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Tesla About To Start Battery-Swap Pilot Program
cartechboy writes: Remember 18 months ago when Tesla promised it was going to launch battery-swap stations? Well, it's finally happening, sort of. It seems Tesla's about to announce a battery-swap pilot program that will launch next week. The swap site will be located across the street from a Tesla Supercharger site in Harris Ranch, California — 184 miles south of San Francisco and about 200 miles north of Los Angeles. The pilot program will involve an unspecified number of Model S electric-car owners, who will be invited to take part in the test. For now, the battery-swap service will be offered by appointment only, at a cost of roughly a tank of gas in a premium sedan. Tesla's using words to describe this pilot program like "exploratory work" and "intended to test technology and assess demand" for a swapping service. While originally pitched that the battery swap would take less time than it would to take to refill the gas tank of a comparable luxury sedan, the company says now that "for this specific iteration" the swap process will take "approximately 3 minutes" — though it adds Tesla has "the ability to improve that time with future iterations." Is this test going to show that battery swapping is or isn't a realistic initiative?
It seems like they're going to be doing part or all of the battery swap manually, so the improvement from 3 minutes down back to the target of 90 seconds is more about getting everything automated again rather than simply improving the process. It's not practical to roll out large numbers of battery swap stations all over the world if they need a pit crew at each one.
From their press release, it sounds like the culprit is the additional armour that was added to the car to avoid damage to the battery packs from road debris. The original swap demonstration was fully automated, but then they went and stuck a bunch of other stuff on the underbody, invalidating their existing automation work for it.