For private use, it is far more difficult. The battery is the single most expensive part of the car- who wants to drive off the lot, then two hours later trade that expensive part for one that is heavily used?
Unless the dealer or manufacturer runs all of the swapping stations, and the purchase of the car doesn't include the battery, the economics are terrible.
OTOH, if the consumer isn't paying the full price to own the battery, then the economics of swapping goes way down unless the consumer pays a hefty deposit on the battery.
Then, private sales become harder as you probably want to be able to authenticate that battery is what it is supposed to be, and not some third party knockoff.
But if you can't swap to a third party battery, the vehicle becomes worthless once those batteries are phased out.
Swapping vehicle batteries has been tried before and abandoned (I think in Israel maybe? I forget) because unless you are operating a commercial fleet where you are willing to invest in buying the extra batteries and owning them yourself (or signing a big fat contact with a manufacturer) it just doesn't make sense.
Who owns these batteries? Who owns these trucks? Who eats the cost on battery/truck degradation?
If I pull in with a battery that has 70% of it's original max capacity and get a brand new battery with 99% of it's capacity how do you fairly assess that value add to the truck?
Silly yes. The 90's vision of the skateboard platform has stuck with me a lot. I'd imagined rolling lounges & other passenger vehicles cabins being a way to start decoupling the car, reducing the number of batteries motors and wheels that a town or city had to own in net. The usage cycle of trucks is a lot higher, and the swappability just for sale of switching batteries seems silly, but I couldn't help but see at least one of the core problems of swappability being solved by disaggregation the compartment from the rest here.
> "The second storyline is that battery swapping is also helping electrifying China truck sales. BNEF analyst Siyi Mi recently compiled data on all the battery-swappable vehicles sold in the country and found that while swapping remains a niche technology for passenger vehicles, almost half of all heavy battery electric trucks sold last year in China had swappable batteries. That’s up from 34% in 2021. Many of these trucks are operating in industrial sites, port warehouses, mines and steelmaking factories. Lighter commercial vehicles with swappable batteries also are being used in urban deliveries, an area where BNEF expects to see more growth as better economics and tightened emission requirements draw more attention to electric models. Long-haul trucking will be the last, and most difficult, segment to tackle."
https://about.bnef.com/blog/chinas-clean-truck-surprise-defi...