Tesla To Build Its Own Battery-Swap Stations

New submitter lfp98 writes "Just a month after the collapse of independent battery-swap company Better Place, the uniquely successful maker of luxury electric cars, Tesla, has announced it will provide its own battery-swap capability for its Model S sedans. The first stations will be built adjacent to Tesla's charging stations on the SF-to-LA route, and a swap will take no longer than filling a gas tank. From the article: 'A battery pack swap will cost between $60 and $80, about the same as filling up a 15-gallon gas tank,' Musk said. 'Drivers who choose to swap must reclaim their original battery on their return trip or pay the difference in cost for the new pack.'"

Comments

reclaim their original battery?

[Joe_Dragon]

that seems like a dumb idea for a car makeing a big trip why not make it like propane exchange where you do not have to due that?

Re:reclaim their original battery?

[Overzeetop]

Unlike propane tanks, it's a huge deal to refurbish a battery pack. You could "refill" your EOL battery pack for an $80 swap and get a new battery pack. Or, worse for the consumer, swap your brand new pack for a recharged pack that is nearing EOL. At $10k+ for a full sized battery (I'm guessing, too lazy to look it up), that's a pretty big fail for one side or the other.

Re:reclaim their original battery?

[Dan East]

The article is light on details, but it doesn't seem possible to always swap out with brand new batteries. Each battery pack keeps track of the exact number of charges and discharges, temperature levels, etc. So essentially the "age" of the battery is known. I would think Tesla would pro-rate the exchanges and charge based on how much newer the replacement battery is. The real question is whether customers swapping the other way (getting an older battery for their newer one) will be paid by Tesla for that difference as well.

Re:reclaim their original battery?

[cnaumann]

A better solution would be to simply lease the batteries and not worry about getting the originals back. The lease would cover wear and tear.

I imagine most people would want their original packs back.

Re:reclaim their original battery?

[wvmarle]

Propane tanks also don't have an infinite life. Over time they start to rust, the screw threads wear out, etc. One way or another that cost will be paid by the end user, either through a filling fee or in the cost of the fuel.

A difference of course is that a propane tank's capacity doesn't decrease over time, which is a typical issue of batteries, making a swap harder.

On the other hand indeed I'd rather see a station outright swapping batteries, and where you pay for the amount of energy you get. However that's tricky: battery capacities vary with age, and your depleted battery is not empty (as otherwise you wouldn't make it to the battery station), and the amount of energy to be added to fully charge it depends on that. Somehow smart battery monitoring electronics will have to take care of that. And when that's done, it should work quite reliably.

The final step is going to be to have all car manufacturers agree on a certain standard, instead of having numerous competing standards. "One size fits all" is impossible as cars have different sizes, so maybe we should go for battery packs: small cars carry ten batteries, big cars carry 20, trucks 50. Like current gas tanks. Thinking of it, this could also solve the "rest charge" issue as the car could use the batteries one by one, starting to use one when the previous one is depleted. Or using 2, 3 at a time to get sufficient power, same principle applies.

Re:reclaim their original battery?

[Alioth]

Unfortunately batteries won't with that speed for any reasonable definition of "soon". 150 miles will be about 50kWh. A 10 minute stop will involve 2 minutes of faffing around (drawing up, parking, connecting, disconnecting, etc) meaning 8 minutes charging time. 50kWh in 8 minutes would require a charging system delivering 375kW of power assuming it's 100% efficient.

80,000 people live in my general area. Now let's imagine everyone has electric cars that can charge in 8 minutes. If we think how many people are fuelling their cars right now, there's probably right at this moment while I type - at a rough guess - at least 30 people putting petrol in their cars somewhere in my vicinity, and this is to fill a tank that lasts on average 400 miles. Reduce this to 150 miles and you're looking at almost tripling the "filling up" activity, so probably around 80 people simultaneously quick charging. This will require an increase in generating capacity of 30 megawatts. Our peak electricity usage now is about 30 to 35MW, so this effectively needs you have to double the generating capacity to do this.

So for rapid charging electric cars to be practical in anything other than really small numbers, it'll be years off just because the grid will need a significant upgrade. This is before considering the engineering that has to go into designing a charging system that delivers 375kW and has to be hooked up by the average car owner safely, not a specially trained operator. It's going to require high voltages just to keep the currents reasonable (at 11,000 volts you're still looking at about 35 amps).

Re:reclaim their original battery?

[Anonymous Coward]

80,000 people live in my general area. Now let's imagine everyone has electric cars that can charge in 8 minutes. If we think how many people are fuelling their cars right now, there's probably right at this moment while I type - at a rough guess - at least 30 people putting petrol in their cars somewhere in my vicinity, and this is to fill a tank that lasts on average 400 miles. Reduce this to 150 miles and you're looking at almost tripling the "filling up" activity, so probably around 80 people simultaneously quick charging. This will require an increase in generating capacity of 30 megawatts.

There's one HUGE flaw in your logic. You are basing your figures on how many people are currently filling up their gasoline cars, and then extrapolating that out to electric. However, how many of those people have a gasoline pump at their house that could fill their car up overnight? If people could easily fill up their cars at home each night, do you think there would still be 30 people at the pump at any given time? Or do you think that more than 80% of them would never need to visit a gas station during their normal daily driving?

Re:reclaim their original battery?

[Agent0013]

To me it sounds like complaining that there is no way everyone could have broadband at their home because the phone lines could not handle that much data. When there is demand for it there will be solutions developed.

Re:reclaim their original battery?

[Lumpy]

"The final step is going to be to have all car manufacturers agree on a certain standard, "

Hell will freeze first. we cant eve get the Gas cap on the same side of the car.

Re:reclaim their original battery?

[CohibaVancouver]

Some people here seem to be very emotionally invested in the idea that electric cars will fail. I'm unclear as to why, but they will find all manner of bizarre excuses and rare use cases for why electric cars will fail.

I think, by their very nature, tech-minded people are obsessed with edge use-cases. This, coupled with a desperate need to be able to say "I told you so!" results in a visceral hatred for electric cars in some cases even though, for 80% of the use cases, they're fine.

Gas

[Dan East]

A battery pack swap will cost between $60 and $80, about the same as filling up a 15-gallon gas tank,

It costs $47.25 to fill up a 15 gallon tank here. However this isn't California, thank God.

Re:Gas

[h4rr4r]

You do a lot of one way long distance trips?
Just hit the same stations on the way back as the way out.

All luxury cars are a toy for the well to do. Else they would just buy a corolla.

Why does this car have to justify itself in dollars if a Porsche does not?

Idiotic

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like a good idea, but certainly does not scale and is a logistics nightmare, as Better Place will attest.

Elon should watch the movie Disclosure. "Focus on the problem". And the problem to be solved is getting recharge time down to 3-4 minutes. It's a sweet technical problem and the peeps who solve it will own the industry.

Can this work for existing Teslas?

[Shoten]

We have a Tesla showroom near where I live, and I've actually been there twice (it's in a major shopping mall...granted, this is in a fairly affluent area). They have two cars on display, along with just the undercarriage of the car...the part that holds the batteries. That section holds the bottom of the car, and the batteries are framed by the frame of the car's body itself, if not also welded or bolted in. The entire bottom of the car is battery...even with the entire upper body and cabin of the car absent, you can put your foot on the front bumper, step up, and walk down the whole length of the car without having the slightest chance of putting your foot through and touching ground. I can't imagine how such a massive battery pack (it's not thin, either) could weigh a small amount either.

So...I have to wonder...if I'd bought one of these cars yesterday, how in the hell would they be able to swap all of those batteries out in 90 seconds? If they were as light as empty cardboard boxes, I'd have trouble swapping them all simply because of the bulk. And there's no way they weigh that little, or are that easily dislodged.

Re:Really?

[tgd]

Really? We can get this for cars but many of our latest phones and laptops don't have accessible or replaceable batteries?

All of mine do.

And in either case, feigned indignation aside, if you wanted your car to be a quarter inch thick, stylish slab of aluminum or polycarbonate, it wouldn't be removable either. If for style purposes a designer, say, wanted to have an almost entirely glass vehicle and needed to hide the batteries in the various A,B, and C pillars, you wouldn't have them removable either -- because the design decision was a higher priority.

Re:Really?

[lgw]

Give em time. It's amazing they can make an electric car not suck at the price point the manage today. As the technology matures, I bet they'll come downmarket. Heck, if I went to work everyday in a very small corner of a very large manufacturing plant, I know I'd be looking for ways to make a product more people can afford.