Tesla might pull the plug on battery swap tech: “Superchargers are fast enough”

Tesla's battery swap tech, which allows Model S owners to switch out their depleted battery pack in just 90 seconds, could be dead on arrival. At the company's annual shareholder meeting yesterday, Elon Musk told an investor that "people don't care about pack swap" and that battery swapping is "unlikely to be something that's worth expanding in the future, unless something changes."

After teasing us way back in summer 2013, Tesla finally started offering invite-only pack swaps at a single Supercharging station in California in December 2014. While Supercharging is free, Tesla planned to charge "slightly less than a full tank of gasoline for a premium sedan" for a battery swap. To back-seat Tesla owners and journalists, battery swapping sounded like a good way of cutting down recharge time (a full Supercharge takes 75 minutes)—but according to Musk, actual Model S owners aren't so keen:

So we did an initial round of invitations, where we did like 200 invitations, and I think there were a total of four or five people that wanted to do that, and they all did it just once. Okay, it's clearly not very popular. And then we said, okay, let's expand that to all customers, but I would expect that all customers behave roughly like that initial sample group. It's just, people don't care about pack swap.

The Superchargers are fast enough that if you're driving from LA to San Francisco, and you start a trip at 9am, by the time you get to, say, noon, you want to stop, and you want to stretch your legs, hit the restroom, grab a bite to eat, grab a coffee, and be on your way, and by that time, the car is charged and ready to go, and it's free. So, it's like, why would you do the pack swap? It doesn't make much sense.

Musk goes on to say that Tesla built pack-swap capability into all Model Ses simply because "we weren't sure" if people would prefer Supercharging or pack swapping—and now that they've confirmed that drivers are fine with free Supercharging, it sounds like the plug might be pulled on pack swapping.

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