June 20th Speculation

[nursebee]

Right below your nose? Has not been answered yet.

Word of mouth program. Perhaps like that asian guy suggested at the shareholders meeting.

 

[DaveT]

Right below your nose? Has not been answered yet.

Under the nose of the car is probably where the battery swapper connects with the car to swap its battery.

 

[JRP3]

Under your nose is figurative, not literal.

 

[deonb]

Under your nose is figurative, not literal.

I'll bite. Then figuratively explain 'under your nose' in the context of battery swapping? ('under your nose' figuratively always implies 'in plain sight').

 

[JRP3]

I'd say it means you're sitting on top of a swappable pack, and that the swap capability has always been built into the car.

 

[Larry Chanin]

Swapping in a much larger pack would increase weight, changing the dynamics of the car and electrical characteristics; could be a be safety issue. I'm doubting it.

Hi Aaron,

Here's some thoughts I had on the subject that I posted in another thread.

Many of us believe that Tesla will be demonstrating battery swapping on June 20th.

For demonstration purposes it would be more interesting if Tesla put together some battery packs at over 100 kWh.

As deonb states its theoretically possible with some additional effort.

Following beegee's methodology and using the published specifications.

3.6v x 3.1 Ah = 11.16 Wh, 85000/11.47 = 7616 cells

3.4v x 4Ah = 13.6 Wh, 13.6 x 7616 = 103.5 kWh.

This would yield a nice 22% increase in capacity. One issue is that the 3.1 Ah cells weigh about 44.5 g, and the 4.0 Ah cells weigh about 54 g, or about 17.6% heavier. This would be equivalent to adding the weight of a passenger distributed in the floor. I'm guessing that the suspension would be able to handle this added weigh.

This would certainly be cool for demonstration purposes, and maybe for a small scale swapping operation. As deonb points out, depending on what Panasonic is charging for the new cells, the 22% improvement in capacity might not be sufficient to justify full commercialization. However, for leasing in a small scale swapping operation maybe it would make sense.

Larry

Larry

 

[FredTMC]

Yep, If the demo is batt swap (instead of air metal frunk extender batt), then I certainly hope it's a demo of a 100+ KWH batt.

I'd LOVE to rent a huge batt for long trips. In addition to longer range, it saves cycles on my poor little 60 kwh batt.

 

[DrTaras]

A Tesla the Hun! is excited to attend this event and has not paid attention to the speculation on WHAT its about, just that there will be a red carpet for him to roll down on!
He's already practicing feigning to tell the Paparazzi to stop taking pictures. It's going to go something like this: "Stop! ... Don't! ... Stop! ... DON'T STOP!!!"

 

[teddyg]

Hi guys, Has the June 20th announcement been "officially" confirmed by Tesla yet? Haven't seen anything on the website about an upcoming announcement that they usually do in the investors section.
Looking at June 23rd options...don't want to be caught out if Elon decides to delay this announcement like the previous ones.

Cheers

 

[Andrew]

Hi guys, Has the June 20th announcement been "officially" confirmed by Tesla yet? Haven't seen anything on the website about an upcoming announcement that they usually do in the investors section.
Looking at June 23rd options...don't want to be caught out if Elon decides to delay this announcement like the previous ones.

Cheers

It's definitely happening. They emailed an invite to local owners (I received one; sadly I can't go), and I know one TMC member was just at Hawthorne and caught a glimpse of them setting everything up.

 

[anticitizen13.7]

Fast swapping would be interesting, but Supercharging at 120 kW is convenient enough that I can't see myself using a swap.

30-40 minutes to get +150 miles of range is a lot of time if you need to stop more than once each day. 20 minutes on the other hand is not that bad.

 

[dmckinstry]

Fast swapping would be interesting, but Supercharging at 120 kW is convenient enough that I can't see myself using a swap.

30-40 minutes to get +150 miles of range is a lot of time if you need to stop more than once each day. 20 minutes on the other hand is not that bad.

30 minutes is no problem at all for me. By the time we walk the dogs, go to the rest room and have a snack, 30 minutes is practically over.

 

[Zorba]

@elonmusk: Live pack swap demo on Thurs night at 8pm California time at our design studio in Hawthorne. Seeing is believing.

 

[Johan]

 

[spleen]

Well, that seems to confirm it. Though I feel oddly disappointed about this - just don't think that battery swapping is conceptually the right way to go.

 

[Laumb]

I have travelled to the future (june 21) and read all the TMC forum posts. I can say for certain:

1) The photo title is a headfake. Whoever named that file would be insta-fired if that leaked out. There is actually no logical reason for a generic model S photo to have that particular name. It would just be "model_s_red_leftside_day_moving_126_feb17.jpg". The tesla guys read this forums too and they needed to buy time so we wouldn't guess the actual obvious announcement. and we are all falling for it nicely.

2) EM has said the announcement is (paraphrasing) obvious, but clever in execution... (some tweet) Battery swaps by hand in service centers fails this test.

3) Its a big hoopla announcement at a SC. It is NOT battery swapping. They can't secretly build a swapper (bay/building/robot) and not have us notice.... come on, we parse the sentences and filenames of every email. No one noticed the big robot being installed in the new bay at one of the 6 SC stations?

4) It is instead, exactly what they have been saying over and over. It's recharging very quickly. The faster 120kWh was a bonus announcement attached to the SC rollout announcement. No reason at all the 5th cannot be ultra-charging. 120kW is the baseline grid-based charging. Ultra-charging is DC to DC charging from captive battery packs at the SC stations, (insert the usual physics complaints here). This is accomplished very easily by.... time travel messages get garbled here....under your nose... garble...

5) You should have known it wasn't a battery swap demo for a another reason. It has been demo'ed before, in some old videos. Yeah its 30 bolts and some hoses and a team can change a battery in 5 min. So what, that isn't an exciting demo.

6) no more complaints about how the battery is "an important structural element so swapping is hard". It is a structural member in the sense that it keeps the square shaped frame from sheering during driving (going from a rectangle to a trapezoid) but those stresses aren't present when parked. The bit of 1/4 plywood tacked onto the back of your Billy bookshelf accomplishes the same thing, and I promise you can swap out that panel if you want.


Special bonus tin-foil-hat theory: we all already have 100kWh batteries installed. Its "under our nose" and "model S owners will be very happy". So, existing SC can go to 50% SOC in the newly released shadow capacity. As musk said in the June 20 announcement: "...we wanted to be sure that we would not need all that extra unused capacity before releasing it in software patch 6.0. But, after careful testing and the fixing of the sleep current issues, we are now confident we can enable this, as we had always intended". I mean, why did you think the curb weight was so high on an aluminum car?

It burns, right?

 

[Johan]

It burns, right?

Don't rub it in ... After all it's a speculation thread...

 

[Laumb]

Don't rub it in ... After all it's a speculation thread...

I know, but the "I can say for certain" part had me put on my rubbing kit.

 

[Yggdrasill]

Battery swapping has been a 99% given since the accident (or is that "accident"?) with the photo.

The (new) interesting information will come at the event. It will be very interesting to see how they've solved the issue. This must be an automated system for swapping the battery, as four guys with a pallet truck and a screwdriver wouldn't make for much of a demo. I would also supect the system to be fairly mobile, so that a team can show up at a supercharger site, drop of a couple of containers, hook them up and everything is good to go. A solution where you need to dig up half the site would be unpractical.

 

[Norse]

Battery swapping has been a 99% given since the accident (or is that "accident"?) with the photo.

The (new) interesting information will come at the event. It will be very interesting to see how they've solved the issue. This must be an automated system for swapping the battery, as four guys with a pallet truck and a screwdriver wouldn't make for much of a demo. I would also supect the system to be fairly mobile, so that a team can show up at a supercharger site, drop of a couple of containers, hook them up and everything is good to go. A solution where you need to dig up half the site would be unpractical.

I have a feeling alot of taxies will be tesla in the future, atleast in Norway. For them, this is very good news. Norwegian taxis drive usually cars that are expensive as tesla.