I realise the moment has passed but structurally integrated batteries aside, this was a huge misconception of the likely reality of battery swap at scale. Starting gate, sure you get lemon packs. It's not like gasoline isn't plagued by low grade fuels and water contamination (it shuts down airports) -but then you get regulatory standards and people normalise to acceptably efficient removal of bad battery packs from the swap scheme. And since you don't own the pack, the problem amortises over the rental costs.
People broke the model with what-if games. It never got to critical mass. So it's basically VHS vs beta, for swappable vs integrated and swappable lost, on pretty specious grounds.
Integrated is good because strength and weight. Swappable was good on speed. Swappable is alive and well in e-scooters and probably works for trucks.
Battery swap did not advantage Tesla in the marketplace and possibly disadvantaged Tesla which had 2x range for most competitors. A viable battery swap economy ends range anxiety, at the density of swap shops. Tesla wouldn't have had a compelling story in swap.
Maybe for freight trains too, since you can build the battery into a battery tender carriage, and railways have 150+ years experience at swapping carriages on and off trains.
Swapping in a multi-vendor world also implies standardization. It’s too early in this technology to standardize - that would stifle progress.
Swap stations would also be far more expensive to build and manage inventory for, and would carry higher liability for whatever automated mechanism moved the thousand pound pack packs around when it e.g. went out of alignment and crushed somebody’s car frame.
Yea, totally - I found this to be a lesser problem in cases like Tesla, where it's all proprietary anyway. You're correct that in a world of many standards, it becomes an issue
From memory the battery pack in a Tesla weighs on the order of 300kg. It's quite a heavy thing to change even if the structural and battery conditions went away.
You're off by a factor of almost two. An 85KWh Tesla pack weighs in at 550 Kg. It's more than 7000 cells, so that's 350 Kg for the cells alone and then you still need to add all of the structure, interconnects, electronics and cooling.
People broke the model with what-if games. It never got to critical mass. So it's basically VHS vs beta, for swappable vs integrated and swappable lost, on pretty specious grounds.
Integrated is good because strength and weight. Swappable was good on speed. Swappable is alive and well in e-scooters and probably works for trucks.
Battery swap did not advantage Tesla in the marketplace and possibly disadvantaged Tesla which had 2x range for most competitors. A viable battery swap economy ends range anxiety, at the density of swap shops. Tesla wouldn't have had a compelling story in swap.