This company, owned by an Isreali who was based in the United States, is a pioneer in EV, and the concept that we speak of. A Professor of ours was talking to us about this, and he knows the guy too.
Main issues with EV's being economical and effective -
Range - to solve range, you need lots of batteries. What do many batteries do? They make the car costlier.
And what happens when your car runs out of batteries? Do you wait for 8 hours for it to charge so you can start using it? Similarly, when we speak of charging stations, are we going to park our car there for hours to charge?
A way out is a switching station. Before anything, current technologies will continue to get better and EV's will continue to improve, but till then, we will have to work within the constraints of our current achievements.
So if all EV's have a standard set of batteries (or a range of standard batteries), they can be replaced without worrying about brand or capacity or anything. So a Switching station will work as a filling station, with an attendant replacing your battery in the same time as you fill petrol in your car. The station itself is obviously much better equipped to store hundreds of batteries with the ability to charge them.
Apparently this concept exists in Isreal, and this company has been invited by a number of Scandinavian countries to seek ways to implement it there.
The company is
www.betterplace.com.
Well, maybe I can share an anecdote with you too. Our Prof told us that since this guy was Isreali, quite young, obviously drafted and probably been in conflict, hated the fact that the world was addicted to oil, which was controlled by the Arabs and the world's oil payments, he said, funded all the terrorism. So he wanted to get the world out of this situation and that was his main motivation!