Hugely increased complexity since the battery needs to have all mounting points easily accessed in any condition, rain, snow, ice buildup, whatever, from the outside and all the other accessing geometry forcing the design of the entire vehicle to allow for it.
Combine this with battery technology improving allowing faster charging speeds lessening the impact. Like phones fast-charging today. No point having a spare battery when 15-30 mins in a charger easily gives you all the hours you need.
Where I live we've had completely electric busses on a line for a few years now (Actually Volvos). Very different use case but also commercial vehicles with similar run hours. They have automatic over-head charging at the ends, filling up enough with a 10 minute stop to run throughout the day. Some longer lines are using hybrids with the same charging technology. They run most of the line entirely on battery power, only kicking in a smaller diesel when needed.
Maybe battery swapping makes sense for some specialized applications? But then I would guess just straight biofuels simply takes the cake, although eating the cost penalty.
“ZES (Zero Emission Services) supplies interchangeable energy containers for new and existing inland vessels. These containers – called ZESPacks – are charged using renewable power.”
I've seen other more permanent container solutions retrofitted on ships, though mostly passenger ferries with set schedules. Also only as auxiliary power allowing to eg. maneuver when docking without having to start another genset or capture excess energy from required gensets running in inefficient ranges.
Why should one of those boxes not be a giant 300kwh battery pack that they swap out at the multitude of weigh stations they have to stop at along the highway already? Just run massive power to the weigh stations, put in a few massive DC chargers and some forklifts.
Hell you could go further and have other parts of the drivetrain in there -- the controller, the charger unit, the DC to DC converter, etc. Then you have an upgrade path for the trucks as the tech improves.
At some point, the cost of the mechanisms and staff to swap the battery is more than the cost of the rest of a second vehicle.
JB Struble just gave a great analysis of this at a Standford talk where he explained why the dropped it.
It actually makes the vehicle more complex and importantly heavier.
It also prevents further improvement, Tesla just showed of their new Cell-to-Structure concept, where the cells themselves have load on them. This fundamentally is incompatible with fast swap. Such a architecture is really great because it negates the 'penalty' of carrying around a battery compared to an ICE vehicle. In fact you might end up lighter, because you don't have the heavy engine and the battery is not so much heavier then the structural steel you would have used otherwise.
You can charge trucks during breaks, or during loading and unloading.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-shuts-down-battery-swap-prog...
https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-batter...
Is there any video of the swaps actually working, outside of the promotional stage-show?
YouTube doesn't have anything, which is odd...
There was a promo/concept video a few years back, from Tesla I think, showing cars pulling up into a battery swap station and a door slid open in the floor beneath the car and a contraption automatically swapped out the battery for a fully charged one without the driver leaving the car. Not sure whatever came of that concept.