You need to actually take a deeper look before being quite so confident.

You are semi-correct though: it *is* a conscious choice. You are just completely wrong on the reasons.

Here are the real reasons:

• We do not have enough batteries. We need every single battery we can make to be in a car, not sitting around somewhere doing nothing.
• Swapping stations are bulky and expensive. It is *much* more efficient and effective to use the same amount of space and money to make chargers than swapping stations. We are not talking 10 or 20% better, but more like 10 to 20 times better.
• Your "5 minutes" only works if you compare a single car charging to a single car swapping. Because you cannot have so many swapping stations, you are going to end up with queues, and that will drastically change things up. Even just a 4 car queue is going to put charging and swapping on fairly level ground.
• There are legal issues surrounding the batteries. If you bought them, then what happens when you get new ones swapped in? What if you deliberately swapped out defective batteries just to get better ones? If you don't own them, how does that work? Who is responsible for the batteries currently in your car?

I want to make clear that none of these things are unsolvable, but they *are* major headwinds. We are having trouble building out just a charger network; waiting for a swapping network would delay things by at least 10 years or more.

Only the first one is guaranteed to be solved, more or less on its own. In 5-10 years we can strike it from the list. The last one is probably the next easiest, but I expect it will take at least 10 years for all the legal difficulties to wind their way through courts.

The middle two are tough, though. As charging times keep coming down and the ability to charge at home keeps increasing, the use case for swapping gets smaller and smaller. Perhaps it will end up being a thing in some bigger cities, but it will probably never be the standard.

Bonus Reason: Because of all of the previous reasons, it is less expensive (and makes the car lighter and safer) to make the batteries part of the structure. So unless someone can quickly solve all those earlier points, the carmakers are going to all gravitate towards swapping being physically impossible. This reduces the use case for creating a swapping system and the whole idea simply collapses in on itself.