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Tesla to lay off everyone working on Superchargers, new vehicles
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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I've said before that the supercharger network is their most important long term asset. They opened up their plug standard, other manufacturers are jumping on board, and they have the largest network that supports all those new EVs.
Only problem is that it's boring, and Elon doesn't like boring. So now here we are.
What really baffles me is why he totally ghosted his battery swap station idea. That completely solves the range and charging time issue all in one fell swoop. Demonstrated it on stage even. Guessing it either wasn’t profitable enough for him, not s3xy enough, or he wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to scale it up.
He announced it as part of a tax break scam, then let the project die.
There's been some discussion over the years that Tesla never seriously tried to make the battery swap work, that they did it to claim subsidies from California which they subsequently never returned to the taxpayers.
what a classic
Wow - didn’t hear that but sounds like something he would do.
Nio has seemingly been successful with battery swap stations in their cars, so luckily the concept hasn't been completely abandoned.
Tom Scott trying it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w
I would love for a Nio style battery swap to make it to the U.S. It just makes sense.
And for those saying they don't want some janky battery that's been through a bunch of cycles. If you have battery swap and access to a station, there's not a lot of incentive to charge at home since the swap stations do it. The max battery life for most EVs is around 10 years. After that, a total replacement is $$$. With the swap system, you have a moderately used battery forever. If it doesn't hold charge well, just go back to the swap station and get another one.
I just got back from a trip to Southern California. Every Electrify America L3 station was busy and had a waiting line. Someone said it was normal and many stations were busy until 3-4am. Turns out anyone living in an apartment or condo highrise had to charge at these stations. It used up 2-3 hours of their day just to charge up. Everyone in line said they hated it and many said they regretted getting EVs.
A swap station would do brisk business and roll them in and out in 5m.
Crazy. I could repeat this with every sentence being the opposite. Let me try ….
—-
I would ~~love~~ hate for a Nio style battery swap to make it to the U.S. It just makes no sense.
And for those saying they don’t want to have yet another middleman, another huge industry of unnecessary infrastructure, always have to visit a refueling station. If you charge at home, there’s not a lot of incentive to battery swap even if you have access to a station. The typical battery life for most EVs is over 10 years and getting longer as batteries improve so you’d need at most one replacement for any practical life of the vehicle, vs swapping means you never own your battery yet pay over and over: $$$. With charge at home , you have a moderately used battery that will last longer than most people own their vehicle, you’ll always have a full charge, and never have to visit a local refueling station again. It’s very unlikely that a battery won’t charge well, given the predictability of chemistry and fewer moving parts.
A couple months ago, I got back from a trip to Northern New England. The only Tesla Supercharger station I tried had plenty of available chargers in perfect working order and no waiting. Someone said it was normal and many stations were very convenient . Turns out these stations are available even in many small cities and towns, convenient to refueling on road trips. It used less than 30 minutes of my day just to charge up for the drive back, and I didn’t mind walking around the attached shopping center . There wasn’t anyone in line to ask about any frustrations or regrets they may have about getting EVs.
A swap station is an unnecessary distraction to electrified transportation. We’d have to build out a huge unnecessary industry of middlemen, rather than take advantage of our existing buildout of electricity everywhere, would not own our own batteries, and vehicles would be less efficiently designed, having to have standardized removable batteries in one place, rather than integrated into the frame of the vehicle
Notice that I said Electrify America. A lot of the Tesla charging stations did have room, mainly because the software routes people to available stations.
Non-Tesla car companies are making matters worse by piling onto EA and giving away 2-3 years of free L2/L3 charging. That creates incentive to just go there. Many people don't have Teslas, nor can they charge at home. Those all go to EA and create 2 hour wait times.
The Tesla charging experience is one of their key advantages. However, that's going to change once they open it up to all cars, which they are. OTOH, Musk is reportered to have fired the whole charging station team, so maybe it won't happen.
Replaceable batteries swapped in 5m makes for a good user experience. Nothing we've said here changes that fact.
Exactly.
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I dont want your shitty old battery.
That is why.
I don't want to rent the battery in my car.
That is why.
It's not that good of an idea in the long run. It was attractive when EVs struggled to have 100mi range and L3 chargers didn't exist. Once batteries got good enough to push 300-400mi and there's plenty of L3 chargers around, it's just not necessary. The range will outlast your bladder.
That's on top of what others have mentioned about how they can get abused. You'll never know if the new battery you're getting is good. Or if the charge station tests it and find it's junk, then they have to do something with it, which increases their costs.
I disagree. I know cross country road trips isn’t the norm for most, but at the moment, it burns an hour (at least on my car) to recharge if you need to during the middle of a trip that out-distances your car’s range. A quick battery swap would solve that and give you the same ease/downtime as filling up at a gas station. I’d think some people have a hard time swallowing having to wait an hour to fill up if they’re trying to get somewhere.
10-80% charge time is in the range of 20 minutes. EVs already exist that will get you 4 hours of driving on that. Yes, even in the cold.
This isn't as big a problem in practice as it's made out to be.
I think there are actual longer term mechanical and safety issues with it. I don't think the idea was quite ready for prime time just yet.
I'm not sure I'd want to be swapping my battery out like a propane tank. Not everyone would follow charging recommendations, etc.
I think the battery swap is more like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w
No need to worry about pervious owners or anything. The system charges and maintains the bank of batteries you swap with.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=hNZy603as5w
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Point remains you roll off the lot with a car that you paid a lot of money for and a lot of that is for that fresh new battery. Then you promptly go out and maybe get a pack with over a thousand cycles on it. Doesn't matter how well the charge controlling and battery care is, batteries do wear out, and if you paid for the battery, it's a raw deal that you likely get stuck with an older battery.
Question is what happens if your battery fails, is the swap station going to happily come out and give you a new battery? This might work if the battery is a lease, but that changes the dynamics of the initial purchase significantly.
Pay for the car and subscribe to the batteries sounds like a CEO's wet dream.
You’re only stuck with the old battery until the next time you swap it out though? Could also remove the need to have charging stations all over the place - just use the gas station model which has been working well for a long time - no need to charge at home or in some random mall parking lot. Just pull into a swap station, get a newly charged battery (for which there should be some safety and quality standards put in place), and leave 5 minutes later.
I think you're still misunderstanding how this would work. So this battery swap setup is like the equivalent of going to the gas station. Basically, when your battery is close to being dead, you head to this place and get a fully charged battery. So it doesn't matter that the battery is used, you just keeping swapping batteries out when you need it. Sure it would be annoying to know that when you bought the car, it came with a fresh battery that would get swapped out with an older battery, but you would have bought the car to get into the swapping system since this is mainly for folks that can't do charging at home.
Elon doesn't care about profit... See X Elon does care about sexy Elon is not the one who has to figure out anything.
So I guess it's no 2. He didn't get the feels for it.
That can't be right. He does have a boring company.
But that's cool because the company name is a elementary school level word play, exactly the kind Musk likes. Also the company is about digging holes and everyone in kindergarten knows how cool digging is.
You can never forget that we're dealing with a person whose emotional aptitude is the equivalent of a child.
I thought the Boring Company was more about pretending to want to dig holes to stifle public transit in order to bolster EV sales... Am I mistaken?
Self fulfilling prophecy that the company seems to have stopped doing stuff. He found it boring and it is failing.
Their rare "completed" projects are utter embarrassments.
It was attached to the hyperloop, right? Which itself doesn't seem to be anything more than a ploy to delay/kill California high speed rail.
It succeeded exactly as much as it dared to hope. California rail does seem to be over the hump at this point, but it took an extra decade to get there.
funny considering how fucking boring he and his ideas tend to be
It’s so unexpected: charging should be steady, reliable, predictable income for the foreseeable future, no matter whose BEVs are most popular. They dominate supercharging in the US at the moment, but rapid buildout means someone else has a chance. Don’t they want to lock in this market?
I guess I assume it’s a profitable market , independent of vehicle sales. I wonder if that’s true
I wonder if they miscalculated the install + maintenance cost vs the charging fee they're giving customers. Like if it's not balanced correctly they could be losing money on each charging station. Maybe the stations require more maintenance than they anticipated?
That seems like a super basic thing to do if you're running the business, but so much of the initial rollout was about availability and low cost and do-it-now that maybe that was a secondary concern or they thought there'd be higher adoption by now. It also seems like a simple fix, raise charging prices and say why. But maybe either the discrepancy is too big or they're worried about customer/media backlash.
Or maybe it's another example of "move fast and break things" running into the real world and not being viable.
That seems to be the case with many of the brands of public charging stations.
There are often more plugs out of service or operating at lower than rated capacity than there are fully working ones.
The startup cost on their charger stations is pretty high and they typically have a deal with land owners to have them installed, so I doubt they hit break even for years on one bank.
They were aggressive in putting up charging areas to ease the hurdle of charging for potential customers when they were the only viable BEV and sales have slumped pretty badly now, so spending more on chargers at this point is financially unwise. With charger competition ramping up they are not in a great place for the financial aggression needed to have the chargers pay off in any timespan with limited income from car sales.
If they had been of the mindset to corner the charging market, instead of driving sales of their vehicles, they would have had an entirely different strategy and could have had a great steady income off chargers.
I know. The SC network and plug could make Tesla the new "Standard Oil" of the 21rst, (and a half!) Century. It could be far more valuable over the long term than that stupid truck.