Becoming a police vehicle isn’t they key to mass acceptance. I think areas with existing / good infrastructure are seeing the model 3 become fairly mainstream, but there’s still large swatches of the United States where the best charging option is to install a L2 charger at home and charge while you sleep.
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Same thing with gas…if the tank is empty you are going nowhere. I personally can’t relate since i never had an instance where i run out of gas or electrons…i’m just not that type of guy. I forget things all the time…just not to put gas.
This opens a can of worms. Some take care of their batteries and other don’t. If you own your car, would you be ok to swap if you knew you would take the risk of getting a beat up one? The other consideration is time…if this swapping process would take say 10 min…is it really worth even trying? The battery tech is actually fairly close to that, Model 3 gets 170 mile in 30 min, Taycan gets 200 in 22 min. By the time swapping gets underway it may end up being useless.
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They are second-worst behind Fred Lambert at Electrek. They will publish 100 overly positive Tesla stories, and after one balanced one Musk will punch Fred on Twitter and the pander returns. There was a bloody one in April after which I hoped Fred would find his spine, no such luck.
It worked, was awesome to watch, but not only did they abandon for economics but made platform decisions/tradeoffs that would prohibit it (which is understandable). In the early days when there was no supercharging infrastructure they had to hedge, luckily one panned out and other isn’t economically viable yet, even if it is technically.
Actually, Evannex is the worst…by a long shot!
To counter that point. Rather than a lease or purchase situation I’d like to see Tesla offer a subscription service similar to Volvo.
A battery hot swap scheme would be very cool in those instances and with FSD becoming more aware and adept with human driving patterns it’d be really neat to be going down the road, pull into a bay and get a swap and a wash (or at least just a wipe down for sensors and cameras for bugs and crud) and be back off on your way.
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Filtered out a long time ago 
I assume Kimball ghost writes there
Battery hot swapping would be cool, but man, what an infrastructure nightmare
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It would be cool to see but look at the Taycan stats…200 miles in 22 min…that’s now, today…the swapping argument has only one advantage…time. This time gap is closing faster than the swapping tech can keep up with.
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600-800KW/hr charging would mimic gas fill up speed and would almost be necessary for the proposed semi tractor.
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You really believe that refueling on gasoline and recharging a battery have equivalent obstacles when the power company shuts off large portions of the power grid for days at a time?
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There’s always solar! 
Diesel and gas generators though are an option.
Are you referring to charge/discharge cycles? Or is there really maintenance you have to do to an EV battery i don’t know about? If you would get a “new” one at the next fill-up, would it really matter? I mean I guess you could get one that only gives you X amount of range when your previous one gave you Y.
That said, although cool in concept, I can’t see it being a long term viable solution like you indicated already, with the supercharger charge time being much more efficient and less reliant on labor.
What we were talking about was having an empty tank at home while you need to evacuate…which is equivalent to having an empty battery.
I think gas has the edge at this time but i will say this…if power goes out you will need to do one of 2 things…find a gas station that has a generator so to keep the pumps running, otherwise no gas when power is out…or get out of the outage area…which means both cars would be able to fuel up. You may get lucky and find an ev charging station with battery backup and charge in an outage…but capacity is not there yet and only the first few cars will be able to take a charge. Another way is residential solar with storage…if i have lived in a high fire risk area i would be looking into that. That will give you even more options than gas would…at a price.
There are some manufacturers out there that under manufacture their cars. Take the Leaf for example…many reports about just how easy it is to mess up its battery since it’s not thermally protected. They “fixed” the problem by slowing down the second DCFC in the same day…but before they did the software “fix” you essentially were damaging the battery on the second charge due to it being too hot and heating it even more while charging. Even Tesla recommends to do regular L2 charging between Supercharging. My eGold has passive cooling too (air fan), i have yet to try 2 DCFC in a day but i bet the second one will be capped to lower speed. It’s pretty dumb, it’s like they forgot the radiator was already invented.
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How much sunlight do you suppose makes its way to solar panels when the air is filled with smoke?
I don’t have to suppose, I’ve actually been evacuated due to Southern California fires and I hadn’t seen the sun for days by that point.
I would also posit that it would be a dramatically faster, safer exit to empty the gas out of the generator into a gas tank than sit there with a generator running while you charge up the EV.
I’m not talking about being late for a movie, I’m talking about escaping with a few cherished possessions and one’s life.
I don’t think I could ever go totally electric TBH. (I actually have exactly zero electric cars in the garage right now, ha)
But I can say for certain there will always be some kind of gas car in our garage.
Range anxiety for the boys in blue? Install some super chargers at Dunkin’ 
- problem solved! You can have your cake and eat it too.
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