It's a pipe dream that we could have regulatory sense, but if they were standardised this would not be a problem, you'd just pay $200/kWh or whatever the going rate is at the time.

I don’t want standard boring in my phones (I iPhone) and I don’t want standard boring cars in my car (I Tesla). In both cases I opt into vendor repair lock-in for a better product.

Proprietary monoliths where you have to take or leave the entire package based on what is most profitable is not how you get creativity and innovation.

If you had to rent your cell phone off of ma bell with no other equipment allowed on the network we wouldn't have iphones.

If roads had ford specific infrastructure like the future elon imagines we wouldn't have tesla.

A balance between interoperability, end user control, and freedom for manufacturers is how you get innovation. In the current auto market you have none of the above.

That's not too far off from the cost for a replacement for the Model S packs. It can be much less expensive than $200/kwh for third party shops, as the bad battery can be refurbished often offsetting much of the cost.

In both of those cases the cost is $x and a mostly functional battery. This is substantially higher than $x and will track with the cost of dealing with whatever anti repair countermeasures tesla puts in place, not the cost of storage..

For all the talk of "anti repair countermeasures", its not really something that we've seen in practice. Refurbishing batteries just isn't a cheap thing to do.

It sounds like there may even be a fully new battery option available for early Model S vehicles in the near future.

Engine replacements are complicated. Many specific parts.

Battery replacements may be much easier to complete.

> Engine replacements are complicated. Many specific parts.

If you buy a full replacement engine (as opposed to parts to rebuild an engine), replacement is quick and easy in an ICE. In endurance racing an engine can often be replaced in less than 30 minutes. In non-racing conditions you'd do it a bit slower but it's not hard.

I would imagine that cars built for endurance racing, where this is known to be a common thing, would be designed to make it easy, while cars built for the general public will not have such a guarantee—some will be easy, some will be annoying, and some will be outright pains.

> I would imagine that cars built for endurance racing

At the higher end of professional racing, those are custom built cars.

But for most categories of racing, endurance race cars are just regular street cars. Hondas, Mazdas and BMWs are what I've raced or crewed with.

You total it out when the hood gets a dent, so ultimately what does it matter?