On Memorial Day weekend in 2015, Edward Needlemeyer took a drive down the west coast.

Edward covers cars and he drove from his home in Oregon to a place called Harris Ranch,

California.

It's roughly halfway between San Francisco and LA.

Kind of in the middle of nowhere and I spent four days sort of smelling cow poop, you

know, out in the central valley, waiting to see if this thing would be used.

This thing that Edward is referring to is a battery swap.

Tesla was advertising that you could drive up and swap out the empty battery in your car

and get a full new one swapped in.

In minutes, which would solve one of the main annoyances of driving electric cars, it

takes a lot longer than a gas powered vehicle to charge.

I started to talk to people, ask them if they did that drive often, many of them did,

and none of them had said that Tesla had reached out to them to let them use this swap

system.

As Tesla said, they had, and so I asked them, you know, would you like to be able to use

this?

Is this something you would pay?

And they said, sure, you know, I'm sitting here waiting for one or two more cars in front

of me.

Each one of those is going to take an hour to charge and they'll take me almost an hour

to charge.

I'd pay almost any amount, you know, to swap my battery and get going.

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