Tom Scott did a video on it. In all honesty, there are a number of things about this system that I just don’t see working well in the long term, but it’s an interesting prototype nonetheless.

https://youtu.be/hNZy603as5w

Tesla did that as well about 10 years ago. They opted to not do it anymore if I recall correctly because they couldn’t control how the batteries were being maintained or what age of battery you would get.

Isn't that Nio?

Edit: didn't see it had been answered already

I’ve never owned a flip phone that I couldn’t plug in and swap the battery with a new one without it turning off. If that wasn’t normal with your phones I’m not sure why, maybe different circuitry?

Regardless making devices easy to repair, and thus open and maintainable was what I was getting at.

I mostly just applying my undergrad chemistry classes here to make an educated guess, nothing official...

Reactions are limited by the quantity of reagents and the mixing rate. As reagents are consumed (or produced), fresh reagent must move towards (or away) from the active anode and cathode for the reaction to continue.

In flooded liquid electrolyte batteries (like lead acid), mixing is very high and it's surface area that affects charge/discharge performance. In absorbed mat chemistries like most modern lithium ions, surface area is very high but electrolyte is "trapped" next to its immediate cathode/anode and cannot easily migrate throughout the matrix.

In lead acids this sort of diffusion is extremely fast. In packed lithium ions it is definitely slower. When diffusion is too slow, the lithium ions will form dendrites (little spikes) where a gradient of ions exist because they are being deposited onto the electrode faster than the electrolyte can move ions. Thats usually what kills batteries over time and why ultra fast charge/discharge cycles are terrible for them.

The timeline from research to "in my products" feels like a decade.

It has been like that since Volta started making stacks of different metal plates and making dead frogs dance. It might surprise you to learn that making subatomic particles dance to our whim at a pace we determine isn't very easy. We try all kinds of neat ideas to make them do this, and some of them even work. The fact that people like you see all the times we try and it doesn't work as an indicator that we aren't trying very hard rather than researchers trying very hard and not always being as successful as we'd like is more an indictment of you than it is of them.

Also, unlike when I started watching advances in batteries, you can find the history of rechargeable batteries with just a few minutes of web searching. If you had put in even that little bit of effort, you would know that advances in rechargeable batteries neither started nor ended with lithium.

Less talk and more delivery is the same as increasing investments in research and production even more than they already are. To deliver even better batteries even faster requires more research. I was using the logical conclusion of what was said.
So yes I absolutely 100% stand by my original comment, because there is absolutely a lot more than talking, when it's the area that is probably seeing some of the heaviest research for more than 2 decades now. And there absolutely is delivering too.

Of course we all want even better and cheaper batteries, it's a braindead comment to make. I also wish there were more pink unicorns.