[sounds]

I'd really like to hear more about what this means, from the article:

  Frenzied drivers will still have to do some work though —
  they’ll have to drop off the battery on the return leg of
  their journey and pay an unspecified “transport fee”, ...

A legitimate worry is that you'll end up with someone else's lemon battery. Is the article referring to a Tesla mandate that you come back for your "original" battery, and how long do you have before you forfeit your battery?

[zanny]

The way you would want it done is as long as you own the car you pay some annual fee for battery swaps but then you can swap whenever you want. You would have to sign up at the point of sale for the service and not be able to situationally opt out whenever you weren't driving long distances with a desire for swaps though, because the idea is that you subsidize the fact you never need to "replace" your battery now and Tesla needs to keep up battery stocks with some fraction of the cost each year.

[TheAnimus]

>A legitimate worry is that you'll end up with someone else's lemon battery.

I was under the impression that these battery packs had so much monitoring and control technology built in, that would be very unlikely. Most batteries become lemons because on of the cells dies a death, becoming a short, which in turn drags down the other cells.

Tesla have a battery technology which is ment to be very advanced at managing each cell to prevent them catching fire, I would imagine they have very accurate wear level information on them too.

[InclinedPlane]

You left out the other part, which I think is significant:

   ... though they can also choose to keep the battery and pony up the 
   difference between the price between of the old and new batteries.

It's hard to say how much of an issue that is going to be without knowing the typical prices. Also, it needs to be balanced against the fact that a typical supercharger recharge is free.