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Comment by CptJamesCook | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad the superchargers will no longer be free for new Tesla owners. I wish they would charge existing Tesla owners for the power as well.

I went to charge my Model X at the Whole Foods in Menlo Park on Friday night, because mine was broken. I waited for over 40 minutes for other people using the chargers to leave.

I'd much rather pay a market rate for the power from Tesla and have the units open when I need them, than take the chance of waiting for hours because people are clogging the spots to get free power.

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Correct me if I'm mistaken, but even if it becomes a paid service, you might still have to wait for other paying customers to leave? Unless right now there is a problem of people taking their sweet (inconsiderate) time in the parking spot since they are not getting charged?

If that is the case, some HN posters had an interesting theory: once some customers start paying, they might feel entitled to stay at a charging station even longer (which would not fix your issue of waiting forever to access it).

Hope your charger gets fixed soon!

To solve that problem Tesla recently introduced a Supercharger idle fee https://www.tesla.com/blog/improving-supercharger-availabili...

This will be a great social experiment...even more so when there are 500k Model 3s around, competing with the Model S/X crowd for the same superchargers.

Paying $10 for an extra 20 mins to finish their coffee may be worth it to someone in a $100k Model S, less likely for a $40k Model 3...

Maybe Tesla should consider the following: All the time passed the point your battery is charged is deducted from you next charging session.

For example: Your battery charges in 30 minutes, but you stay at the station for an hour (30 minutes of charging + 30 minutes of idling). Next time you go to a charging station you get penalized for a certain amount of time (percentage of you idle time). Of course, this will probably never happen, but it would get the point across!

> Unless right now there is a problem of people taking their sweet (inconsiderate) time in the parking spot since they are not getting charged?

Per r/teslamotors that seems to be the bigger issue. Once a vehicle is charged people don't move it promptly because they have no incentive to do so.

Isn't that the case at a gas station too?

As another commenter pointed out, gas fuel times are so short that you typically don't wander off far. Additionally, there are some safety concerns around leaving the fuel hose attached when you're not there.

At the Santana row shopping mall in San Jose people pretty much just use them as parking spots.

I get the sense that the charging stations are being used by people who would charge at home, but instead drive to Menlo Park to save the $10-$20 in electricity. I could be wrong, though.

>I waited for over 40 minutes for other people using the chargers to leave.

And yet "free Supercharging for life!" was advertised as a major advantage for owning a Tesla.

I agree, this is the most realistic option. If waits are long with 0.5% market share, how bad would it be with their expected 500,000 cars on the road over the next couple years?

Well I mean, presumably as they sell more cars and their market share goes up, they'd also continue to build more and more superchargers.

They gave up on the idea of automated battery swap stations, right? It's a shame; I thought they were a great idea, but perhaps there's good reasons why they can't work in reality.

They gave up on them because people didn't use the only one they ever ran: http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/teslas-battery-swap-is-dead/

Realistically, it seems likely that there just wasn't enough demand among existing Tesla owners for that use case. If/When Tesla gets more market share, that could very well change. My understanding is that they are still engineering all their chassis to support the fast swap technology, so they haven't entirely trashed the idea.

No, that charging station was purposefully built and run to make it extremely inconvenient in order to discourage use. It was just built to obtain a tax incentive.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2015/0312/Tesla-ba...

http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-battery...

There may be good reasons that swappable batteries don't make sense, but interest data gathered from this station doesn't contribute.

I'm sure the tax credits play into the decision to build the station, but its position was intended to allow people to swap batteries for the trip from SoCal to SF, which otherwise requires a fair amount of time at a charger. For that it's pretty perfect, it's just that Tesla users apparently don't find it worth using. I do think that's pretty clear and useful data, and it's clearly informed their current efforts (i.e. no new battery stations).

Did you read the articles? Even if it's in the world's most convenient location, this can be outweighed by high prices, slow (non-automated) swapping, and large inconveniences from forcing people to schedule ahead.

> They must make an appointment in advance to get their pack swapped, and they will pay a fee said to be roughly equivalent to the cost of a full tank of gasoline--perhaps $50?

> And the swapping process isn't fully automated, unlike the one supposedly presented by Musk 21 months ago.

> The company never released details on how that system worked, or answered questions on how the battery's liquid-cooling system could be disconnected and reconnected, and any lost coolant replaced, within a 90-second swap.

> But the slow pace of the single swap station differs markedly from the fast-growing Supercharger network, where any Tesla owner can drive up, charge for 20 to 40 minutes, and drive away with a battery recharged to about 80 percent of capacity.

So maybe you save 20 minutes on net, but it costs $50 and you have to sign up a week in advance. Why would anyone use it?

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.

One big reason is people want their original battery back after swapping. We have all been trained that we are taking care of our batteries on phones or AA at home. The tesla should take care of batteries and they are basically swappable without issue. But this isn't how anyone thinks of their battery.

I don't know if they gave up on it, or if it's simply not ready for primetime and/or the market isn't currently open to the idea of battery sharing.

Once marketshare increases, car sharing increases, etc., and people become more accustomed to sharing property (and charging becomes the norm for everyone), the convenience of a 3 minute battery swap will likely win over - and Tesla will be ready to roll out their tech.

It's still free if you bought yours. They will keep this lifetime free thing going if you buy before January 15th. Only 2 more days! Mine is free forever. They just keep adding cool stuff making me wanting to buy a new one.

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