-Remember the quick battery-swapping system that Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk was so jazzed about just a few months ago? At yesterday’s shareholder meeting in Mountain View, California, the electric car pioneer’s opinion seemed to have cooled considerably.
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In response to a shareholder question regarding Tesla’s single battery-swap station in Harris Ranch, California, Musk had this to say (as transcribed by Sebastian Blanco at Autoblog):
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We have, basically, the LA-to-San Francisco pack swap capability in place, and I believe all Model S owners in the California area have been invited at this point to try it out. And what we’re seeing is a very low take rate for the pack swap station. So we did an initial round of invitations, where we did basically, like, 200 invitations, and I think there were a total of four or five people that wanted to do that, and they all did it just once. So, like, okay, clearly it’s not very popular. And then we said, okay, let’s expand that invitation to all customers, but I would expect that all customers behave roughly like that initial sample group.
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It’s just, people don’t care about pack swap. The Superchargers are fast enough that if you’re driving from LA to San Francisco, and you start a trip at 9 AM, by the time you get to, say, noon, you want to stop, and you want to stretch your legs, hit the restroom, grab a bite to eat, grab a coffee, and be on your way, and by that time, the car is charged and ready to go, and it’s free. So why would you do the pack swap? It doesn’t make much sense.
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We built the pack swap into the car because we weren’t sure if people would want to choose the pack swap or not. We thought people would prefer Supercharging, but we weren’t sure, so that’s why we built the pack swap capability in. And, you know, based on what we’re seeing here, it’s unlikely to be something that’s worth expanding in the future, unless something changes.
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That’s a far cry from Musk’s apparent enthusiasm back in December. At the time, Musk was promising that, with further development, the swap setup could replace a dead battery with a full one faster than you can fill your car’s fuel tank.
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Pack swap now operating in limited beta mode for SF to LA route. Can swap battery faster than visiting a gas station. Tesla blog out soon.
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— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 19, 2014
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Musk seems to blame the low pack swap demand on the superiority of existing Supercharger infrastructure. In a way, he’s correct: With just a lone pack-swap facility, located at the midway point between two large urban areas, it’s not like the average L.A. Tesla driver had ample opportunity to try the new tech. And with the battery swap costing “$60 to $100,” it’s not hard to see why drivers, even those who can afford a $100,000 Tesla, would prefer the free charging of a Supercharger station. Of course, there’s a darker side to this: As Edward Niedermeyer has been doggedly reporting at Daily Kanban, Tesla’s one nearly unused battery-swap facility just happens to make the carmaker eligible for lots of California ZEV credit revenue. So why would Tesla back away from this free ZEV money?
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-2018 expiration of extra CARB ZEV credits for fast refueling is totally coincidental. https://t.co/Ne8IZK3Tvg — E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) June 9, 2015-
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This story originally appeared on roadandtrack.com.
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