In my opinion, EVs are a classic case of the initial concept going off the rails because it ignored several basic facts....
Without getting into a lot of details, years ago I sat through several energy brainstorming sessions ... much of this involved a lot of stupid stuff with wind and solar for which the problem preventing it from making sense was always the disconnect between supply and demand (how does that work for a grid when the electrical generation is random in nature?) and the fact that ‘storing electricity’ is not that easy when the system has developed without storage.... you go to turn the lights on, you expect the electricity to be there to make the lights work.
As part of these discussions, EVs came up.... this was before Tesla was even a thing. I strongly suggested to the group that if EVs were ever going to be a thing on the marketplace, it would only work properly if battery sizes and configurations could be standardized enough so that when one’s battery charge was depleted, the car owner would go to a battery charge location which was setup so that the depleted battery was exchanged with a fully charged one. If the car and the battery exchange station was designed properly, the entire exchange could be done in a matter of minutes. Essentially when the car was purchased, it was without a battery.... the car owner would ‘buy electrons’ via the ongoing exchange of batteries.
There was a primary reason for this concept of battery exchange that had a huge benefit.... it was because virtually every electrical utility has plenty of demand during the day and very low demand at night. Under the concept of battery exchange, depleted batteries could be charged at night when demand was low and electricity was a lot cheaper. What the concept of battery exchange would help do is something that the electrical generation utilities have been trying to figure out for years... how to achieve a more levelized grid.
EVs could still be charged at home and take advantage of lower overnight electrical rates... but the Achilles heel of EVs has always been that they don’t accommodate travel away from one’s home very well....take too long to charge and it’s far less likely that one can take advantage of cheaper rates overnight.
And that, of course, would cause demand to be high and electricity to not be a lot cheaper.
That's a flat out brilliant idea - an 'Elec Station' could swap out batteries in less time than it would take to fill a tank with gas..solving another problem with EV's. I'm impressed. Where's Elon Musk when we need him?