Tesla’s working on a system to swap out the entire battery system in less time than it takes you to pump a tank of gas: http://www.teslamotors.com/batteryswap
Watch the video, pretty interesting. Imagine your charge is running low — you simply drive up to a replacement station (similar to how gas engines force you to drive to a gas station), get new batteries, and are back on the road in under 90 seconds. Granted, you’d need plenty of replacement stations within range, but that’s the eventual goal.
So imagine the consumer being able to offload battery replacement/wear/degradation/maintenance to GiantBatteryCo(tm). As the batteries get swapped, GiantBatteryCo(tm) can run diagnostics on each pack and fix/replace/recycle as needed in a centralized location/process. The EV consumer no longer needs to worry about batteries in the same way that combustion engine consumers no longer need to worry about oil extraction/refining.
Batteries are one of the biggest sticking points for EVs, but if you remove those from the equation, it changes the outlook quite a bit.
