Comment by bb611 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bb611 | Hacker News Reader

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I did read your articles, and didn't find them particularly compelling. Technology failures happen all the time, the fact that Tesla wasn't successful at rolling out battery swap but was successful with superchargers seems pretty unplanned, given the engineering time spent on the system and the constraints this all put on the chassis.

Tesla hasn't released anything on their own, but the battery swap patent is now public: https://electrek.co/2016/10/25/teslas-battery-swapping-magic...

They essentially designed and built an industrial robot, R&D costs for which easily range into 8 digits.

This looks like a failed good faith effort to me. They thought they had something (as did much of the rest of the car industry), turned out they were wrong and they're cutting their losses.

Neither I nor the article is arguing that Tesla's entire battery swap program was just a scheme to get tax incentives. It likely was good faith, and there may have been good reasons for Tesla to end the program.

The point is that that particular swap station was not in good faith, and therefore it's (predictable) non-use gives you no additional data about the public's demand for swapping. (You may, of course, infer something from the fact that Tesla doesn't think it's viable.)

It has to do with the way the incentive structure is set up: there is tax credit of order $1,000 per vehicle if the vehicle has battery swap capabilities, which necessitates "available" infrastructure. If Tesla invested huge in battery swap tech and then decided it wasn't going to work, they still have massive incentives to open up a single, highly inconvenient swap station in order to recoup part of their investment through the tax incentive.

That particular swap station was a great one if you expected lines at the superchargers between LA and SF, which is one of the most-used routes and has a charger that's halfway. As a Tesla driver that travels that route, I'd happily pay $50 or $80 to know that I would have more reliable timing on the day before Thanksgiving. However, I usually return up 101 to do some wine tasting.

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