While Tesla has offered some hardware upgrades for vehicles (like the MCU2 upgrade), it seems unlikely Tesla will offer major upgrades (battery, motor, supercharging) to existing vehicles and instead do what the other manufacturers do - encourage customers to trade in and purchase a new vehicle with the latest technology.
After a vehicle has depreciated 3 or 4 years, it's more difficult to justify major upgrade expenses.
While it may be technically feasible to offer battery upgrades, Tesla probably won't do that.
However, if Tesla ever does allow 3rd parties to perform service on Tesla vehicles, a 3rd party could implement a battery upgrade/exchange program...
There’s 3rd parties who already offer it. The question is if Tesla would end up disabling your supercharger access if you were to do it.
The only reason why I say that battery retrofits would be possible is because of the massive price reduction. We are going from $1,000 per/Kw to perhaps $100 or $80. The price of the battery and even the vehicle itself will be significantly cheeper than it is now.
That may be the case, but the logistics haven’t changed. It’s possibly cheaper to ship a car with the battery pack coast to coast ($500-$1000) than it would be to ship just the battery pack ($1000-1500 freight)
Then you have to factor - how many service centers have the forklifts to unload and move a battery pack around? That’s overhead. Then you have to recycle the old pack. Do you ship it back to the gigafactory? That’s potentially $3,000 in shipping costs alone round trip. That’s aside from the installation and time at an already overwhelmed service system.
Now let’s consider this. Trading my 75D in for a LR+ would cost me $40,000 roughly. Aside from the profit on the car itself, I’d lose free supercharging, which reduces Tesla’s cost and raises a revenue stream. I’d lose free connectivity, which reduces their cost. If I financed, Tesla would make a small commission on that loan. It also adds a car to their sales figures for the shareholders who read volume. They can now also turn around and sell my traded car for a $15,000 markup.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to upgrade. But if I was running the company, it wouldn’t be worth it to offer it. There isn’t enough money in it to deal with the potential headaches.
