Tesla tried out battery swap stations about 7 years ago [1]. They assessed that demand wasn't high enough. Basically, it cost money to do battery swaps (which paid for battery swap infrastructure), whereas supercharging was just the cost of electricity.
On a first principles basis this kind of makes sense. Supercharging has effectively no moving parts. The plug doesn't even have a tab. That's less maintenance and pieces that can break over time. On the other hand, battery swapping has a ton of moving parts, and would require the car to have additional hardware.
Isn’t there also a concern on battery quality? If batteries are expensive, then you don’t want to swap a good one for an older or reduced capacity battery, but you would have no way of knowing a priori how good the replacement might be.
I don't understand why this is a concern. In this scheme you swap out batteries instead of re-charging them; you don't own them, you're contracting with a service to provide them as needed. Theoretically, you could buy the car battery-less and be asked upon purchase which battery service you'd like to sign up with.
But batteries are heavy, so quite possible that a battery swap would end up taking as long as supercharger charge anyway.
On a first principles basis this kind of makes sense. Supercharging has effectively no moving parts. The plug doesn't even have a tab. That's less maintenance and pieces that can break over time. On the other hand, battery swapping has a ton of moving parts, and would require the car to have additional hardware.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_battery_station