For cars, you would want to automate the swap anyway, so you'd presumably have handling equipment to swap and move batteries between the remove-recharge-store-install steps. I don't think you'd want to use humans in that application.
Until the value of the battery is a tiny fraction of the vehicle, battery swapping will always be a risky proposition.
I as the battery swap station will try to keep the good batteries and swap into someone else's vehicle the terrible batteries. Even if most stations are good actors, it won't take many to destroy the ecosystem by pushing marginal (or worse) batteries into customer vehicles.
Nobody's going to blindly trust a swapping system where the swapped commodity is anywhere between very valuable and toxic waste.
I didn't spell it out in my top post but this is part of my concern as well. My primary battery is going to have to stay mine due to the market for lemons.
A swappable spare battery feels like something I don't need to own. And my hunch is it should be more tactile versus automated, for that reason and because humans are good at manipulating non-standard objects, machines are not. Probably require less weather proofing too.
But now you're limited by how much an average human can carry for fifteen, thirty feet. Propane tanks are 37 lbs new, and those are hard for many people to wrangle until they've burned off a few pounds of propane. 30 lbs, or maybe 15kg feels like a more workable number. But that's < 9 miles per 'cylinder'. I don't know what the threshold is for 'compelling' but I'm pretty damned sure it's a lot more than 8 miles. 25 miles for a pair might get someone's attention, but that's a few years out.
Or an automated replacement process, which still has other issues we haven't addressed in this thread.
Good points. But, there must be a way to test batteries in an automated way at the replacement station and presumably take them out of service. And, like gasoline distribution, a way to inspect and certify the workings of a replacement station so that the user has good confidence that they are getting a serviceable battery to carry along to the next replacement.
