If you operate a fleet of trucks, battery swapping becomes a lot more viable because you don't have to worry about swapping your good, new battery for a worn-out old battery.
If you have a fleet of trucks, having battery swapping batteries also means you need to have more batteries then trucks. Meaning extra capital cost.
Secondly, battery swapping architecture of a vehicle makes it significantly heavier specially wants you consider battery packs or even cells with structural loads to make the vehicle lighter. For one personal luxury car that might be fine, but if you are operating 150+ trucks for 20 years, that adds up to a lot of missed payloads.
This is exactly why Tesla, dropped this idea. JB Struble just gave a nice analysis of this at a Standford talk.
Also, trucks, will spend some time on break and more time loading and unloading. During that time you can charge them or top them off.
Tesla is the last company I would look to for advice about the future of the market for haulage. Weight is one point against battery packs, but easy refill/swap and maintenance are two points in their favour. When you start to deal with volume commercial vehicles the cost of maintenance and repair adds up and is considered a part of doing business. If you try to tell me that your load-bearing conformal battery packs that are critical to making the truck move are an item my depot mechanics cannot touch or repair I am going to show you the door.
If my truck are loading/unloading they are probably doing it at customer facilities so charging is unlikely to be an option. If they are loading/unloading at my facility then I can swap the battery pack at the same time.
> Tesla is the last company I would look to for advice about the future of the market for haulage.
Funny then that many large companies disagree with you have have order literally 100s of electric trucks from Tesla.
> If you try to tell me that your load-bearing conformal battery packs that are critical to making the truck move
For a truck, you are gone have body-on-frame anyway so the battery would probably not be structural. And it wouldn't be 'critical' to make the truck move, it would be a weight optimization.
> If my truck are loading/unloading they are probably doing it at customer facilities so charging is unlikely to be an option.
Lots of companies transport thing between their own facilities and lots of companies have long term costumers. Adding the charging equipment is relativity cheap and could be built to you.
> If they are loading/unloading at my facility then I can swap the battery pack at the same time.
Go check out how complex these battery swapping robots actually are. Having those at your facility is very costly and need a lot of space. The are prone to break down because they mechanical machines are moving around heavy batteries.
Also, so far nobody has even demonstrated this type of battery swap device for a large truck. Current system drop the battery from under the vehicle, this however is not possible in a body-on-frame construction, and a different method would have to be found. Non of the electric truck vendors have announced or even talked about such a system.
