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Comment by russelluresti | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing about the wait time that everyone keeps talking about is that, apparently, no one actually cares about waiting.

Tesla piloted their battery swap program over a year ago, where you could swap out your battery for a fully charged one in under 2 minutes. You'd get all your range back faster than you could refuel a gas car.

Want to know what happened? No one used it. Because no one cares about refueling in under 5 minutes if a supercharge station takes 15 - 30 or you can just plug in at home. It's literally not a thing people (in general) care about.

I don't know how to phrase this any other way. NO. ONE. CARES.

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Haha. Yes. You could swap your battery in under two minutes.

If: you had pre-made an appointment, first.

And: you paid to use it.

And: you ignored the fact that the pilot program was only in one location, and that location was meant solely to service SF-LA drivers on I-5, but was 15 miles from the freeway, so 2 minutes, plus a 45 minute round trip).

And: you ignored the chargers across the street from the battery swap program.

This is pretty disingenuous. If I was Elon Musk and I wanted to prove how little people "cared" about the time of a "2 minute battery swap", all of the above variables are pretty much how I'd set my pilot program for guaranteed failure.

Source: http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/teslas-battery-swap-is-dead/

Were the batteries brand new? Were the battery swap stations everywhere that had a supercharger? Did everyone know about it? It seems like there are possibly some other explanations than people didn't care about the recharge wait. I know I wouldn't swap out my known good batteries for some dodgy unknown batteries from the last Tesla that went through here just for convenience, but that wouldn't mean that I didn't care about the inconvenience..

See my comments. It almost seems designed to fail, to "prove" how preferable supercharging is.

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