What is more curious is that they do not even need to make such an assumption or propose a leasing model.
They point out that in diesel trucks, the drivetrain is about 50% of the price of a $150k truck. Super. Tesla can offer a 500 to 750 kWh battery at near $75k. The markup is in the other half of the vehicle, but MS wants to see a specific markup opportunity on the battery visa vis a diesel drivetrain. Such an extraordinary opportunity is not needed. Tesla can spend $75k on drivetrain, $40k on the rest of the truck, and still gross $35k on a truck sold for $150k. This becomes a fantastic deal for the truck operator who can save alot of money on fuel and maintenance.
There is no need for Tesla to lease this out to make it at compelling purchase. Leasing is a financing option that some buyers will want, but it is simply a finance option, not an essential business model. For example, some buyers will lease a Model S, but this is not essential to Tesla's business model. It's also a compelling outright purchase with cash.
What MS is suggesting is that Tesla put a half size battery (about 300kWh) in the truck and lease it out at $75k or more, which implies 50% markup on the battery alone, and probably as much on the rest of the cab as well.
Let's say Tesla offers a 600kWh pack. This could provide a loaded range of 200 to 300 miles. Let's also suppose they use a chemistry that has long cycle life, say 2500 cycles. So at lower end of range, that is 500k miles, maybe more, but that works to the advantage of the lessor. So at Tesla's cost this is $0.15/mile, even assuming 3kWh/mile. So if Tesla can lease this out at $0.30 to $0.45 per mile, Tesla does stand to make crazy high markup. But this is largely at the expense of a customer who would be better off buying the battery outright. This essentially leaves the door wide open for competitors to step in and under cut Tesla with potentially inferior products. I don't think this is sort of strategy Musk would pursue. Rather, I think he'll want to lease at say $0.20/mile and offer swaps and Supercharging at near cost. One can buy outright, trade in batteries at swap stations or Supercharge for a fair price. Both buy/lease options are fairly priced.
Extrapolating from some model S owner concerns about the single swap station (concerned that they'll be swapping their brand new pack for a moderately used one), I think a battery leasing model (or more accurately a "charge storage" leasing model) makes much more sense with a battery-swap type of "refueling" plan. Firstly, battery swapping just sounds financially more attractive (downtime for supercharging, even @ 350kw, are operating costs to the truck operator). If you're going to swap, then you shouldn't have to worry about the condition of the new battery versus what you've just turned in. Leasing the battery takes that worry away, since it wasn't really "yours" in the first place. So that part of the MS analysis makes sense, but the rest was garbage.
Throwing my own idea on a charge-storage leasing model:
- The Tesla semi uses a number of 100kwh flat packs (stackable), from 1 - 5?.
- The truck operator purchases the truck and puts down a security deposit for how many packs they'll use at any time for their operations.
- They can recharge at the depot (if it's for short-range use only) on the operator's own dime, or swap out their used packs for freshly charged ones (X for X exchange) for the nominal cost of the charge-difference (between the packs being exchanged) plus a swap fee (tesla's fee to recoup the capital cost of supplying the batteries and swap station).
- Tesla's swap stations will rely on utility power + solar panels to charge the batteries. The software will preference solar to charge enough batteries for swap-station use, and falling back to utility power only when more batteries have been swapped out than anticipated. This implies a Tesla energy cost of $0.10/kwh (or whatever the normalized cost of Tesla Solar's panels will be) + utility connection cost.
- The reason to call it charge-storage, is because a nearly degraded 75kwh (formerly 100kwh) battery pack can still be accepted by the customer as they only care about the usable energy stored in the packs.
This should optimize the costs to Tesla - minimizes peak-demand charges and electricity costs, while maintaining more than enough supply of batteries for truck operator use. Any extra capital needed for holding extra batteries can be offset by taking warehouse loans against those extra batteries as available inventory. So the swap fee should be:
( Cost of battery pack + cost of capital from warehouse loan +
100% profit margin to cover station expense ) / (charge cycles of the batteries)
guesstimating:
assuming $25k per 100kwh flat pack
==> ($25,000 + ($25,000)(6.5% per year * 3 years) + ($25,000)(1.0)) / 2000
==> $25,000 (1 + 0.195 + 1) / 2000
==> $27.437 per swapped battery pack + $0.10/kwh difference between swapped packs (~$10 per fully depleted 100kwh pack).
With numbers like that (unless I messed something up), a competitor can't compete without replicating the entire truck-battery-solar ecosystem.
