Musk: No Interest In Tesla Battery Swap Facility From Consumers
How many Tesla owners have paid a visit to the automaker’s sole battery-swap station in the world? Not enough to keep the experiment going.
During Tesla’s annual shareholders meeting Tuesday, CEO Elon Musk responded to a question regarding accessibility to the facility on the grounds of the automaker’s Supercharger station in Harris Ranch, Calif. between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The answer, Autoblog reports, may be a sign Musk won’t commit to another such facility ever again:
It’s just, people don’t care about pack swap. The Superchargers are fast enough that if you’re driving from LA to San Francisco, and you start a trip at 9 a.m., by the time you get to, say, noon, you want to stop, and you want to stretch your legs, hit the restroom, grab a bite to eat, grab a coffee, and be on your way, and by that time, the car is charged and ready to go, and it’s free. So, it’s like, why would you do the pack swap? It doesn’t make much sense.
The swap program was originally a pilot involving 200 invited owners in the area. Of those, Musk says only four or five went through the process, and only once. He adds the program was extended to all Tesla owners, but believes few will ever take up the offer.
In addition to its original intent, the swap facility also served as a California ZEV credit booster for the automaker. With the low turnout, however, Tesla won’t be gaining much in the way of those credits prior to 2018, when the scheme is set to change again.
[Photo credit: Tesla/ Facebook]
Seattle-based writer, blogger, and photographer for many a publication. Born in Louisville. Raised in Kansas. Where I lay my head is home.
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Better Place learned this lesson the hard way, and went out of business. Battery swapping can only work if all mfrs used a universal battery pack. Then you’d have common hardware, and the critical mass of customers to make a viable business case. But even then, widespread quick charging makes battery swapping a moot option. It's a very important question for Tesla, because abandoning the ability to battery swap could open up a lot of design flexibility for future products.
Running this through the Corporate Speak Translator(TM) produces this statement: "I want to shut down the Harris Ranch battery swap station. If CARB won't give us the ZEV credits that it used to, then there's no point."
The level of cynicism from the B&B is hilarious sometimes. I wonder if it's my not being an american that causes me not to look at everything through pessimist eyes? Tesla tried something new, in a market of newness. People didn't use it. Probably because it isn't better than free - 45 minutes to fill up for free is a pretty good deal, and I applaud Tesla for hedging their bets. After all, it's not like they have limiteless funds to try every option - they need to focus on what consumers want and what will work, and that means that *gasp* sometimes things will turn out to not be popular or necessary. But no, please, it's more fun to believe that in fact Tesla knows everything and every decision was carefully planned around snowing people over as much as possible. ;)