Quote:
Originally Posted by Red Bread
No, but do you get your money back when you go back to the same gas station with an empty tank? You also get your original battery back fully charged, so it's the equivalent of two full fill ups.
I generally take road trips with my wife, who would gladly spend 20 minutes at every gas stop, so the regular Supercharger setup would work fine for me, but being able to pay for the convenience of a quick battery swap, for less than filling a similar car's gas tank, does certainly appeal. I think Tesla is so far out ahead of everyone else on this front that the contrast of adding 330 pounds to a car and only including a 2.5 gallon tank with a best case additional 80 mile range is just laughable.
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Okay, so let's not get a head of ourselves here. It's great that Tesla plans on some stations to provide fast swap capability in the near term, but it will take years and billions of dollars to achieve a network of these types of stations that will allow range-anxiety-free Tesla electric car travel across the entire nation (not just select highly traveled corridors). I have no doubt Tesla has the engineering prowess to make all of this work, but like all machines, it will never be trouble free. It will take years to make this a viable alternative to ICE travel that already has 3-minute/400-mile travel recharging.
And I'm not sure it is economically viable for one car company to support such a nationwide infrastructure. Now if Elon's battery design becomes a standard and allows other manufacturers to use the design (with a low royalty cost), then maybe it will work. But then it would stifle design innovation as the Tesla's battery pack pretty much defines the platform of the car. Hopefully the forethought of using the robotic battery swapping system for other battery configurations (yet to be designed BTW) has been engineered into the design.
It's so much fun to discuss all this stuff...