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First confirmed battery swap upgrade from 60 to 85?

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The cost of the battery is absolutely amazing. My wife's car can be bought for slightly more than the cost of the battery and her battery is 3months/3700 miles old!

There is an industry analogy to this phenomenon. I recently read a report that showed that Apple makes more (gross margin dollars) on flash memory storage than all suppliers of flash memory storage combined.

I am thinking it might also be true that Tesla Motors makes more money (gross margin dollars) on batteries than all Li-Ion battery suppliers combined.

Obviously, you have to tease out what they are making on the battery in order to do this analysis but it is relatively easy to do so just by doing linear interpolation between the models.
 
I wonder if it's a special case because their road trip article was cited by a lot of other media sites. It would be great if it was an option for all owners, but it raises a few questions....

At a CA service center i was told a month or so ago that they had already done it. 60 to an 85. I asked if they could make a 40 to an 85 and he said just add the extra 10K for the 40 to 60 increase. So I guess for 28K you can upgrade to a higher value car (+ tires)
The extra 10K David paid for delaying his decision would be somewhat mitigated here in CA if you consider auto taxes and annual CA DMV fees are based on purchase price.

I don't think the VIN would affect resale I assume they would change the picture in the "T" screen.

So what's the headlight upgrade?
 
The business case for Tesla is hughe. Refurbished batteries for use in cars or other applications (home solar etc.) will become a big and profitable market. Of course Tesla should take ownership early.

With batteries in the super charger stations, Tesla will create havoc in the utility industry. They will accomplish
- demand leveling & avoid peak charges
- buy vast amounts of renewable energy at the time there is surplus generation
- sell ancillary services like reserve gereration capacity, black start, frequency regulation

A peek in the future
- Tesla approaches full coverage of North America in 2015 with approx. 200 stations
- pace of new stations slows down, existing stations get extended like in Gilroy
- local battery storage deployed to all stations with 500kWh and 1MW initially
- 20m Tesla EVs on the road doing 300b miles annually, consuming 300b*300Wh=90TWh of electricity
- Tesla becomes the largest purchaser for energy in the country
- Tesla offers special home charging tariffs. Charging is managed remotely to balance grid requirements.

Ups, way OT here. where to turn?
Edit: continuing over there...
 
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