[whynotmaybe]

I just watched this Tom Scott video this morning about a Chinese company that created a "pod" where you can replace the battery instead of charging it.

https://youtu.be/hNZy603as5w

You can buy the car and rent the battery. Each time you need to "recharge", you change it.

[robotcookies]

There have been several attempts to make battery swapping for cars a thing. This includes Tesla's attempt and another company that went bankrupt. For some reason, it does not seem to work out and they all stop trying it.

[Nextgrid]

I bet the reason it doesn't work out is greed and that everyone is doing their own incompatible system. Gas/petrol would also not work out if every car brand had their own unique & incompatible composition of fuel.

This is something that governments could solve. Commission a decent swappable battery form-factor and offer tax rebates & incentives to both buyers of compatible vehicles (thus incentivizes manufacturers to make those vehicles) as well as gas stations to adopt the system.

It doesn't have to be perfect performance-wise, if battery swaps take 5 minutes and every gas station supports it, it'll still be good even if the effective range of such battery is half of a custom proprietary one's.

[lacksconfidence]

Nio currently has around 2,000 battery swap stations in china. They seem much farther along than the people that gave up.

[dragonmost]

But you have to keep in mind that it's heavily subsidized by china and is more than likely just burning money