What people don't realise is that hardly anyone needs to use this sort of infrastructure regularly. We fixate on the range of a gasoline tank, thinking that an electric car <i>must</i> match that range if it's to be useful. In truth, long range driving is a very niche use case.<p>How many times in the last year did you start a trip with a full tank and need to refuel before you reached your destination? The mode answer to that question is zero. According to the Department of Energy, the average vehicle trip is just 10.1 miles. 98% of car journeys are less than 50 miles.<p>Battery swap technology is irrelevant and always will be. It's a great marketing move by Tesla, because it undermines one of the key arguments against electric cars, but it has little or no practical importance. The fast-charge infrastructure is what matters, because it's cheap enough to realistically become ubiquitous.<p>We're just very poor at translating our experience of car ownership to electric technology. There's a long thread of comments about peak demand, in which several people clearly haven't internalised the idea that you can charge your electric car at home, so you only need to use a fast-charge or battery swap facility if you've just driven 300 miles in the same day.
Even ignoring the range differences, this is misleading marketing. What happens when 500 cars show up at an urban Tesla battery swapper within 30 mins of each other on a Saturday morning?<p>Anyone who's been to a Costco gas station knows that the petrol refill process is sustainable for hundreds of cars, while the battery swap is "draining a cache" of however many battery packs the station has pre-charged, which my guess is, way less than 100.<p>They are gonna have a peak demand problem on holiday weekends, etc.
Starting by congratulating Tesla in their system, which should win some converts, but there's something bothering me with it.<p>An automobile network that's also owning their "refueling" network concerns me with the usual lock in concerns. What'd append when other brands want to offer the same service? A multitude of recharge posts all accross the land space each under their car brand flag? Figuring that there's only tesla and ford on this city, instead of the Nissan charging station that I need?<p>This particular solution seems very specific to Tesla (or even only model S), is there any standard or independent initiative for battery-exchange stations?
The Tesla takes ninety seconds to get a battery which will last 235 miles. (<a href="http://www.teslamotors.com/models/facts" rel="nofollow">http://www.teslamotors.com/models/facts</a>)<p>The Audi A4 takes three minutes to get a tank of gas which will last 448 miles. (<a href="http://autos.aol.com/cars-Audi-A4-2013/specs/mpg/" rel="nofollow">http://autos.aol.com/cars-Audi-A4-2013/specs/mpg/</a>)
The one thing I didn't like about the demo is they showed it compared to refilling a car, but refilling a car adds more miles to your range than swapping out one of those batteries.
How much will this cost? Really.<p>Reuters reckons it'll be the same as filling a petrol car about $60 <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/21/us-tesla-swap-idUSBRE95K07H20130621" rel="nofollow">http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/21/us-tesla-swap-idUS...</a><p>Edit:$60 apparently.
Interesting timing on Tesla's part - announcing battery swap
stations less than 4 weeks after battery-swap based Better Place
announced (May 26) that they are shutting down.<p>This is either an amazing fast pivot, or more likely Tesla had the
swap capability designed in, but the swap station plan held in
reserve to be able to announce swapping so quickly after the
departure of Better Place from the battery swap niche.
I'm really hoping that Tesla licenses the technology to other electric car manufacturers and makes certain their other vehicles (Model X, Roadster) can use it. It would be really silly to have "Tesla Model-S only" service stations.
> Each unit will include 50 loaner battery packs that Tesla owners can borrow for the equivalent of what it costs to fill up a tank of gasoline. The units will cost the company about $500,000 each to install.<p>What does this mean?