Haha, so here's my reasoning:
Tesla just announced a MASSIVE supercharger rollout. Why in the world would they do that and then add swapping? That's too redundant. Don't say "well some of those dots will be swapping stations". No they won't. Some poor smuck buys a 60 and pays 2k extra because of that grey dot near him will have a fit if they don't build a supercharger there. Tesla is not going to open themselves up to a lawsuit by lying to customers and shareholders about the supercharger locations.
Don't try "they will put the swap stations at service centers and cities". That doesn't make any sense. If I was traveling from LA to Vegas, why would I swap my battery in LA? That doesn't get me to Vegas.
Elon talked about his upcoming road trip with his kids. He could have said "we will soon have a way to travel across the country as quickly as any gas car". Instead he made it a point to say he was going to route his trip with the supercharger network (using the lightning bolts on the screen). If swapping were coming, he would have used ambiguous language. He was clearly talking about supercharging.
Fact: new superchargers come with longer cables. Why? I can't think of a single credible explanation for that except they may need to stretch to somewhere other than the tail light port (btw, I don't believe the second port will be the opposite side tail light. I think both ports will be on the same side. That way you can walk by the cars while they are charging and not have to duck under a cable. Gas cars with 2 tanks have both caps on the same side for that very reason)
Elon just announced that each supercharger box will now have 4 plugs instead of 2. Hmmmm....that's interesting. So if Harris Ranch has 5 boxes, that means they will have 20 parking spots? I don't think that real estate is going to scale like that.
Elon and Javier both used the term "recharge". I don't recharge my phone by swapping batteries. Unless they are intentionally trying to mislead us, that language indicates a charging solution.
Yip. I'm yet to see a coherent argument about
why I want to sometimes charge and sometimes exchange at a co-located battery exchange/supercharger spot. Other than just "well, charge is free, exchange is not". Ok - then so show me a plausible fee structure for such an exchange program that will create balanced usage. And THEN show me how you will convince the media to not run article after article after article that simply takes that amount and multiply it by the number of miles you drive per year to show a "True cost of ownership of a Model S".
If you want to market free charging, you better make sure it's free in every conceivable way or alternatively that message will get spun faster than a Model S can get to 60mph.
I agree with the language - especially Javier's.
One more argument that I like to add to those:
[EDIT: I already had this above in this thread. Sorry - didn't realize it's the same thread]:
Tesla is getting supercharger real estate for rent-free or close to it (Elon's words today at the meeting). The reason for that is that it's essentially just a conversion of existing parking spaces, and it serves to draw high-income customers to the businesses surrounding it. Elon didn't even use the word 'reserved parking' - he just called it 'priority parking'. So it's really a no-loss model for business. If they're out of other parking spaces, additional visitors will just start filling the Tesla spots. (I know we will be annoyed by that, but you can see from the structure owner's perspective that they could reason that way).
Next is - if you're at a SuperCharger, you're by definition on a road trip. So even if you only need to charge for 5 or 10 minutes, you're probably still going to get out anyway and go into those shops. This is even better than the gas station convenience store model, since you're not technically allowed to leave the pump while pumping. (I'm sure there is someone who follows this law somewhere - same person who leaves the tags on his mattress...)
HOWEVER, if you're going to exchange, it
has to be a drive-through experience. Charging is a parallel experience that you can split over a bunch of parking spots, and Tesla anyway has to oversize it to get good solar coverage. Battery exchange on the other hands means you have to either drive through or at least stay close to the car during the exchange, since cars will be served one after the other and you can't block the exchange bot.
That means you're in the car anyway, and you're already driving. So you'll most likely just drive off. Sure, after the exchange you could still park and go into the business, but if you're going to stop anyway, why did you do a (paid for) battery exchange in the first place? So now you've spent 5 to 10 minutes to do the exchange and re-park (worse if you were second or third in line), and then only do you go into the business. In that case you might as well have just grabbed a free charge to start off with.
So since the battery exchangers are by definition not going to frequent the business, the parking lot owner isn't going to give up those spots near the parking structure for free. He's going to want rent. Lots of it.
If Gen III is a success and Tesla sells 500k vehicles per year, they'll need about 25'000 SuperChargers locations to support them (just from a solar perspective). No WAY he'll create a model that will require Tesla to pay rent on all of those.
- - - Updated - - -
I think on the order of 25% will be swap-enabled
Then it does not fit with his 'anywhere in the country' part of his tweet. If you have 100% coverage of Superchargers it barely accomplishes that. 25% definitely does not.
