Tesla's battery-swap stations will finally arrive in December

[roblab]

1.. Why would a business do this
2. Don't underestimate the time value of a tesla owner.

Exactly.

Picture the well off businessman. He wants to take the S from LA to Sacramento, as it's faster than flying, renting a car, etc. He heads out of LA area, goes over the pass and hits Harris Ranch. In 5 minutes he has a full pack. You know that whatever your pack type, a full charge takes at least an hour, and he's done in 5 minutes. On down the road, he gets to his meeting. While there, he's plugged into an HPWC. A few hours later, meeting done, business completed, he's headed back home. It's late. Hits Harris, 5 minutes and he has a full charge, on his original battery that he dropped off that morning. On down the road, and home. He's saved at least two hours, and to him, it's worth at least that. I'm not in this category.

Depending on how many people use this quick charge, Tesla is renting a battery for a few hours. If the battery is good for 500 cycles, and simply gets cycled per swap, then the value is 1/500th of a $30K battery, or $60. If for some reason it turns out that the battery is cheaper, which we believe it is, then our hypothetical businessman is paying for the station also.

Of course, the rest of us use superchargers. We see Tesla building out more and more stations every year (you thought they were gonna quit end of 2014?) and the rate of build will match with new cars, of course. I'm not worried that Tesla will keep up. But they don't need many swap stations, and then only between high end business areas, as on the East Coast, and as in LA to Frisco or Sacto.

On a side note, I have never been at a supercharger station where I had to wait, including Gilroy and Hawthorne. Most times I am the only person there. But, surprise! going at peak volume times (Fri eve thru Sun AM) you're gonna have bottlenecks. I highly recommend driving when it isn't so busy, if you possibly can. Sort of like avoiding LA traffic. If you CAN, don't go there during rush hour, ie. between 5 AM and 9PM. And then you don't have traffic jams.

 

[Evbwcaer]

I initially thought the swapping was a gimmick. With the overall goal being mass market EV's, selling the Model 3 with a 40kwh pack and offering free rental of a 110kwh pack all of a sudden makes a car priced like a Nissan Leaf more useful than a 85kwh Model S. Game changer.

Battery swapping would also fit in well for Tesla looking to power SC's renewably or perhaps using off peak rates. It is essentially a free secondary benefit to have a battery bank.

Finally, the arguments made here are largely concretely correct I feel. However, they miss the point about consumer behavior/emotions. No matter the arguments about costs, time, etc., the bottom line is that a major hurdle to EV adoption is range anxiety and overall anxiety about how/where/how long charging takes. It is quite unwarranted, as my electric car has cut the time I spent refueling to zero from maybe 10 minutes/week, but it is real.

I think a large swapping network really takes away all of the concerns associated with refueling. Cars are emotional and people won't buy them if they FEEL, regardless of how true it is, that refueling issues are unresolved. I have had very intelligent people scoff at the SC network and concept, despite is being very functional from any objective analysis. The biggest hurdle is peoples' minds, not the technology, and battery swapping would ease peoples minds to a huge extent.

 

[wk057]

I think the biggest problem with travel via supercharger is that my trip-long average speed gets capped pretty low, even making intelligent use of the chargers. The best I've been able to do is an average door to door speed of right around 60MPH for a ~600 mile trip, and that was pretty carefully gauging where my state of charge would be on the supercharger's taper curve to maximize the power I would get at the next stop.

I'm not saying I was driving 60MPH, on the contrary I was keeping with traffic in the upper 70's MPH. But door to door average for the whole trip was about 60 MPH.

With an ICE, I can bump that to over 70MPH to maybe the mid 70s. With a network of swap stations, I could beat even that time.

Not that I personally am concerned about the extra ~75 minutes this long trip takes for charging purposes. To me that's already pretty amazing. Only 75 minutes on on-route charging for a 600 mile trip? Pulling over 100kWh from the superchargers in the process? Awesome!

But some people wouldn't dare buy a Model S if their similar trip would be ~75 minutes longer than in an ICE. (Really probably closer to only 60 minutes longer, since stopping for gasoline once isn't instantaneous.) And this extra time scales pretty linearly as the distance gets longer. ICE fueling time scales with distance as well, but even a cross country trip in an ICE can potentially be done with less fueling time than my 600 mile supercharger trip.

Keep in mind, people seem to forget all of the time I spend locally NOT fueling by leaving every day with a full "tank." If you take the average 12.5k miles per year at 40 MPG, that's 312 gallons. A 40MPG car wont have but a 10-12 gallon tank, so that's about 30 fill ups per year. That's 2.5 hours (150 minutes) even if each gas station stop only takes 5 minutes (including time off the road, pumping, and getting back on the road... just like my supercharger number above.)

With the superchargers, I basically pack my full year ICE fueling time into the fueling for the couple of long trips I make per year which is fine, but people just don't seem to get that nor care enough.
With the battery swap, my yearly fueling time could potentially be dropped to next to nothing (10 minutes?) per year vs ICE if I desired.

Beat that.

 

[breser]

Keep in mind, people seem to forget all of the time I spend locally NOT fueling by leaving every day with a full "tank." If you take the average 12.5k miles per year at 40 MPG, that's 312 gallons. A 40MPG car wont have but a 10-12 gallon tank, so that's about 30 fill ups per year. That's 2.5 hours (150 minutes) even if each gas station stop only takes 5 minutes (including time off the road, pumping, and getting back on the road... just like my supercharger number above.)

With the superchargers, I basically pack my full year ICE fueling time into the fueling for the couple of long trips I make per year which is fine, but people just don't seem to get that nor care enough.
With the battery swap, my yearly fueling time could potentially be dropped to next to nothing (10 minutes?) per year vs ICE if I desired.

Don't forget during the supercharging time you're not necessarily spending that time the same way as you would with ICE fueling. You pretty much spend that whole 5 minutes focused on fueling (getting off the road, finding the station, pumping, and then finding your way back on). The on and off is roughly the same but the pumping time doesn't equate to the super charge time since during that supercharging time you're probably off eating or doing something else.

 

[DITB]

In Germany, on the Autobahn (highway) where you can go as fast as you like on many sections, you could run an 85kWh battery flat in about an hour. If you then want to charge fully, that would be one hour driving, one hour charging, and so on. That wouldn't work well to compete against a large limousine or sports car, with 25 gallon tanks or more. Going faster in order to get to your destination faster, is defeated if you have to stop more often to charge, in the end, the average trip speed will not differ much. Although that would be a good environmental and road safety incentive, some people just want to travel fast and not stop much at all.

However, if you can swap a battery in 90 seconds, you can even make a pit stop faster than a gas or diesel car, which typically take 5 minutes to fill up. It would almost be like a race car pit stop, except you won't get new tires also on a Model S/X/III, in 90 seconds - not that I know of.

Heck, you can't even pee in 90 seconds, someone with an idea to make a pee stop in 90 seconds, including hand washing :tongue:

 

[franknesss]

-20sec if they dont wash hands :tongue:

Heck, you can't even pee in 90 seconds, someone with an idea to make a pee stop in 90 seconds, including hand washing :tongue:

 

[FredTMC]

In Germany, on the Autobahn (highway) where you can go as fast as you like on many sections, you could run an 85kWh battery flat in about an hour. If you then want to charge fully, that would be one hour driving, one hour charging, and so on. That wouldn't work well to compete against a large limousine or sports car, with 25 gallon tanks or more. Going faster in order to get to your destination faster, is defeated if you have to stop more often to charge, in the end, the average trip speed will not differ much. Although that would be a good environmental and road safety incentive, some people just want to travel fast and not stop much at all.

However, if you can swap a battery in 90 seconds, you can even make a pit stop faster than a gas or diesel car, which typically take 5 minutes to fill up. It would almost be like a race car pit stop, except you won't get new tires also on a Model S/X/III, in 90 seconds - not that I know of.

Heck, you can't even pee in 90 seconds, someone with an idea to make a pee stop in 90 seconds, including hand washing :tongue:

Excellent point. Maybe future deployment of swap to Germany will help the EV adoption rate there.

 

[RichardL]

Lots of work going on at the old carwash at Harris Ranch. Nothing specific to tie it to this - its all general trenching and concrete. Some kind of machine inside, but I don't know what it was doing. No Tesla boxes or anything sitting around

 

[Tyl]

I asked when I was there today. Yes, this IS the beginning of the Tesla battery swap station!

 

[DITB]

I asked when I was there today. Yes, this IS the beginning of the Tesla battery swap station!

Maybe they will include a stomach-swap and bladder-swap, so you don't need to eat or pee either.

90 seconds, including full battery, full stomach and empty bladder - yay!

Put the auto pilot on and take a nap while driving for a few more hours, road tripping will reach a new high on the booooooring scale ...

 

[Tyl]

In the photo above .....your bladder-swap station is already there!!:love: (the tiled side of the building) .....while your Tesla's Main Pack battery is being swapped out, you can dash around the corner, say goodbye to the last few hours in the rest rooms provided and then.... dart across the street to Harris Ranch's mini mart for personal refueling. Better run though, your battery swap-out will be done before you are!!!:crying: There is also a doggy park on the left side of the above photo!!!

 

[AnOutsider]

Is this page new?

Battery Swap | Tesla Motors

 

[apacheguy]

Nah, that's been there for a while.

 

[AnOutsider]

OK apologies, went to go look for a SC earlier and noticed it.