From the HBO Documentary Films Musk documentary released 2026:^1
"Clearly, there was never any real effort to make battery swap actually work because the value to Tesla was not, you know, as an actual viable way to drive adoption. It was a way to earn ZEV credits. Once California changed its rules and insisted that Tesla prove that customers were swapping batteries, Tesla abandoned the program. But Tesla had already banked over 100 million dollars from its phantom battery swaps. Since its founding, Tesla padded its bottom line with more than 11 billion dollars in government carbon credits."
Perhaps Tesla's most successful product was carbon credits
https://www.eenews.net/articles/musk-made-a-fortune-on-clima...
"The electric automaker earned $10.7 billion from selling credits created by government climate programs, a total that accounted for a third of Tesla's profits over the last decade, according to an analysis of securities filings by POLITICO's E&E News. In the first nine months of 2024, some 43 percent of its net income came from those credits, which Tesla sold to rival carmakers after exceeding climate mandates in California and elsewhere."
1. No discussion just upvotes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50413608
"Clearly, there was never any real effort to make battery swap actually work because the value to Tesla was not, you know, as an actual viable way to drive adoption. It was a way to earn ZEV credits. Once California changed its rules and insisted that Tesla prove that customers were swapping batteries, Tesla abandoned the program. But Tesla had already banked over 100 million dollars from its phantom battery swaps. Since its founding, Tesla padded its bottom line with more than 11 billion dollars in government carbon credits."
Perhaps Tesla's most successful product was carbon credits
https://www.eenews.net/articles/musk-made-a-fortune-on-clima...
"The electric automaker earned $10.7 billion from selling credits created by government climate programs, a total that accounted for a third of Tesla's profits over the last decade, according to an analysis of securities filings by POLITICO's E&E News. In the first nine months of 2024, some 43 percent of its net income came from those credits, which Tesla sold to rival carmakers after exceeding climate mandates in California and elsewhere."
1. No discussion just upvotes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50413608