Seems like what's really needed is a way to swap batteries at home, so that you can leave one pack at home to charge from your solar panels while you drive to work with the other one, then swap in the evening when you get home. Otherwise you'll have to charge a stationary battery during the day, then charge the car pack from the stationary battery at night, with all the attendant losses.
That seems like an expensive way to turn your valuable daytime electricity into less valuable nighttime electricity, but I guess it makes sense if your goal is to disconnect from the grid.
Right, but if you're getting your energy from home solar panels, then having the car at work all day complicates things. If the batteries could be easily swapped out, then you could always have a pack charging during the day while you drive about with the other one.
If you have net metering, let the solar panels send to the grid during the day, and charge the car from the grid at night. If you have net metering with time of use metering, the difference in energy prices for generation and use, then you're being paid to essentially use the grid to store your solar energy so you can use it at night.
I'd be concerned about receiving a battery that has had more charge cycles than mine. Kind of a good way to unwittingly shorten your vehicle's life span.
... that's why you have to swap back to your original battery, which is the one you own. For example, drive SF-LA swapping for a loaner battery; swap back to your own battery on the way home.
Why? The battery swap only makes sense when you are on a road trip longer than the typical range of your battery(hundreds of miles), so it's not like Tesla owners are going to be doing a battery swap every week. Most likely, tesla owners will charge at home for over 99% of their trips, and maybe choose to do a battery swap if they are on the road for a long time and don't want to wait the 30 minutes for a super charge.
It seems disingenuous to complain about Tesla not keeping their promise about building battery swap stations in response to an announcement that they're opening the first battery swap station.
"It’s actually funny, because before we were able to get the Roadster out, they would say, “Well you couldn’t possibly make that car work”. Then when we made the car work, then they’d say, “Well nobody’s going to buy it”. Then people bought it. Then we announced the Model S and so many people called bullshit on that it was ridiculous, and yet we were able to bring it to market, and when we brought it to market they said, “Well you’d never be able to produce it at volume”, and then we did that. Then they said, “You will never be able to make a profit”, then we did that in Q1. So I’m hopeful that people will observe that theres a trend here."
You're already counting "autopilot upgrades" in the "promises it hasn't kept" category when they only announced the thing in September and were quite clear that the full feature set wouldn't be available until sometime in 2015?
I'm not too optimistic about them making that date, but you're jumping the gun something fierce here.
