For many reasons, electric cars are awesome in theory, and sucky in reality. On Thursday, Tesla motors will publicly demo a technology that will bring electric cars one step closer to their amazing potential. That technology is called battery swapping.
It's pretty simple: electric cars can currently only go a few hundred miles without a charge. With battery swapping technology, you could drive your electric car that few hundred miles--then just open up the chassis, switch out your dead battery for a new one, and drive on. Like changing the batteries in a flashlight. Except it's your car.
Battery swapping technology has been unsuccessfully attempted before. Let's hope Tesla keeps up the problem-solving until the awesome potential of electric cars displaces the not-so-awesome reality.
