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Tesla discontinued battery swap because people do prefer to spend 1/2 hour charging, even when traveling with sleeping children.

Note that this is only an issue for long-distance travel; for day-to-day driving, most people will charge in their garage, their apartment's garage, or at a street-side charger.

Well, there was one battery swap station, and you had to book it and pay for it. Not exactly encouraging.

Who is going to scale the street-side charger network? In Europe, a lot of cars are parked outdoors during the night. In smaller towns, parking spots around residential areas aren't even painted.

Many other cars are parked in shared garages that don't guarantee one plug per car. I guess garage owners could install the chargers (but that would be hundreds of kW if electric cars were really commonplace---that is expensive infrastructure) and meters, but still it's hard to reach critical mass.

I'm not sure how to reply, given that the things you say are hard are beginning to happen already.

In a handful of big metropolitan areas. Good luck doing that throughout multiple continents. Most European countries are still on the order of magnitude of 1000 total EVs sold per year. Growing, sure, but still hardly a serious market penetration.

And I am talking about problems with scaling: "beginning to happen" and "available for everyone who needs it" is not the same as "available for everyone". Installing a dozen chargers, unused most of the time, in a shopping mall's 1000-car parking lot is not the same as installing a few hundred chargers in a multistorey parking downtown that previously only needed to power some neons.

Your error seems to be that you insist on seeing a big-bang overnight solution that works for Everyone(tm). That never happens.

There are millions of people in Europe who has a private garage/carport/parking spot and can afford to install a charger there, and who lives within round trip battery capacity of where they need to go. Millions more who don't, but whose employers can be convinced to install chargers. That's more than enough for the kind of critical mass where apartment block landlords, employers and shopping centre parking lots will start to install chargers, not for novelty or green credentials, but for naked self interest. It's not overnight, but it will be very quick.

"Tesla discontinued battery swap because people do prefer to spend 1/2 hour charging, even when traveling with sleeping children."

That was set up to fail.

There was only one battery swap station. It was aimed at people commuting between LA and SF. Except:

- you had to book in advance to use it

- you had to pay a fee to use it

- it was set up across the street from a Tesla Supercharger

- despite ostensibly being for the commute between those cities, it was actually 15 miles away from the freeway, making for a significant detour

If I was Elon Musk and wanted to demonstrate how people would much rather use charging stations than any kind of battery swap program, I think the above is a pretty good example of how I'd set up my battery swap program (for failure).

15 miles from the freeway? Try less than a mile from I-5: https://goo.gl/maps/bDJACbS8XNE2

As a Tesla owner, I didn't think all of the past back-and-forth about the swap station in blogs was that interesting. I eat dinner in Harris Ranch.

Battery swap doesn't really scale. It's hard to imagine battery swap stations being set up wherever you could conceivably need one, with all the associated infrastructure and labor costs, just so you can swap a battery in 10 minutes rather than supercharge in 30.

And remember, chargers of the future will be faster still. CCS has been designed to scale to at least 300kW.

Yeah, it definitely seemed like it was too complicated of a process to be able to be anyone near as simple as recharging or refueling is.

From first principles, a battery swap station seems to add just one relatively isolated component to an existing charge station... they would use the same power infrastructure, the same authorization protocols, the same locations...

The economics completely change with fleet vehicles (aka, self driving taxis). Instead of taking an entire car out of commission for half an hour, you can just replace the battery in 1 minute and keep the car on the road and earning money. Because both the car and battery swap station is owned by the same company, there's no arbitrage between trading an old, worn out battery and a new battery and fleet cars can be designed alongside the swap station to make the entire process entirely automated.

But the big plus is that if you design a fleet system around battery swap, you can get away with puny batteries on the vehicles. A battery sufficient for 1 - 2 hours of city driving is optimal which saves both cost and weight for the vehicles. Instead of relying on expensive, power dense advanced Lithium batteries, you can shove cheap batteries into the thing, scatter the entire city with drive-thru swap stations and drive the cost of transportation way down.

While that's true, I think you can also have taxis stop at charging stations more often when they aren't in use. Particularly if you have self-driving taxis, you're not bothering passengers by doing that. You could even have trucks with large batteries which act as mobile charging stations.

i strongly disagree with your thesis that a 1-2 hour long driving capacity sized-battery is optimal. If you have an electric car, being able to not constantly worry about whether you can drive home is far more important than the cost of recharging. its so cheap it almost doesn't matter, like $10 for an 85kwh tesla. not worrying about running out of power is the big value.

Yes, for individually owned cars, range anxiety is a real thing. I'm talking about electric taxis which shuttle multiple people around on short trips throughout the day.

I believe that battery swap was effectively a scam. There was some arbitrary full recharge time that had to be met to access some rebate program, and Tesla did exactly as much as they needed to do to meet the terms and then stopped.

Electric cars are the future, and Tesla's are cool, so don't take this as a negative. The complexity of battery swapping was in ownership of the batteries, not in the physical swapping. It maybe makes sense for big taxi firms, but not for standard consumers.

edit: adding a link with some corroboration since I got downvoted: http://insideevs.com/carb-zev-program-changes-tesla-takes-la...

Tesla is already beginning to end free charging. Any car ordered after 31/12/2016 will be limited to 400 kWh (~1000 miles) of free charging per year, after that you have to pay. 1000 miles is around 10% of the distance most cars go in a year. And reserved != ordered, so this limit applies to all Model 3s.

> 1000 miles is around 10% of the distance most cars go in a year.

Comparing usage of the supercharger network to the total amount driven by the car in a year doesn't make much sense. You only need the supercharger network when going a long distance; otherwise, you can charge at home or perhaps at work.

Exactly. But when it's free, people do crazy things like queue for half an hour to charge at a supercharger even though they could easily charge at home. I think this is the primary motivation of the new rules, to restrict supercharger use to those actually needing it.

I heard (secondhand info and all that) that there's some taxi startup somewhere that is using all Teslas, but instead of approaching Tesla about installing superchargers for their own use[1], they decided to just use the existing public superchargers, tying them up and creating long delays for anyone else who wants to use them. So it seems that this new rule is meant to combat that type of behavior.

[1] Apparently companies can approach Tesla about installing their own private superchargers, though I don't know the details.

They're 'Tesloop', based in LA. I've seen complaints on the Tesla forums from LA area Tesla owners about how they keep hogging up the chargers. E.g Charging for Supercharging Won't Deter Local Fleet Operators

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/5bonff/chargin...

"The charging time itself is an issue"

I've thought about this, and I disagree. I think driving habits - and fueling stations - will simply change along with it. Truck stops are especially experienced with this. Older pumps can take a good while to fill the tanks. Improvements were made so they are faster, but they are still slow compared to cars. Hence the tendency to have a bit of shopping and food at a good number of fueling stations.

For passenger cars, this can turn into a number of things. Entertainment places, coffee shops, and the like fit in well here - as do fast food with play areas and other such things.

This will take time, but I think it's right. If you are charging your car overnight, the only time you'll need to charge mid-trip is on long-distance trips. If you're driving 10 hrs, you'll need to take an hour-plus break sometime in the middle of it regardless.

Many people will probably only seldomly need to charge at stations, as they'd probably charge their batteries at home each night. Many office parking places will probably have charging stations as well.

If you're traveling with two kids you certainly don't want to waste half an hour while they're both asleep just to charge the battery... :-)

Supercharging time is almost never wasted. You (and the kids) need a break after 3-4 hours on the road anyway. Quite often, in my experience, the car is recharged and ready to go well before the occupants are!

I don't think you'd ever want to take a road trip with me. One of the big reasons I bought a VW TDI is that I can go for 8+ hours without stopping at all.

I hope you are exaggerating. Otherwise I don't think I want to be on the same highway as you either.

People like you are a hazard on the road. Driver fatigue is a real thing - and saying you can go 8 hours without stopping isn't a testament to how awesome you are - it's a testament to how little you care about others sharing the road with you.

Some people think they have super-human reflexes, or are immune to fatigue, or have trained themselves to task with a phone and driving. Most of these people are wrong. Chances are, you are just an ordinary driver - and there is nothing wrong with that.

I'm more than willing to admit I'm an average driver - and so I will take breaks, or forgo using the phone, or drive slower to compensate for that. Yes, sometimes I do drive poorly (sleep deprived, stressed, or in a rush) - but I'm never going to claim I can go 8 hours without a break. That's going a bit far.

Truck drivers are allowed to drive 8 hours without breaks. I suspect most of them do.

Very few people what to go 8 hours without a break.

Sure but I will want to take a break at the beach, at an attraction, or worst case at a supermarket.

When going from Palm Beach to Orlando, we traded more time on the road for a visit to Cape Canaveral. (Way) more than 30 minutes, but the kids didn't notice neither that nor the 5 minutes stop to fill the tank...

Oh well, at least if there is going to be some kind of valet service around superchargers, it's going to be more healthy than a job filling up tanks.

Absolutely. We're still in the infancy stage of charging infrastructure.

However the time and costs to build them are really pretty small (and will continue to improve with scale). You can easily put them in wherever there is parking and a grid connection.

Businesses, restaurants, malls, hotels, etc, are already starting to figure out that having charging is a great way to attract more customers. We'll see this snowball as market share of EVs grows, and it will get to the point where you can charge at most attractions you'd conceivably want to stop on a long trip.

Tesla's move to PAYG supercharging is also positive for the wider charging industry and should encourage more investment by 3rd-parties.