[notahacker]

You'd need the deposit to be the price of buying a battery, because unlike a metal tank a high capacity lithium battery is pretty useful if you never use that company's charge facility again, but if the status quo is that the company only swaps their own serial numbered batteries within certain time frames, the whole notion of swapping an old one for a new one is meaningless. Sure, sometimes people will wreck a battery but return it anyway, like any lease business, but there's no way of using them as a general bad battery disposal service

[rdiddly]

Swapping old for new IS meaningless and not the goal. In fact some swaps would inevitably be new-for-old. The company would own both, so who cares. This idea is only about swapping depleted for charged, so you don't have to wait around while it charges. Obviously the only way it would work is if swapping were made easier and faster than charging. As for abnormal or unusual occurrences, if a battery is nearing end-of-life the customer can do the company the favor of reporting it, or the company can find out themselves by testing it. If you demonstrably wreck one, or just keep it, the company has your deposit (which I agree should be close to the price of the battery), and you just bought a battery.

It's early and people still fetishize the batteries a bit, but they're really just containers for the thing we actually want - the charge.