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[Richard230]

You may be aware of the Gogoro scooter concept, with its battery swapping idea.  An interesting concept, but would it fly in the marketplace?  And can anyone make money in the long run using any sort of battery swapping infrastructure?  Cleanrider.com is not too sure about the technology and if a company can stay in business using battery swapping. Apparently this has been tried before without much success, as this article by Cleanrider explains:

http://cleanrider.com/gogoro-better-place-electric-scooters/

[CrashCash]

I don't think battery swapping w/o a charging system will work. You end up with an electric vehicle that can't take advantage of lots of investment in charging stations, and its success depends entirely on how many swap stations the company can build. No up-and-coming EV company will have the bucks to invest in enough stations to get the (very large) ball rolling. If the company goes out of business, all the swap stations close and your EV is useless.

[Justin Andrews]

The problem I see with swappable batteries as I see it is mainly weight.

You can make them smaller (power tank sized) to make them easier to swap, but then you are starting to run into inefficiencies caused by space being taken up by contactors, packaging and the like, which could have been used more efficiently in a larger harder to handle block.

Otherwise you'll need industrial equipment to swap the batteries like is technically possible on the Tesla.

[MotoRyder]

For the North American Market, I don't think that an exclusively 'swappable' battery power pack would be successful in the market on a large scale.  The inconvenience of having to get to a swap station at least every 60 miles would be prohibitively inefficient in terms of time and effort; unless the network is all over the greater metropolitan area and as large as the gasoline/diesel distribution network that is present today.

I could see some form of 'fleet operations' where localized transit is needed (say like within a campus environment), then swappable battery power packs could make sense.  The localization and confinement of transit would more easily facilitate the need of switching out expired batteries for newly charged ones. 

Perhaps in urban settings in highly concentrated Asian metropolises (and possibly space-confined European cities) the traffic patterns are localized and massively utilized, such that swapping stations could accommodate this arrangement. 

 

[zeetuz]

I think that this is a common place.