This is what I never understood : why don't they create cars where the battery is removable and when you go to a "gas" station there's a machine that just change your empty battery for a full one.
In fact I thought about patenting the idea 10 years ago but I didn't have the know-how.
The battery-swap idea has in fact been fairly well established for a while, but nobody has actually made it work. I believe that Tesla considered going down this route for a while.
Better place did that but it's actually far worse idea than it sounds. People have electricity in their homes and it's much easier to establish a grid of super chargers than building for changing batteries.
It might happen over time when infrastructure is better established.
People have been talking about this for as long as they've been talking about electric cars, and several companies have demoed prototypes. The two main problems are that the machines needed to do this change are very expensive and tricky to maintain compared to a simple gas pump, and more importantly, unless you can get all car manufacturers to agree to a universal standard for batteries and battery access you're going to need a half dozen different machines and batteries at each gas station, driving up the costs even further.
unless you can get all car manufacturers to agree
to a universal standard for batteries
And unless batteries get so good that the battery in that £19,000 Renault Zoe has identical performance to the battery in that £90,000 Tesla Model X, they never will :)
Or for that matter people accepting having their brand new Tesla X battery replaced with a 5 year old Tesla X battery.
I suppose one solution would be that cars have two batteries. One battery that is specific to the make/model of the car and one battery that is easily replaceable. So perhaps the cheap Renault basically only has the replaceable battery while the Tesla X has 70% of its battery capacity in it's super awesome main battery and only 30% in the 'crappy' replaceable battery which you only replace when you quickly need an extra 100 miles of range.
I think it was too complex for a demand it has (most people can just charge car at home every night). They will probably revisit it when more electric cars are around (especially later with self-driving fleets, it's a no-brainer).
The size of battery needed to propel a full-size car makes swapping mechanically prohibitive. It would be like swapping a 4U rackmount server loaded with HDDs.
Better Place sadly went under in 2013; not enough market penetration, lack of focus on a few target markets, and difficulty getting enough capital together for the infrastructure.
In fact I thought about patenting the idea 10 years ago but I didn't have the know-how.