Who's they? There were thousands of shcooters with swappable batteries riding around Taiwan when I was there in November.

Correct.

Gogoro currently do more than 400,000 battery swaps / day, primarily in Taiwan, but are expanding into other Asian countries.

https://www.gogoro.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gogoro

Never heard of these guys before, thanks. Insteresting. But it looks like they have severe limitations on the kinds of vehicles they support and their parameters. Would never use this as a daily driver for personal use.

We’ve literally got people right now open air pouring liquid gasoline. It’s not uncommon to even get some on yourself.

My point is it can’t be much more of a hazard.

Sounds like you haven't seen a lithium or a sodium fire yet. After you've seen one, you'll handle batteries like you do explosives..

This is gonna sound crazy but gasoline is not that much of a fire hazard. I’m speaking comparatively.

I used a gasoline stove for a while and it is bonkers how hard that thing is to light. You can spill the gas or do all sorts of things—the only thing I could do to get a fire out of it was to follow the instructions, exactly, and keep the stove perfectly level. I later learned that gasoline only burns if you keep the gasoline / air mixture within a narrow range. I know that gasoline is implicated in a lot of fires, but it’s also just so damn common and people are careless with it.

Powerful batteries scare me more, to be honest. Not a lot more, just a little. Not trying to fearmonger here. It’s just that I love those sparks and that fire, and have spent time playing with batteries and playing with gasoline or other flammable substances. If you short a battery, it will basically dump as much energy as it can, as fast as it can. It’s easier to accidentally short a battery.

Properly stored & maintained batteries are fine. I just get a little nervous holding a wrench, sometimes.

Gasoline is not much of a fire hazard. (Compared to other things like a 32 ampere spark right next to a lithium battery, at least.)

There's a difference between user-swappable and battery-as-a-service. There is a company called NIO that seems to be successfully doing battery-as-a-service in China right now and is trying to expand this platform to Europe. They're also in talks with other manufacturers who seem to be interested in developing a common standard to make the batteries interchangeable so the stations can service other brands too.

There may be safety concerns (e.g. if I understand it correctly, the swapping process is fully automated and the car locks the doors and takes over steering, so I'm not sure how this deals with emergency scenarios where the driver might need to leave the car or intervene) but as far as the driver is concerned they never touch the battery so the risk of accidents from improper wiring is significantly reduced.