Do you think the Gigafactory will enable that just due to sheer production capacity? Because right now Tesla seems to have zero interest in offering upgrades for classic cars. And if they ever change the battery form factor making it incompatible with the older cars, then I would say the chances of being able to upgrade a battery on a 10 or more year old car from Tesla go to zero.
Maybe 3rd parties will pick up the market.
I think the overall drivers will be different for replacement for end-of-life batteries than it it is for performance/capacity upgrades.
Replacing EOL packs will:
- Have large demand: There are 100K's of cars today that will reach this state within a few years of each other in the future. There will be millions soon.
- Be necessary: Cars will become increasingly unusable without them.
- Have a PR impact: Manufacturers won't want the perception the car has to be "thrown away", when the HV pack wears out
- Become increasingly plausible: Once battery manufacturing capacity catches up (at least somewhat) with demand, the logistics of manufacturing replacement packs is less problematic
So I suspects manufacturers will allow for it to some degree (although I'm sure they'd be happy to sell you a new car vehicle instead), but I also expect a 3rd-party industry will crop up as well...
Last edited: