The faster the charging, the harder it is on the battery. a cable delivering 250-350 KW is something consumers have never dealt with before. Bad connections ( which Teslas are designed to detect ) in an outside environment are a big worry. I'm an EE.
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Full battery swap for quick charging
- Thread starter MoHazee4
- Start date
arcus
Active Member
There might be one more reason: the batteries are in short supply. Just look at the recent woes between Tesla and Panasonic. Imagine the logistics of keeping spare battery packs all over the country (and later world) where the company already has a problem with the supply chain.
This wouldn't work unless it was offered as a service. People do not want to give up their brand new battery and receive some randomly abused battery pack in return. Also, the more range batteries have and faster charging we get the less this would help anyway. This functionality requires major infrastructure and if you have to wait in like 20 minutes for a battery swap, then why not just charge for those 20 minutes?
Knightshade
Well-Known Member
Yeah, but dense urban apartment guy doesn't have to charge every day because he's not commuting very far.
And the majority of the US still lives in single family homes anyway, so it's not like there isn't already a ton more possible customers who CAN charge at home than Tesla (or all EV makers combined, for years to come) is capable of building cars for.
By the time the only untapped market left is urban apartment guy urban chargers should be even more common than they are too.
Not to mention that public charging at his work is very likely to expand rapidly. L2 or even L1 chargers would meet the needs of pretty much anyone that lives in an apartment with street parking, if they can plug in at work. My local Wal Mart and grocery stores all have chargers on site.
Most here are oddly attached to their precious packs... I *abuse* mine like crazy, I yell at it everyday, call it ugly... sometimes I charge it to 100% for no reason... just to make it feel bad.
However, I'm sure this reasoning will not apply to Elon's "Robotaxi" car sharing... our packs are more precious than strangers riding around in our cars... right?
In regards to the above though, I do agree with you... it would need to be provided as a "service" to be successful under the current state of battery pack psychosis, only leased or "subscription" drivers would participate because they could care less about others "abusing their battery".
Sitting in a Wal-mart parking lot for 4-6 hours waiting to charge on L2... good times.
I do hate seeing people try to use Better Place as an example here, because it's so twisted.
It's correlation without causation. It's like saying, "Bob's Stuff Store was a startup in the ________ business, and it failed. That must mean that _________ is an unprofitable industry that no one can succeed in."
Better Place was a spectacular failure because of being a horribly run company that wasted ungodly gigantic mountains of cash on lavish wastes of investor money--expensive executive vacation retreats, fancy architectural marvel gleaming new headquarters building before they had even gotten their real business off the ground, etc. etc. It didn't really have much to do with whatever type of business they could have been in. Here's an article about their really weird story:
A Broken Place: The Spectacular Failure Of The Startup That Was Going To Change The World
Why take my post out of context? Charge while working if you don't have a home charger.
I expect a lot of us on this forum don't work at Wal-Mart (chargers are for customers, employees have to park in back)... or Trader Joe's (no chargers, employees park on the street.)
I work in an office building... maybe you as well. If I don't arrive before 8am... all the chargers are full. If I didn't have a home where I could charge, I would still be driving a Volt.
I know two people who bought EV's with no ability to charge "at home" and rely on public infrastructure... they both regret their decision. Yes, it will get better.. but let's not fool ourselves into thinking our streets will be lined with chargers for all to enjoy.
To my point... pack swapping stations _could_ have solved this for all of us, not just a class of people with two car garages and 100amp panel upgrades.
Knightshade
Well-Known Member
No- fact based view of the world.
The majority of Americans live in single family homes, not apartment buildings.
Tesla can only physically produce 500k cars a year right now. And a good chunk of those go overseas.
Meaning they can only replace about 2% of all cars sold in the US annually- at best.
They have no plan whatsoever to get that number out of the single digits for years to come.
They're not going to "need" to sell to "guy who lives on the 17th floor of a high-rise apartment with no parking and no place to charge" for a very, very, very long time.
So dumping money into a proven failure of a battery swap system seems like an incredibly dumb plan.
Tesla is having enough trouble keeping things like bumpers in stock in their less than 2 per state service centers....you think they could have enough batteries in urban spots to routinely swap out battery packs?
If so I've got a nice bridge to sell you. It's artisinal!
(it's an even dumber idea when you consider the main reason they're not producing more cars (or hardly ANY powerwalls) is.... lack of batteries.)
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Tesla Engineer: Captain.. we can't do battery swaps anymore because we screwed up the process by adding that battery shield post original design.
Elon: That sucks. I just made the case why we should do it... oh well... Knightshade said its fine if we ignore the market advantage we might have had anyway. He also said we can't make enough batteries, all that time we were designing this whole thing we didn't think of that.
Meanwhile in China...
BDY: Yo, Jinping... we control half the worlds lithium supply and battery production. Let's scale!
JINGPING: Right. I'll also let Tesla build a GigaFactory here then. We'll get their IP in addition to selling them materials.
NIO: Yo bros... yeh, we've been watching all of Tesla's missteps and learning from them. Battery Swapping for the masses. We'll also treat our owners with respect.
JINGPING: Go guys... you're going to love the taste of MAGA Milkshakes.
Elon: That sucks. I just made the case why we should do it... oh well... Knightshade said its fine if we ignore the market advantage we might have had anyway. He also said we can't make enough batteries, all that time we were designing this whole thing we didn't think of that.
Meanwhile in China...
BDY: Yo, Jinping... we control half the worlds lithium supply and battery production. Let's scale!
JINGPING: Right. I'll also let Tesla build a GigaFactory here then. We'll get their IP in addition to selling them materials.
NIO: Yo bros... yeh, we've been watching all of Tesla's missteps and learning from them. Battery Swapping for the masses. We'll also treat our owners with respect.
JINGPING: Go guys... you're going to love the taste of MAGA Milkshakes.
Knightshade
Well-Known Member
So this one is dumb for three reasons.
First- they don't need any "market advantage" in EVs- they're already selling vastly more EVs than every other car company in the world combined by a huge margin.
Second- An insanely costly system they can't afford, or maintain, or properly stock, is the opposite of an advantage.
Third- they killed the swap program when they had plenty of battery capacity. And a really small number of cars they'd be doing swaps on compared to today. They're making five times as many cars now, with plans to double that in the next couple of years.
They literally don't have enough batteries just to build the cars they want to build
Same reason people have been waiting years for powerwall installs now- they don't have enough batteries.
That's without getting into all the logistical reasons it's a horrible idea.
Nio receives huge subsidies from the government of China both for production of batteries and cars, as well as charging infrastructure- so yes when you can do something for a tiny fraction of the cost out of your own pocket, things that are stupidly expensive suddenly aren't.
Of course they charge $2400 a year to owners to subscribe to the swap service... which is about what I was already spending on gasoline (and I drive a lot more than average- the typical american spends LESS than that in a year on gas) so...why would I bother with an EV if I was paying $200/mo for swaps in ADDITION to any home charging I did?
Oh- also? Nio has delivered about 10,000 cars to customers in 2018.
Tesla delivered about 350,000. 35 times as many. With another several hundred thousand already on the road.
Gee- I wonder why Tesla offering battery swaps might be a lot harder and more expensive.
Scale indeed
2018 Tesla Totals: ~245k
2018 EV Totals (Others combined - Tesla): ~575k
I think you meant to say "Yuuuuge margin..." - kind of like how some measure their inauguration crowd turnout.
Knightshade
Well-Known Member
*Citation needed- be careful you're not counting hybrid vehicles instead of just EVs- and not counting things like buses and trucks
Anyway, numbers I'm finding are the top 5 best selling EVs for 2018 were:
1. Tesla Model 3- 145,846
2. BAIC EC-series 90,637
3. Nissan Leaf 87,149
4. Tesla Model S 50,045
5. Tesla Model X 49,349
Tell me again how they need a "competitive advantage" when their sales are 3 of the top 5 including #1?
Also weird you fixated on that and not the half dozen specific ways I pointed out how terrible your actual swap idea was and why it made no practical or economic sense for Tesla.
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Global electric car sales analysis 2018 - carsalesbase.com
EV Sales: World
heh... all this time I thought "EV" stood for Electric Vehicle. I find it 'weird' that you're now trying to change the definition of the word 'vehicle' to exclude buses and trucks to support your 'alternative facts'. Unless Webster recently made an update that I don't know about?
That said, they're all BEV's in the sources cited... no buses or trucks in that list that I can see...
Anyway, you said total all other EV manufacturers combined... now you're changing the criteria to the top 5? Hmmm... ok, let do that as well... (since I've cited sources; we'll use those figures);
2018 Tesla Totals (Top 5): ~195k
2018 EV Totals (Top 5 combined - Tesla): ~233k
2019 Tesla Totals (Top 5): ~18k
2019 EV Totals (Top 5 combined - Tesla): ~47k
Nah. I agreed with most of it.... I even gave it a 'like'... however it doesn't really negate or support the topic of this thread. Sales snapshots and leader-boards are not an indicator of what is, or what could be successful. If we bound ourselves to that logic, the EV-1 would have been the last EV made.
My swap idea? I'll still give credit to Elon for that one.
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Knightshade
Well-Known Member
Since Tesla does not make those products it would be incredibly stupid to include them in a discussion of places where Tesla is looking for "competitive advantages" wouldn't it?
"THEY NEED A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN PRODUCTS THEY DON'T EVEN MAKE!" is a terrible argument.
Why would you want to make (another) terrible argument?
indeed- thanks for providing a source.... but we were discussing need for a competetive advantage right?
The #2 in sales only sells in China. Where Tesla barely sold anything until this past quarter (which isn't included in your data and is just starting to ramp).
So we won't know if Tesla "needs" such an advantage to compete until we have more complete data on how well they are doing in what for them is mostly a new market they're expanding in.... and that probably doesn't significantly happen till GF3 is up and running.
The entire rest of the world they appear to have not needed any additional such advantages though since they're dominating sales everywhere they're actually competing so far. That's the original point you appear to have missed by going down the rabbit hole of china numbers.
No, but math, supply, economics, and logistics are- as already explained.
All of which make your idea impossible for Tesla.
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