The biggest issue with electric vehicles is the recharge time. Society is accustomed to stopping at a gas station, filling the tank in a few minutes, and driving another few hundred miles. Electric doesn’t work that way — yet. One way to bypass this issue is rather than wait for your batteries to recharge, simply drop your depleted battery into charger, install a freshly charged battery, and zoom off into the sunset. It’s all the speed and convenience of a gas station fill-up in an electric world.

Of course, one of the main issues with this is every manufacturer has a different battery design and standard — until now. Motorcyclist reports that Yamaha, Honda, KTM, and Piaggio have signed an agreement to form the Swappable Batteries Motorcycle Consortium, which will help and promote the establishment of common standards for vehicle batteries across corporate boundaries.

This is absolutely crucial if swappable batteries are to succeed. There are many different standards out there right now, both for charging as well as the batteries themselves. Seeing a few big companies jump on board with this idea is encouraging. Standardization to allow swappable batteries makes it easier for manufacturers to sell us on electric vehicles, because they become much easier and more practical to use. No more range anxiety. Just pull into a battery swap shop just like you use a gas station now, swap batteries, and keep going. At that point, it doesn’t matter if the batteries take a few hours to charge. They’ll just sit there, charge, and go right back into someone else’s vehicle afterward. It’ll work great, as long as the electrical infrastructure can handle it. (Are you listening, Texas?)