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Comment by tbabb | Hacker News Reader

What was the requirement that was satisfied by the battery swap?

California wrote an idiotic tax credit that gave +tax credits to vehicles that demonstrated a capacity to charge in under X minutes. Elon Musk shows off a battery swap demo on stage to "prove" it, and then grabbed the tax credit.

Then he threw away the battery swap demo and never talked about it again.

Its a combination of idiotic governance + a conman / liar at work. The government tax credit is a decent idea to spur innovation, but only if the government actually rewards money correctly. If it gives out money too freely, then the companies will just eat the government's face... they'll take the money but never actually develop the technology.

That's about 1/3 of the story of the battery swap experiment. Tesla put engineering behind making the battery easily removable in all Model S cars, but actual customers (like me) didn't want to use battery swaps. I'd rather supercharge.

p.s. can you stop name-calling?

Not true, they did have a real battery swap station just off i-5 (between SF and LA) near Kettleman City. I don't think many people used it, however.

That was only open to select members and required a reservation. It never was a viable model, or even open to public service.

And we all know that swapping $15,000 batteries out for free ain't a valid business model and never will be a valid business model. It was a project designed to maximize the California incentives and minimize the costs to Tesla for obtaining that money.

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I hope that the citizens of California learned their lesson. But even if they refuse to learn, I've learned very much from that episode.

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