Note that this is only an issue for long-distance travel; for day-to-day driving, most people will charge in their garage, their apartment's garage, or at a street-side charger.
Who is going to scale the street-side charger network? In Europe, a lot of cars are parked outdoors during the night. In smaller towns, parking spots around residential areas aren't even painted.
Many other cars are parked in shared garages that don't guarantee one plug per car. I guess garage owners could install the chargers (but that would be hundreds of kW if electric cars were really commonplace---that is expensive infrastructure) and meters, but still it's hard to reach critical mass.
And I am talking about problems with scaling: "beginning to happen" and "available for everyone who needs it" is not the same as "available for everyone". Installing a dozen chargers, unused most of the time, in a shopping mall's 1000-car parking lot is not the same as installing a few hundred chargers in a multistorey parking downtown that previously only needed to power some neons.
There are millions of people in Europe who has a private garage/carport/parking spot and can afford to install a charger there, and who lives within round trip battery capacity of where they need to go. Millions more who don't, but whose employers can be convinced to install chargers. That's more than enough for the kind of critical mass where apartment block landlords, employers and shopping centre parking lots will start to install chargers, not for novelty or green credentials, but for naked self interest. It's not overnight, but it will be very quick.
That was set up to fail.
There was only one battery swap station. It was aimed at people commuting between LA and SF. Except:
- you had to book in advance to use it
- you had to pay a fee to use it
- it was set up across the street from a Tesla Supercharger
- despite ostensibly being for the commute between those cities, it was actually 15 miles away from the freeway, making for a significant detour
If I was Elon Musk and wanted to demonstrate how people would much rather use charging stations than any kind of battery swap program, I think the above is a pretty good example of how I'd set up my battery swap program (for failure).
And remember, chargers of the future will be faster still. CCS has been designed to scale to at least 300kW.
But the big plus is that if you design a fleet system around battery swap, you can get away with puny batteries on the vehicles. A battery sufficient for 1 - 2 hours of city driving is optimal which saves both cost and weight for the vehicles. Instead of relying on expensive, power dense advanced Lithium batteries, you can shove cheap batteries into the thing, scatter the entire city with drive-thru swap stations and drive the cost of transportation way down.
As a Tesla owner, I didn't think all of the past back-and-forth about the swap station in blogs was that interesting. I eat dinner in Harris Ranch.
Electric cars are the future, and Tesla's are cool, so don't take this as a negative. The complexity of battery swapping was in ownership of the batteries, not in the physical swapping. It maybe makes sense for big taxi firms, but not for standard consumers.
edit: adding a link with some corroboration since I got downvoted: http://insideevs.com/carb-zev-program-changes-tesla-takes-la...