A robot just swapped my electric car's battery

Speed, for one. 5 minutes vs 30 minutes to an hour to be fully charged. Makes a big difference for road trips where you need to recharge on the way.

Repairability. A battery should be able to be replaced.

Having options is good for the consumer.

I find this kind of comments so stupid. The technology is well beyond proven. Logistics have had swappable batteries for over 15 years since the time of acid batteries. Nio is a rental company first and for them the model seems to be working. It's compelling for road trips specially since most of the charging stations are broken most of the time and for extremely dense cities where people aren't allowed to access power plugs at parking spaces. I mean, on the suburbanite hellscape, charging at home will always make more sense, but the US is not the entirety of the world. This things seem to be ripe for success in Asia and Europe.

That, and the internal combustion engine will never replace horses.

I dream of F-Zero type charging

You lack imagination. What if they had multiple smaller batteries, as some cell phones do? The big reason it's not more common in phones is that space is a massive premium, which is less of a concern in cars. Weight is a bigger factor here.

EV batteries have hundreds of cells that could potentially be charged in parallel. It's even possible to do battery swaps one cell at a time, albeit that's unlikely.

And these are just possibilities that I came up with as a non-EE. I'm sure they have their flaws, but it would bypass those physical limits.