I am not sure when the car industry reaches that iteration where you can swap out batteries. It already happened for the electric rollers and it is freakin amazing. I think many of the electric car skeptics would convert if there was a way to "re-charge" the car within 5-10 minutes. The batteries would be also happier.
Battery swap seems unlikely. It's just an excuse for "skeptics".
The use case for swaps is small. The vast majority of trips are short. Trips long enough to require a recharge often require a long stop for the driver.
People have priced in the notion of spending some time each week pouring flammable liquids into their vehicle. If we had started with electric cars everyone would find it disgusting and far too frequent. The speed of it for rare use cases would not impress.
Swappable batteries will not change that. They are too expensive and they limit design too much. Reducing the charge time to five minutes or even zero minutes would not change the minds of people who would simply swap to their next excuse.
Since the battery is one of the biggest expenses to replace when it no longer holds charge, the economics of it would be tricky. Nobody would want to swap their good battery that they've carefully looked after for one that holds much less charge. Not to say that it's not possible to solve, but it's not so straight forward.
Also, I've used lots of chargers greater than 100 kw, and they really don't take that long to charge a car. Combine it with a meal, even a fast food meal and they've generally charged more than I needed in that time anyway.
Fast charging is an outlier anyway. >90% of the time you slow charge at home for a third of the price per mile, and it's lovely to only need to visit a filling station on rare long drives.
Financially for swapping to make sense, I think you need to be renting the batteries from the swapping company, not own them as part of the car purchase.
Tesla tried it. There was no point Tesla building more swap stations because so few people paid the premium to get a swappable battery. It turns out that people who won't buy an electric car unless they can swap the battery will find some other reason not to buy an electric car if that reason is removed.
