No, I wouldn't shell out $24k for a new battery, as last we heard non-warranty cost to replace a Model 3 LR battery was under $15k. (It might be as low as $12k now.) And that will likely continue to decline in the coming years.
People tend not to like to lease major required components for their vehicle. IMO, if they are worried like that they should just lease the car itself. And how did you come with $5k as being a reasonable cost to replace a battery pack? (Are you saying Tesla should lose money on every out of warranty pack replacement they do?) Elon was hoping to get the cost of replacing the modules in a failed/worn out pack down to the $5-7k price, but I don't think they are there yet. (And that probably isn't even possible on the current 4680 pack design.)
Yes - the 4680 pack, not the cells, is dumb. I actually was going to cancel my order if they switched me not because of the chemistry but the pack design. They put foam in it and made the whole pack non-serviceable. No shop can even attempt to repair them. 5k is reasonable because car warranty companies have set 6k as a common cap on any repair number 1, and number 2 it doesn't cost Tesla anything in profits IF they built a reliable repair and refurbishment system.
If they don't want packs field repairable, buying a new pack is 24k. That's absurd but there are simply no refurbished packs available and I suspect why - they can only come today from crashes - right? But in 5 years - enough cells will fail in battery packs across millions of vehicles that the good cells they can harvest should be vast majority.
In other words, there are three scenarios. Packs that fail with a handful of cells but 80-90% of cells remaining can still be used. Maybe a lot of these are still under warranty. These can easily be refurbished depending on the overall condition of the remaining good majority cells. Tesla could repair a failed pack like this for hundreds of dollars.
The second scenario is the situation of an abused battery. Lots of supercharges, running it to 5 perceht, etc. - I don't know enough about how Tesla can show abuse, but it is in everyone's best interest that they start thinking about how to track this and just stop worrying about peoples reactions to range loss. I think 95% of population owning Tesla's would rather baby the battery and lose 10-20% usable range in exjange for lower TCO and higher reliability. Abused packs of tracked should not be charged to Tesla or via-a-vi Teslas profits, us all as a whole but rather should incur some financial penalty to customers to pay refurbishment.
The third case is out of warranty packs where it may fail but the remaining cells are simply too worn to be refurbished in to another pack. This is the one that concerns me most. There are not enough failed units right now to harvest good cells that's why we have to get new packs. That may never change - it could be these packs for 95 percent of people last 200k miles - in that case Tesla may never care. But the 5% of folks who get unlucky - because of a bad batch or maybe an accident that created latent thermal or vibrational damage to the pack that is detectable. Think of spinning HDDs. One time my boss dropped a server full of spinning disks. He said "it still runs who cares" - I said "mark my words in 6 months that system will fail" - and in less than 2 months 4 out of 12 disks failed and 3 more failed in rest of year.
The electronics and circuit boards on a Tesla are second to none of any other car - therefore, even though they are solid state and don't have moving parts like old HDDs as per the analogy above, these statistically will fail and cause physical damage to inverters, drive units, bms systems, battery cells, you name it - it's all digitally managed now.
So the end result of this new world we are in is reliability should be higher for the masses, at the expense of the fewer who do have issues having to pay 4x the typical cost for an ICE repair. It's not acceptable for Tesla to think this way - because Tesla owners are right now very intellectual. If we expect the average person to want a Tesla, psychologically, they have to know that they are not facing a 5% or whatever risk of 24k fir a battery, or 4k for a steering rack because Tesla doesn't believe in component level repairs, batteries included.
Not to say the final issue here - what the heck happens to all of these cells at 200k miles or whenever the cars do get tossed? Is Tesla going to melt them down and build new cells? I think they need s separation process to do that and I heard a third party is doing it already - hope that matures too.
(Not that there are many third parties dealing with HV packs at this point.) Third parties actually sell the good modules from the S&X packs to be used in other projects, so they get a second life before being recycled.
