I want to pay for "battery as a service", I don't need to own a battery, I don't want to charge it, just bill me by the KWh used (which should better be competitive to gas).
Renault in Europe are part-way there with their EVs ( the Fluence, Zoë and Twizy ) You buy the car but pay a battery-lease to Renault each month, when the battery capacity falls below 80% they call you in to a garage and swap-out the pack.
You still have to pay for charging, though.
The Renault approach appears to be appreciated by people who are dabbling in EVs as a hobby ( e.g. wealthy folk in leafy areas of London ) but is offputting to people looking to replace their internal-combustion cars. £70 minimum per month for rental + cost of charging quickly exceeds the cost of diesel in the UK.
http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/teslas-battery-swap-is-dead/
(Although the business model didn't work as you describe it.)
It seems as though, for now, the supercharger network is good enough.
As long as all Teslas come pre-equipped with a very expensive battery, it makes little economic sense to let it depreciate while you are paying to use another battery.
What Tesla discovered is that bootstrapping the battery swap infrastructure off of battery owners doesn't work, since owners are reluctant to pay for swapping out their battery over recharging the one they own.
(Although, arguably, it was also launched too early from a technology perspective.)