Tesla tried battery swapping in 2015 and abandoned it due to a lack of customer interest (and also due to various problems that made the process less straightforward than you'd think). Both the Model S and Model X were designed from the outset to have swappable batteries.
The battery swap feature was implemented only to maximize California clean energy credits. Only enough infrastructure was built to claim the credits.
“In 2013, California revised its Zero Emissions Vehicle credit system so that long-range ZEVs that were able to charge 80% in under 15 minutes earned almost twice as many credits as those that didn’t. Overnight, Tesla’s 85 kWh Model S went from earning four credits per vehicle to seven. Moreover, to earn this dramatic increase in credits, Tesla needed to prove to CARB that such rapid refueling events were possible. By demonstrating battery swap on just one vehicle, Tesla nearly doubled the ZEV credits earned by its entire fleet even if none of them actually used the swap capability.”
Premature reject. It's working in China, it would work in trucking. "Tesla tried" doesn't mean jack. No car manufacturers want to do this because it means loosing a point of innovation. It has to be regulated to happen at scale. It won't happen but not because it can't work. After all... look at 12v car batteries
Horrid quality video and not about the trucking you mean (i think), but these [0] electric dump trucks are a very welcome sight everywhere in Shenzhen, China.
Battery swapping for trucks is far different from cars though. Trucks are reasonably standardised, they commonly have predestined routes and purpose built depots to operate from. If you're say Pepsi and you've got a fleet of trucks going between your warehouses you can build the infrastructure around your route.
If you look at old mobile phones with removable batteries, you'll notice that there is usually a lot of space taken up by the plastic around the battery which is designed to allow a user to replace it repeatedly. A car battery that's rapidly replaceable would need a large, strong structure around it to allow it to be replaced but also to hold together in the event of a crash. If batteries had to be swapped out, you would lose more cabin space and structural rigidity. Then you get to standardised connectors and mountings, data protocols, the list goes on. And that's before you think of the automated equipment to actually swap the batteries.
In a world where we can charge a car today from 10-80% in 10 minutes, it doesn't seem like a worthwhile engineering challenge.
