulations, and a nonzero number of yearly injuries.
If you were going to operate a car battery swapping lot, you would probably need: powered battery swapping trucks manned by professional operators, a very flat well maintained driving surface, an indoor charging room, a standardized car battery placement, access system, tie down system, and battery size. you would need to worry about things getting caught in the battery doors, the battery - car cable getting severed, making sure you were perfectly lined up with the access door, and about doing some sort of tie down routine.
It's doable but it would be a LOT of work to get right. Batteries aren't as fungible as tanks of gas so you'd probably only use such a system for corporate vehicle fleets or special lease pools.
Second link isn't great and is selling batteries but it seems to cite useful figures
https://www.osha.gov/etools/powered-industrial-trucks/types-...
https://www.onecharge.biz/blog/lithium-batteries-get-the-top...!