Of course, without an industry-wide effort to standardize a few core battery sizes for different applications, it's a moot point. That is the problem that I wish Musk had set out to solve.

To some extent there is a standards problem: there is not a common battery pack (like there is a gas tank fill point). But even if there were, the batteries would continue to run down after delivery (unless supplied with a non-trivial amount of power). And the space required to physically store these batteries would occupy a lot of volume. After all, gasoline/diesel is far more energy-dense than modern batteries.

My thinking is that they would be kept on trickle charge at the gas station after delivery. That wouldn't take a huge amount of power. The actual recharging process would happen at a depot that has high power connectivity to the grid with low distribution losses.

I suspect it would be more efficient to do that and have the charged batteries trucked to the service stations, than it would be to have each service station do their own primary recharging. Especially since, as you say, the service station owners aren't going to want to devote a huge amount of space to battery inventory.

I'm vaguely aware of Better Place but they certainly don't get Tesla's mindshare (good, bad, or otherwise.)

Storing the batteries at the station will require much more volume than the analogous amount of gas/diesel. And a dumb tank beats a smart battery charger with software and EEPROMs if your concern is resiliency. Some EV problems are pretty clearly chicken/egg adoption problems. But there are some real infrastructure problems, too, and other changes may bear far more fruit towards the goal of more efficient energy exploitation.

Tesla's battery packs are distributed throughout the car, both to allow for cargo space (not having a trunk would be something of a minus) and to distribute the weight of all those batteries. I am having a very hard time envisioning a way to achieve both of those goals while making the batteries replaceable.

It's just that for the majority of people, battery swapping makes no sense. They can charge their vehicle over night at very very cheap prices and have enough range to serve them all day. If you insist on taking a cross-country roadtrip, rent an ICE - the infrastructure is just not there yet (or peoples minds have not accomodated - see this article).

Pic of the battery: (which is really the base of the whole car) http://www.cartype.com/pics/10143/full/tesla_model_s_battery...

I'm probably just scratching the surface with a minute of thought. I'm sure that the folks at Telsa have been over this ground, and much more.

Swapping my car's battery should be as big a deal as swapping the propane cylinder on my gas grill.

And yes, batteries these days are perfectly capable of monitoring themselves in a leased-usage scenario. Your laptop battery has its own CPU and EEPROM, for instance. To understand why, see any recent news story on the Dreamliner.

Yes, and we've just read about them in the New York Times.

The tradeoffs due to price point, available technologies, time to market, etc leave a lot of "should" on the cutting floor due to compromise. I don't think we're particularly close on hot swap batteries as a stand in for real time charging while they still weigh 1000lbs.

I'm betting that folks like Telsa will drive hard on the necessary advances in battery technology over time, or energy storage technique more broadly.

Personally, I think having to swap the battery is just as stone age inefficient. I want some sort of super-capacitor with instant charge capability and fine-grained control over the energy release --- not to mention avoiding the nasty chemical mix in traditional battery tech, waste energy in the form of heat, etc.

Maybe some amalgamation of materials science, nano-tech, etc will get us there.

Yes, that part of the article struck me as a real head-scratcher. This kind of "engineering" is becoming all too common in the auto industry, even among companies that have been around for decades and should know better.

For instance, the battery in the new-generation Porsche 911 is in the front trunk... which can only be opened electrically.

WTF, people? Are all the smart guys and gals working for Google these days, or something?

Maybe there will be swappable batteries eventually, or one part of the battery will be swappable, but as far as I understand thats not coming soon.