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?

Comments

3 minutes is slow?

[X-Ray Artist]

Are we really in such a hurry that a 3 minute swap needs improvement? It takes longer than that to use the restroom and buy a coffee.

Re:3 minutes is slow?

[Guspaz]

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.

even better

[slashmydots]

My take on this is if they put up wind or solar arrays, it would work better than trying to charge people's cars live off it. They could have more of a flexible margin of when they charge the batteries because as long as they have full ones to give out, they're in the clear. So if the wind isn't blowing, they just wait to charge the empty ones later. So technically all their electricity could be free if they played their cards right.

Re:even better

[MattskEE]

Do you know how many solar panels it takes to charge an electric car? You're basically looking at a football field's worth, each.

Ah, to be young and full of made up numbers. Let's do the math.

The large Tesla battery is 85kWh. A solar cell typically has an efficiency of 10-20%, so with about 5kWh/m^2/day of typical solar radiation (check PVWatts for specifics in your town you can produce about 0.5-1kWh/m^2 per day.

If we assume 15% charging losses it will take 100kWh to charge a Tesla battery, which will require 100 to 200 square meters to produce in one day. A football field has about 5300 square meters, so we could expect one football field of tightly packed solar panels to charge around 26 to 53 Tesla's per day.

Re:Awesome

[dbrueck]

Ooh, I love this game. My turn! (BTW you didn't give me a starting point so I'll just go with your /. handle, but on future turns please give me a subject to start with)

Ok. 'greenwow'... let's see. Well, 'green' is like the Jolly Green Giant, who is big, as was Andre the Giant. He was French. The French sold us a lot of land in the Louisiana Purchase. Louisiana has a really high rate of obesity. Why do you support pediatric heart disease, you monster???

Your turn. Subject is 'turnips'.

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