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is a game changer for electric vehicles, providing long
distance travel that has a level of convenience equivalent
to gasoline cars for all practical purposes,” Elon said. “How-
ever, by making electric long distance travel at no cost, an
impossibility for gasoline cars, Tesla is demonstrating just
how fundamentally better electric transport can be.”^387
It still takes longer time to charge a Tesla with electric-
ity from a Supercharger compared with the time it takes
to fill up the tank in a gasoline car. To tackle this problem,
the engineers designed Model S’s battery in a way that the
battery can be replaced with a charged battery. “You’ll head
to a battery-swap station, drive your car onto rails that lock
your car into position like at a car wash, and a customized
forklift device will grab the pack from beneath the car, pull
it out, and replace it with another pack,” Elon said. “It’ll
take roughly five minutes – less time than filling your gas
tank.”^373
Critics argued that installing Superchargers across the
country would not be enough. Many car owners are living
in apartments and can’t charge their vehicles in a garage.
In a survey, 43 percent said they didn’t have the ability to
charge an electric vehicle in home or at work.^388 To build
a complete network of charging stations, it was estimated
that it will cost hundreds of billions.^59 But the number of
charging stations today can be compared with the number
of gas stations when the gasoline car was new. Today there
are 119 000 gas stations in the US that didn’t exist 100 years
ago – and it was certainly not free to build them.^424
When there was a demand for gas stations, it didn’t