It seems that owning an electric car (or boat, etc) involves having to wait for the battery to re-charge. Most cars need 8, 10, sometimes 12 hours to recharge, especially if the electrical services is limited to 120V. I wonder why no-one has proposed changing the battery?

It could be as simple as rolling up to a service station, and locating the battery compartment using parameters transmmitted from the car, say at whatever distance from the front right tire. The automated arm could remmove the dischareged battery, and install a full charged battery, while the driver goes inside to pay the cost for having the service station re-charge the battery. The time to complete this should be at most 10 minutes. A busy service station might have three, six, or even nine bays for changing the batteries.

Done right, the manufacturers could agree on some standard formats (H&215;W&215;L) where H could be less than 6 inches (15 cm), so that the service station automated arm can get underneath the car to remove the battery. The battery could be secured to the floor of the car using a plate with industry-accepted fittings that, again, the service station automated arm could undo to start the removal, and redo when finished.

This would require the service station to keep on hand a certain number of batteries, of the most likely formats. The discharged batteries would be re-charged by the service station, over a period of 10, 15, even 24 hours, using the relatively low-cost techniques that would be available as long as the overall recharge time is not important. The service station automated arm should be mounted in such a way to pertmit quick removal, quick search time to locate the matching format, and quick load times. The storage of full recharged batteries could be underground, next to the automated arm mounting.

The driver (who pays for the service) would have a completely recharged battery installed, likley within 10 minutes, ready for the next leg of the journey. (Such an arrangement would also completely take care of "range anxiety" for drivers facing long trips.)

Newer cars such as Tesla Model 3 boast a recharge time of under 1 hour (from 10% charge remaining), using 240V service. Part of this is the Supercharger itself, but I think the battery technology is also a determining factor. Tesla states the recharge time of 5 minutes can deliver 75 miles of range. This sounds fantastic, as long as there is a Tesla Supercharger loacted every 70-75 miles along the route; which in Canadian cottage country is pretty unlikely.