Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
This battery swap system is going to fail. If you have to pick up your original battery on the return trip, how do you swap multiple times to drive cross country? Time limits? That won't work. Have to take the same route back? That's not going to work either. So Tesla is just building these swap stations to satisfy short-haul driving for the Model S. When the Model X comes out, we will still have this same problem so now you're just buying an SUV just because (you're not taking it off road, and you're not going on roadtrips).
This will be Telsa's Achilles Heel
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.
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).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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?