Sounds like you're underestimating the underlying logistics of swapping out huge/heavy battery packs.

If you use the throughput (trucks refueled per period of time) of a conventional gas station as a benchmark to compare the battery pack swapping station with and try to think of all the additional difficulties you might see why I'm skeptical about the swapping of batteries, even when automated.

* Handling of liquid fuel is vastly less complicated than moving around heavy battery packs

* Space requirements are much bigger (because of volumetric energy density) with battery packs

* Battery packs may very well need to be transported to and from swapping stations, whereas fuel only goes to stations

All in all, seems to me that the flexibility that everyone is used to with liquid fuels is near unattainable with battery swapping.

I'm very inclined to bet that we'll be relying on liquid fuels for quite a number of years to come.

Might be methanol for electeic vehicles equipped with methanol fuel cells or maybe even formic acid.

Hydrogen, I'm skeptical about it. Too much of a hassle.

Battery consumed storage space and battery swap time are likely very small inconveniences considering we will have to dramatically reduce fossil fuel use (=cost increases and/or subsidies for alternatives). It means they will have to compete with synthetic hydrocarbon fuels made from renewables. But sure they will have to compete with fuel cells.

You could also avoid the need to deal with large batteries by having the truck draw power from an overhead wire. For bonus points you could put the whole thing on rails, eliminating the need for the truck driver.

> You could also avoid the need to deal with large batteries by having the truck draw power from an overhead wire.

https://www.engineerine.com/2021/04/germany-opens-its-first-...

I could see all of the above happening with different mixes of needs of routes, infrastructure, and investment.

Or while we're at it, a standard energy module that could be a battery, hydrogen fuel cell + tank, or something else.

Well maybe, I wonder about the cost efficiencies of multiple fuel cells in modules (usually they're pretty expensive because of the use of costly metals like palladium/platinum). Moving the cell out of the module obviously makes for a dedicated battery truck or dedicated hydrogen truck, but modular automatic liquid fuel let alone hydrogen links I would imagine is hard to keep reliable vs an electrical interface.

But you don't need to sit them on the shelf recharging, so you don't need to have many extra hydrogen modules (vs your fleet size). So, compared to dedicated hydrogen powered trucks, you'd maybe end up having 110 modules for every 100 trucks, for a modest increase in those costly fuel cells.

Maybe the swapping/charging stations could support both kinds and would prefer to give you charged battery modules, but if running behind in the charging, would switch to giving out hydrogen modules. Or maybe only some routes would have hydrogen equipped cargo stations at both endpoints, so the trucks would get different kinds of modules depending on the route - making a gradual rollout of hydrogen fueling infra easy.