cool, thanks for the info! I swear though, I thought the whole point was that you didn't have to get out of the car, it was supposed to be faster than filling up a tank of gas......
Sure, but I think they can safely hide behind the "beta" label for now. My other thoughts on it though...
I am assuming the 85KWh exclusivity is just because they're keeping it simple under the hood while they iron out the kinks and make sure it works reliably. But this is one way I was hoping Tesla would offer different battery sizes for different amounts of money, and use swap stations to seed the market with new sizes. (you would buy them right there and then inside the swap station, and upgrade your car in 1.5 minutes, basically) So I look forward to seeing 40KWh and 60KWh batteries getting swapped as well.
I was fond of the idea that via your first ever battery swap, you would basically elect to surrender your battery into the "system" and never get it back... simply living off of other batteries from that point onwards. (Said batteries being warrantied for use by Tesla of course) Perhaps they have seen too much physical wear and tear on existing cars to support this system as there would be too many people dumping their damaged batteries into the swap system as a method to get a better one. Otherwise, the "free or fast" isn't really held up by this restriction. As of now it's going to be "free or fast, as long as you don't mind coming back to this exact location within two weeks." One of the things we probably like about ICE cars is that they are always ready for immediate deployment on any trip, any time - you can decide to drive across the country and just do it immediately, if you want. Having to bring your car back to a certain spot before a certain date doesn't strike me as liberating.
I was under the impression (and this came mostly from info out of Tesla Motors) that the titanium shield parts did not cover the battery, they were in actually front of it, thus not impeding battery swap at all. Recently however, it was confirmed that (whether this is the case or not) those parts need to be removed in order to do the battery swap, then replaced afterwards, preventing it from ever being as speedy as it was during Elon's 2013 demo. Has the Model X been redesigned to avoid this extra time delay? Time will tell, no pun untended.
The development of this is certainly going as slow as molasses. Sort of the same speed as the SDK. Attendant needs to drive your car in? Where is the software update that charges your account directly? Shouldn't we all see that deployed to our cars already? Makes we wonder if they are really trying to make it work, or if it will ever happen. By that I mean extensive deployment of automated battery swap stations all over the place, so that you don't need to drive a long distance to use it. We seem a long way from that situation.
Sorry for the doom & gloom :|
