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?