You're confusing Elon Musk's statements with reality. A simpler explanation is that they can't sell it and be profitable.
I'm expecting a lot of promises and no delivery.
Heh, sick but fair burn on Musk. I basically said the same thing in my local group: Model Y SR was killed because of their struggle with profits on the 3 SR, not because the range is unacceptable.
I'm not talking about "battery swapping" (capability to replace whole battery pack in minutes) - something Tesla discontinued years ago. This is a dead end except for fleet of cars/trucks. They can replace battery modules with reasonable complexity and designed Model 3/Y packs to allow that (yes, not trivial like battery swap, but still well within standard maintenance procedure you can perform once in 10 years or so).
I was always amazed by the logic "why would Tesla do that? They can just make new cars." Of course they can. But that, from my personal prospective, makes the product I already own inferior to the one with upgrade options. So either Tesla do that or someone else will and Tesla will loose to this competitor. But I think Tesla is smarter than that and will choose to be a leader and provide some upgrade options, as it will make the product better. You can attempt to force people to buy new car when they just want to upgrade the battery and happy with the rest of the car, in that case you are not only going against the environment, but also against the market and what consumers want.
Regarding the "supply constrained" argument. Well, Tesla is ramping up capacity, so that means they will eventually be demand constrained, and I don't think we will have to want more than 5 years for that. Why would they want to wait for the last moment? You can promise something now (which you can practically implement), you can even be upfront and say "we need all the batteries for new cars for NOW", but we will eventually produce enough and allow existing owners to enjoy their cars for a very long time if they choose to. This will actually raise demand for Teslas NOW given that people will know they will be able to upgrade and retain their value even better.
Tesla? Being a leader on reasonable repair? I don't normally like to absurdly point out things like this, but we aren't talking about the same company. In practice, they're always against repair. When it comes down to it, the
actual total cost to owners will make module swapping effectively pointless. The industry as a whole doesn't really do in-place repair anymore: replacement with refurbished assemblies is cheaper, faster, and still allows for repair to actually occur (it's just that
your old assembly is refurbished and given/sold to
someone else). For this reason I can see Tesla offering refurbished packs, but not necessarily a guts swap on your own pack. This might not be the "good ol' days" of fixes at your local mechanic, but the fixes do still occur. In the refurbished units that are bought instead.
Tesla is ramping up capacity because they
must to accomplish their long-term goals (and no doubt, more details about this ramp-up will be part of battery day). Tesla isn't just the consumer vehicles they have now: publicly coming up, you've got Semi (huge capacity per vehicle), Cybertruck (relatively large capacity per vehicle, but also a mass consumer market target),
more home supply (e.g. Powerwall),
way more grid installations (e.g. Megapacks,
huge amount of battery storage), and this list will only grow.
It looks like they will be constrained on battery supply for even a decade more despite trying to build out so much of their own manufacturing capacity. They have
so many plans to use all that supply, only a
small fraction of which are being built today.
This is the type of thing battery day should really be clearing up, and it probably will to some extent.
