What is Tesla's upcoming 'under your nose' announcement?

[CapitalistOppressor]

Just to be clear, I am agnostic on what the announcement will be. I went crazy trying to figure out what the leasing announcement would be and was way off cause that option seemed too boring, lol.

But I do think that both faster SuperCharging and battery swapping are both credible options if this is going to be an actual major announcement, instead of just announcing more SuperCharger locations.

As to the battery swap the economics are fine if you justify it as public relations. Frankly, I think it would work extremely well in that sense. In terms of overall cost it would roll out in the same phased fashion as SuperChargers, and the yearly cost to Tesla would be relatively small.

One key barrier has to do with the inherent swappability of the batteries, and I've seen credible arguments on this both ways. Some think they can be swapped in minutes, some think it takes more like an hour once you count dealing with the battery coolant fittings and the coolant itself. If it can't be quickly swapped then it seems moot.

But another key issue is a scalable automated swapping station. It requires a custom engineered robotic device capable of quickly removing a battery, storing it, charging it, and swapping a charged battery in its place, while maintaining high levels of uptime and low maintenance costs.

All very doable and straightforward, but it is clearly a non-trivial bit of engineering. There are other management and logistic issues that need solving too. Developing a working system is probably more difficult than actually deploying it.

In a sense the idea that Tesla would delay announcing this until a year after the car was put in production makes a certain kind of sense. It is a substantial technology and process development project in its own right. Tesla would have needed to invest substantial resources before even beginning deployment.

So there is ample reason to be skeptical.

 

[WarpedOne]

There is one single reason that kills battery swapping: different cars use different batteries.
Battery swap station must offer my kind of battery or it is of no use to me.

Model S now uses 2 kinds of battery, GenIII will for sure use physically smaller battery, very probably of two different capacities.
Add a truck and a newer chemistry that demands a bit different electronics on board and things multiply into horror.

Imagine you drive into a gas station nearly empty only to find out they do not have *your kind* of gas.

 

[TD1]

Battery swaping would make no sense, because its pretty clear that Battery swapping wont be needed anymore in 10-15 Years.
So Building a network of very very expensive Battery swapping Stations is not a longterm solution, that also why Betterplace failed, its a Business that has no future.
Supercharger Station is around 200k, Battery Swapping Station is around 2-3Million (thats what Betterplace had calculated)

My Money is on the Lithium-Ion / Metal Air battery Hybrid. Tesla has a Patent on it and that technology is capable of doing 1000Miles. It would be more expensive then recharging, but would once and for all solve the range anxiety issue. And since it will only be used on long distance trips, driver electric would still be much cheaper then Gas.

Im really surprised how the most people here totally ignore this incredibly awesome Patent that Tesla has there.

 

[raymond]

Numbers do not lie, trips beyond the range of a single supercharger stop are so rare they are probably less than 1% of all passenger car travel.

Perhaps a bit off-topic, but whereas sometimes 1% is "just 1%" (e.g. a 297 mile range instead of 300 miles) other times 1% is a lot (when 1% of patients in a hospital die).

Sometimes a reliability of 99% really sucks. And some people might view this as a reliability thing.

 

[DonPedro]

In a sense the idea that Tesla would delay announcing this until a year after the car was put in production makes a certain kind of sense. It is a substantial technology and process development project in its own right. Tesla would have needed to invest substantial resources before even beginning deployment.

And, most importantly, people might have focused too much on the swapping and whether they believed in it or not. In this way it has become clear that you can be a perfectly happy Tesla owner without ever visiting a swapping bay, and so it is only an added benefit to owners.

I am also agnostic about what the announcement will be - only ended up in this discussion because I thought the discussion didn't reflect how big Elon tends to think.

 

[Banahogg]

My Money is on the Lithium-Ion / Metal Air battery Hybrid. Tesla has a Patent on it and that technology is capable of doing 1000Miles. It would be more expensive then recharging, but would once and for all solve the range anxiety issue. And since it will only be used on long distance trips, driver electric would still be much cheaper then Gas.

Im really surprised how the most people here totally ignore this incredibly awesome Patent that Tesla has there.

We've had people in and around the car long enough that I think we can be pretty sure there isn't a separate metal-air battery and support equipment (compressed O2 canister, pump, vent, etc) already hiding in there somewhere. And given that existing owners can't even get a full performance plus suspension as an retrofit from the company, retrofitting an entire power system seems unlikely.

Additionally, we have the existing evidence for battery swap from the 10K that needs explanation.

Personally, I've always thought of metal-air as more of a gen3 technology, as cool as it'd be to be able to just drop a long-range cruising battery in the frunk.

 

[vfx]

While I don't think Tesla will go the way of Better Place, If they were to offer Batt Swap I imagine they would offer a battery minimum guarantee as they have for resale value. They would simply cull out the weaker range batteries and refurb them later. All about making the customer feel comfortable.

 

[CapitalistOppressor]

There is one single reason that kills battery swapping: different cars use different batteries.
Battery swap station must offer my kind of battery or it is of no use to me.

Model S now uses 2 kinds of battery, GenIII will for sure use physically smaller battery, very probably of two different capacities.
Add a truck and a newer chemistry that demands a bit different electronics on board and things multiply into horror.

Imagine you drive into a gas station nearly empty only to find out they do not have *your kind* of gas.

That possibly might be a factor. But it seems likely that if Tesla actually did design for battery swap (which they have repeatedly claimed to do) they might well have made it possible to have a 60kWh car swap in an 85kWh battery. There is probably no reason why the connections need to have been different, so functionally the only change would be the weight. The suspension is tuned for a particular weight, but adding a couple hundred pounds to the car will not substantially impair it.

Traction and stability control is all controlled by software, so when you swap in an 85kWh battery the car would just load the appropriate control profile. If you have an air suspension, that is controlled by software as well and the car might come very close to being a full 85kWh car in terms of acceleration, braking and handling just from switching batteries and loading a different control profile. But even a standard suspension would not experience much in the way of difficulties.

So *IF* this was going to be done, it is likely that only one battery type is needed. When GenIII comes out that would be a second form factor that would need to be supported.

Any truck is likely to use one of those form factors, while "chemistry"; "different electronics"; or other horror multipliers all fall into the realm of software controllers. They don't affect the basic form factor. Future advanced batteries would be able to be seamlessly swapped in as long as they use a compatible form factor. If there is serious miniaturization in the future you might still be able to plug it in using an adapter. If a future advanced battery supported higher power output than the current generation motors could support, then that would just be software limited.

These are straightforward problems to solve when dealing with electrons. EV's are very much a digital platform.

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Battery swaping would make no sense, because its pretty clear that Battery swapping wont be needed anymore in 10-15 Years.
So Building a network of very very expensive Battery swapping Stations is not a longterm solution, that also why Betterplace failed, its a Business that has no future.
Supercharger Station is around 200k, Battery Swapping Station is around 2-3Million (thats what Betterplace had calculated)

My Money is on the Lithium-Ion / Metal Air battery Hybrid. Tesla has a Patent on it and that technology is capable of doing 1000Miles. It would be more expensive then recharging, but would once and for all solve the range anxiety issue. And since it will only be used on long distance trips, driver electric would still be much cheaper then Gas.

Im really surprised how the most people here totally ignore this incredibly awesome Patent that Tesla has there.

I agree that battery swap is a short term fix. But your estimate from Better Place just goes to show how inexpensive this would be for Tesla. For the BP small battery swapping solution to work in the U.S. they needed to build swap stations every 25 miles. Thats a lot of investment to cover any significant area.

Tesla could cover most of the U.S. with just 100 stations in the initial rollout, and the "refill" fees could eventually make the system profitable as the vehicle fleet grows. Given that possibility Tesla might be well served by finding partners to share in the cost. Maybe they should package it as a CDO and sell it to Wall Street.

 

[DonPedro]

Maybe they should package it as a CDO and sell it to Wall Street.

Haha, funny man. Only you got this the wrong way around - Wall Street sells CDOs to people they consider stupid. (Stupid defined as trusting the expert advice from Wall Street).

 

[CapitalistOppressor]

Haha, funny man. Only you got this the wrong way around - Wall Street sells CDOs to people they consider stupid. (Stupid defined as trusting the expert advice from Wall Street).

Ya, no kidding.

That said there is potentially a money making opportunity in battery swap if that turns out to be the winning technology in the future.

There might only ever be 300 such stations built in the entire U.S. The CapEx isn't terrible and if they charge ~$20 per swap (for 150 miles of range between stations) that approximates paying $3.50/gallon in a car that gets 25mpg.

If the vehicle fleet starts @~15,000 in 2013, and increases by 15k each year until 2016, that is ~60,000 vehicles using the initial 100 stations. If 2.5% of vehicle days use a swap station a single time you get 60000*365*0.025=547,500 swaps for 2017 based only on vehicles built in 2012-2016. @$20/swap that is a pathetic $10.95m in revenue after investing ~$200m and having ongoing operational costs.

But in 2017, you build 15,000 more Model S and 100,000 GenIII. That is ~1.6m swaps in 2018, which is ~$32m in revenue to pay operational costs. After 2018 production 2019 yields ~$53m in revenue. At some point in this process the $200m investment becomes profitable, even accounting for incremental investment in extra battery capacity. Maybe.

Tesla doesn't care. They deploy this and SuperCharging and let the market decide which one wins. It's all advertising to them, and they might be able to get partners to take a risk on battery swap. That risk might be more palatable after Tesla has had its first profitable quarter and has won every car award available, than maybe it was in 2012.

 

[DonPedro]

I think this is plausible. The two credible alternatives that I have seen voiced at this point are this and the "Supercharger upgrade + Elon math". I think Elon is a guy that can learn from mistakes, so let's hope to avoid more bistromathics. In that case, the battery swap is the best match with the tweet.

Is there a third (or "1B") alternative that would go something like this: Install a "thingy" in the frunk, which has a receptacle. Here you can plug battery "cassettes" that you can exchange at the SC station? Probably not feasible in terms of weight and volume of cassettes to be replaced?

 

[SteveG3]

Tesla doesn't care. They deploy this and SuperCharging and let the market decide which one wins. It's all advertising to them, and they might be able to get partners to take a risk on battery swap. That risk might be more palatable after Tesla has had its first profitable quarter and has won every car award available, than maybe it was in 2012.

This is what I'm starting to see. Deploying swapping can make plenty of sense as a temporary solution, even it it costs $200 million.

That size deployment could cover Model S/X produced in next 5 years. Assuming they sell 100,000 of these in NA over the next 5 years, they could charge $1-2K to turn the feature on. If 50% take the feature at $2K they recoup half of the cost. Charging per mile usage at cost recoups cost of batteries, and customer knows they've also benefited by not putting these miles on their own battery.

Even $2,000 per car is a laughably cheaper short-term solution for range than what the competition has come up with... an ice engine as a range extender.

What about when Gen III swamps the system?

"They can let market decides what wins" (and science). Four years from now metal air battery may be ready. Put that in Gen III, offer choice in Model S/X, and Tesla wins whatever customer preference mix ends up between SCs, swapping, and metal air.

Even if the swapping is near, or completely, obsolete in 10 years it just all makes the path to 500 mile batteries (or beyond) more palatable to more people.

 

[ckessel]

This is what I'm starting to see. Deploying swapping can make plenty of sense as a temporary solution, even it it costs $200 million.

That seems crazy to me. A $200 million for a temporary solution to a problem for the very tiny portion of people for which SC's aren't fast enough? That's not efficient use of capital and Tesla certainly hasn't been one to waste cash on dual "let the market choose" tactics.

 

[CapitalistOppressor]

This is what I'm starting to see. Deploying swapping can make plenty of sense as a temporary solution, even it it costs $200 million.

That size deployment could cover Model S/X produced in next 5 years. Assuming they sell 100,000 of these in NA over the next 5 years, they could charge $1-2K to turn the feature on. If 50% take the feature at $2K they recoup half of the cost. Charging per mile usage at cost recoups cost of batteries, and customer knows they've also benefited by not putting these miles on their own battery.

Even $2,000 per car is a laughably cheaper short-term solution for range than what the competition has come up with... an ice engine as a range extender.

What about when Gen III swamps the system?

"They can let market decides what wins" (and science). Four years from now metal air battery may be ready. Put that in Gen III, offer choice in Model S/X, and Tesla wins whatever customer preference mix ends up between SCs, swapping, and metal air.

Even if the swapping is near, or completely, obsolete in 10 years it just all makes the path to 500 mile batteries (or beyond) more palatable to more people.

Yes, if they partner with the customers themselves they can lower swap fees down to just the incremental cost for each swap. Good point.

Who knows what to do, but based on Elon's tweets and official Tesla statements as recently as the....

Well, I just looked. We have an answer in the most recent SEC filing -

our capability to rapidly swap out the Model S battery pack and the development of specialized public facilities to perform such swapping, which do not currently exist but which we plan to introduce in the near future

 

[FredTMC]

Is there a third (or "1B") alternative that would go something like this: Install a "thingy" in the frunk, which has a receptacle. Here you can plug battery "cassettes" that you can exchange at the SC station? Probably not feasible in terms of weight and volume of cassettes to be replaced?

I was thinking the exact same thing. Basically a block battery for the rear or frunk that has maybe 50-100 mi capacity. Problem is that it weighs too much (~ 400 pounds for 100 mi boost). Maybe lowered into frunk with a hoist. It wouldn't need active cooling if it only recharged the main battery at a slower rate. Kinda of like a gasoline gen set. You drive away and it's still recharging the main battery. Between this battery block and simlutaneous supercharging of the main battery, the driver may be on his way in 15min or less.

 

[CapitalistOppressor]

Quickie link for anyone interested.. just search for "swap"

Tesla Motors - Quarterly Report

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That seems crazy to me. A $200 million for a temporary solution to a problem for the very tiny portion of people for which SC's aren't fast enough? That's not efficient use of capital and Tesla certainly hasn't been one to waste cash on dual "let the market choose" tactics.

Maybe the SuperCharger announcement is that they are scaling them back in favor of a new strategy, lol

 

[SteveG3]

ckessel it serves two purposes.

1. the point that Consumer Reports said would take the Model S to a 110 out of 100, filling up as quickly as an ICE. It may be irrational, it may be only a temporary issue, but I think CR is right... the ability to drive long range as conveniently as an ICE is the biggest drawback in public opinion. In practice SCs may only be not fast enough for a minority, but it is currently the most successful point of attack against Tesla I know it's detractors to have.

2. it manages the growth of demand on Superchargers. If it swaps in 3 minutes and IF SCs shortly get to fully charging in 30 minutes, it is 10X faster a recharge. This will be critical during the 5% of the year of major holiday driving. It's one thing to wait 10 minutes behind 3 people on the battery swap line, another to wait 1.5 hours on line behind the SC line. Tesla either invests something like an extra $90 million for enough SCs to accomodate triple traffic at ultra peak times, or they get a lot of grief from press and customers about ridiculous lines around Xmas and Thanksgiving.

So that $200 million becomes more like $110 million. And again if they charge $1K or $2K for those unlike yourself who'd like the feature, the cost gets scaled way down or eliminated.

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Well, I just looked. We have an answer in the most recent SEC filing -

Awesome find C.O. Who'd of thunk it would be tough keeping up to speed with a thread on a Saturday. This is not done, but it is very encouraging indeed!

 

[Royal TS(LA)]

I think that automated battery swap is the most likely option. Judging from several images showing the underside of Model S, it seems that the battery module design is such that the module can be unfastened very easily and hence dedicated robotics should be able to do the job. Keeping individual packs and recharging them until the real owner returns to the recharge station would be complicated and expensive, since storage space would be needed. On the other hand, using statistics and probability calculus should enable to have a really small underground storage&recharge chamber with some simple transport system, maybe some form of conveyor belt?

I may err, but IMHO there are several arguments against metal-air battery extension packs, as well as against using ultra capacitor packs.

Metal-air batteries do have a nice energy content, but how much space is there really left in the Model S to pack this thing in without annoying its driver and passengers? One of the great points about Model S is its spaciousness. Space equals value, hence IMHO reducing available space equals reducing the car's value. I can hardly imagine that this is Tesla's intent. Also, metal-air batteries need to be refurbished. If there is no compact automatic refurbishment for empty metal-air batteries on-site, there would have to be a logistics to be involved -> cost factor. Seems implausible from a business perspective. Keeping systems as simple as possible and as cheap as possible is the key factor to success.

Ultra capacitor packs are very nice, because they can basically be sucked dry close to 0V. But what good would they really do? I read somewhere on the forums about an idea to use ultra caps to quickly recharge and then let those refill the battery pack on the road. Tough luck, because half the energy of the ultra caps would be lost during the process. Plus, you'd e.g. need about 33 cubic meters (!) of commercially available ultra caps to get 85 kWh. Assuming a 100 fold improvement still requires 0.33 cubic meters of space. The numbers don't work out, even with science fiction .

Another aspect is the assumed increase from 90 kW to 120 kW super charger capability. Well, 90/120 is .75 or 75%. That's a meager 25% charging time reduction. So we need 22.5 minutes instead of 30 minutes? Elon said that this would be quicker than typical gasoline refilling. Hence I say, a 25% reduction is nice and dandy, but nothing dramatic. IIRC, there is a scene in the megafactory video where they show that Tesla workers were drilled to attach the battery pack in like 4:15 manually. My guess is that even this can be automated, and this is what I believe now works on the road. It would make sense.

There is a hint from Elon in the reign of "it has been under your nose", right? Which would make sense, if the super charger stations had already some extra infrastructure beneath them, still visually being sealed off from the outside. And the little tower structure next to the recharging spots seems like it could pack a punch and deliver an appropriate amount of cooling (for itself and possibly subterranean recharging, a kind of air conditioner). Maybe some men in black are working their S's off each night to install alien tech in those spare spaces.. .

 

[CapitalistOppressor]

Tesla is already charging $1,500 for SuperCharger hookups. Switch that money into investment for Swap Stations and you have ~$30m/year to invest in new stations. In 4 years that is $120m of investment which goes a fair distance towards covering the cost.

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Just in case anyone missed the switch over. This thread is solved. Tesla has already announced Battery Swap in the 10Q filed yesterday.

 

[SteveG3]

I think that automated battery swap is the most likely option. Judging from several images showing the underside of Model S, it seems that the battery module design is such that the module can be unfastened very easily and hence dedicated robotics should be able to do the job. Keeping individual packs and recharging them until the real owner returns to the recharge station would be complicated and expensive, since storage space would be needed. On the other hand, using statistics and probability calculus should enable to have a really small underground storage&recharge chamber with some simple transport system, maybe some form of conveyor belt?

As to storage Royal, one thing to remember, the SC stations are in between cities, basically the middle of no where. It may be tricky dealing with state governments that tend to manage these big highway rest stops and allow for construction, by the land itself, or worst case a couple miles from SCs, is cheap cheap.