All of this could be moot - the frame rigidity talk made me think, "hey, when none of us even driving the vehicles, safety won't matter as much."
Frame rigidity isn't nearly as much for safety as for comfort of the occupants, as I understand it. Obviously also for handling performance, which admittedly will matter less when the cars are driven by computers and performance is less of an issue.
A rigid frame allows the tires, springs and shocks to absorb and dampen the bumps, cracks, and other disturbances on the road. Prior to unibody construction and stiff frames, those road changes would transmit through the entire car.
I understand, but I'd add in the word "now."
.
I just figure we're like a 3-month old baby right now when it comes to the lifetime of how widespread and total electric transportation will be. We're back in 1907 cranking the front of our motor carriage. I think what' I'm suggesting will be simpler and easier in the near future. And I could be wrong.
Time will tell.
To be honest, this is a constant thought I hear from people with no background in engineering or other "innovative" pursuits, that someone smart will just figure it out.
There's a degree to which that's true... It's amazing what humanity has invented over the last century and a half.
But there are also limits. We've been "promised" a future full of flying cars since at least the 1950s/1960s. And we still don't have them. I've explained here the problem: energy. It takes zero energy to keep a car at rest on the road. Gravity pulls it down. The earth pushes it up. You're in stasis. It takes TONS of energy to keep a car aloft. Gravity pulls it down. You need to generate lift to push it up. We've not found ANY means to generate lift that doesn't use significantly more energy to operate a vehicle in the air than on the ground. In fact, we're no so much more energy-conscious that modern cars shut off their engines when they stop to save fuel.
It's not to say that you're wrong--maybe some fantastic technology will come around and we'll have battery swaps.
But right now we have major headwinds. Battery packs between manufacturers (and even between vehicle lines within a single manufacturer) are not standardized in any way. Battery packs weigh thousands of pounds, so there are all sorts of safety/liability concerns with a swap. And to enable battery swaps, as stated requires completely redesigning cars around a swap technology, which means adding rigidity (i.e. weight) elsewhere, making sure that the battery terminals are good for X number of insertions, that the non-fixed battery packs can stand up to the vibration, to the elements, etc that aren't as big of an issue in a fixed configuration, etc.
All the while, the competition (charging infrastructure) is rapidly maturing to the point where you can add significant amounts of charge in very short (<30 min) timeframes, and most BEV owners charge at home otherwise so don't need rapid charging and it's only an issue on road trips.
So you can hand-wave away ALL of the challenges and the rapid improvement of the alternative and say "well they'll just figure it out"... Or you can look at it and say maybe someday we'll have it, but the tea leaves are pointing the opposite direction for all the reasons we've already told you.
I'm not saying we'll never have battery swaps. I'm saying that based on what I see, it's not on a time horizon where I see the logistical problems being an easier solution than rapid charging for the foreseeable future.
