Tell me where I'm off base....
1)You've never done this before on a Tesla Roadster
2)You want someone to loan you their car and pay you $30,000 for the priveledge in the hopes that they might get a new battery pack
3)You can offer no assurance that they will get a functional vehicle back at the end of your experiment
4)You have nothing to loose and everything to gain, while the owner has a potential gain and a lot to lose.
IMO you should do one of the following:
1)Get a loan, buy a used/wrecked/salvage Roadster and do your own proof of concept to then take to market; or
2)Offer to do the install for free for someone willing to put their own Roadster at risk.
The concept is interesting, no doubt about that, but I pity the fool that decides you to take you up on this offer unless I'm clearly off base on my original points above.
From a buyer perspective this is all very intriguing, I'll address your points:
1; correct, it has not been done, it is uncharted territory.
2; I am not asking them to "loan" us their car, I'm not looking for a joy-ride; we have a Tesla Roadster here, but it is a 2.5 and still under warranty. I just sold my Roadster last month, it was a 2.0 though... Our objective with the vehicle would be to rebuild the battery pack and we could have most of that process done prior to receiving the vehicle itself, after we have the vehicle here we would drop the battery pack/box, open it up and replace the sheets with the new ones and put it back together. This process has been done before using Tesla provided battery cells.
3; I can offer the assurance of a fully functional vehicle back at the end, if you know much about batteries you would know they are "dumb" they don't actually communicate or do anything other than hold potential energy, there are few conceivable reasons why this swap would fail... And ultimately if it did we would swap back to the original cells and obviously NOT charge the customer.
4; The customer has the potential to gain and also be part of innovation, something that Roadster owners are notorious for...
The last 2 points; 1-Our company is a legitimate company with plenty of money to buy a Roadster but it may be easier to get this initiative going if we have a "first sale" opportunity already in hand: However, at $30K we aren't actually looking to make much money on this, it would be a proof of concept and experience opportunity. Also, the installation labor would be FREE (#2), we are only charging for the batteries and we would be charging at our cost on this first opportunity, this means the price is likely to be less than $30K in the end but I don't want to build false hope or make false promises, I'm not in marketing, I'm in R&D! The worst case scenario is $30K cost, the likely scenario is something more like $25K...
Anyways, I appreciate your feedback and I definitely agree it would be really easy for any owner to do this with us if we did it for free but that would be a $20-30K investment from us to prove a concept in a market that has incredibly limited opportunities (there are only 500 1.5's out there, less than that are in the USA, less than that will ever hear about us and less than that will actually be driving them enough to care about the battery...) So for $20-30K we prove to a market of about 50 people that we can do it... That isn't financially worth it for us, their is some reciprocity with our offer in that we are passionate about Electric Vehicles and do actually want to see Roadster's with improved range and capabilities!
No one would design a business around supporting just 50 or so vehicles, unless those vehicles were $100M airplanes... That isn't our case, we are looking at building custom battery pack solutions for all, if we just wanted to prove a concept we would do it with a smaller application, and in fact, we have already!