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Ask HN: Tesla electric cars: is the business in the battery?

1 points by J_cst ↗ HN
Noticing that Musk dropped the swappable battery model with a very weak reasoning ("people don’t care about pack swap" [0]), and sealed the battery in - like Apple (and others) do with their iPhones - a friend of mine stated that in his opinion the real business was obviously in the batteries. Considering that having a swappable battery may resolve what I consider the main inconvenience of an electric car, namely the charging time, dismissing so lightly the swappable option seems quite odd. What does HN think? Can the total control of the batteries be the real business in electric cars? Thank you

[0] https://insideevs.com/elon-musk-comments-failed-tesla-battery-swap/

7 comments

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haxen
Comparison with smartphones doesn't stand: swapping a phone battery means shelling out cash for a brand new one, done once in several years. Quick-swapping the EV battery means getting another, used one, in a questionable state. Car owners aren't willing to pay dear cash for their own battery, treat it carefully, only to hand it over to a stranger. Batteries, due to their delicate makeup, just aren't a fungible commodity like that.
J_cst
What about not owning the battery but just paying for its usage? ( Please do not read my reply as aggressive / arrogant as I am genuinely interested in hearing your opinion). Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
haxen
Yes, as I wrote the previous comment that stood out as the "obvious fix". However, there are many other hurdles to this model, like handling all the logistics behind the batteries: charging them up, shipping them around as demand requires, manning each station because the physical process of battery swapping is not 100% reliable, and so on. This would cause the costs to rise and there would be far fewer such stations compared to supercharging stations. And people just don't have a problem with stopping for a 20-minute charge.

Then there's the huge showstopper issue of the tragedy of the commons. People would lose the incentive to care for their batteries, they'd charge them to 100%, wouldn't care about their temperature, would do all kinds of abuse and then go for a replacement. This goes back to the initial argument of batteries not being as fungible as, say, gas.

J_cst
Thank for sharing your opinion, really appreciated.
natch
Not figured in to your analysis is the fact that the battery pack assembly has become a structural element of the car design in many cases now. It’s providing stiffness and strength, and making it removable would take away the benefits of that, which would be a high price to pay because some replacement structure would be required, adding more weight and bulk to the car design.
J_cst
Isn't that the stiffness is given by the battery pack _enclosure_? This means that in a swappable option you may not need it. (Genuine question).
natch
Good question... I’m sure there would be some extra weight with effectively two enclosures in that case but maybe it could be made to work... would be nice imho.