If they are planning to release further detail Thursday, though, that'll presumably clarify.
Forgive my ignorance, but how? Cheap battery swapping would mean that all batteries are essentially fungible. What stops the new owner from just swapping batteries again? What stops you?
You're also forgetting that Tesla has a very generous battery warranty. Unless you don't think they'll honor it. http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/26/autos/tesla-service-gaurante...
Which will be interesting. I wonder if at that point the "tragedy of the commons" would start to set in. "Oh, it's ok if I run this battery totally flat all the time, it will shorten the battery's lifespan a lot, but I can just swap it for another!"
There might be people who can't plug in, but that'll happen regardless of swapping. You might make the argument that swapping could convince more people in that situation to buy the car, but that's hardly a downside for Tesla Motors.
>it will shorten the battery's lifespan a lot
It doesn't do that if you set your depth-of-discharge correctly. Lithium cells are more sensitive to temperature than charge cycles anyway.
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I think perfecting the whole supercharging system makes more sense.
Factor in the price of recycling with a cynical view of the average user and everyone gets a price decrease on the batteries without the sticker shock of seeing the battery cost all at once. Really you'd sell your Tesla's with an already recycled battery and a couple of years of swapping thrown in. You can price it just like you price car insurance, based on amount of miles driven a year.
Anything that puts more control of the most unproven tech into the hands of Tesla, the faster their batteries will improve. But maybe this is all just too expensive to implement without millions of cars on the road.
The capacity of batteries in rotation would be maintained at a certain level, and the old batteries recycled or used as storage for the superchargers. I think it could potentially cost less than the monthly cost of gasoline for most people.
Superchargers don't use batteries. SolarCity does, though.
Musk said that the ones with solar panels can go completely off the grid and continue to work in a zombie apocalypse. The only way that is accomplished is through energy storage.
Battery swapping might have a niche future for urban fleet applications (taxis, police cars, ...) where battery ownership and vehicle diversity aren't issues. Maybe Tesla is trying to make moves there?
Funny, this isn't a problem in consumer electronics, where thousands of different devices from flashlights to ghetto blasters use one of a very small number of battery sizes.
Don't think of it as swapping one monolithic battery... think of a Ferrari that runs on two 'AAA' cells, a Buick that runs on two 'AA's, a FedEx truck that runs on four 'C's, and an eighteen-wheeler that takes sixteen 'D' cells. Service stations would only need to stock a few discrete sizes.
You'd have to swap batteries more often on a long trip but I could see the swapping easily taking the same amount of time as filling a gas tank.
It would make more sense to lease the battery.
I don't think battery swapping is a great idea.
On the contrary, it's the only way EVs can possibly work for the masses. The drawbacks of swappable batteries are substantial and worrisome, but the potential benefits are staggering.
The thing I keep coming back to is this: as we transition to EVs, we have a once-in-a-century chance to do it right. Look how badly we screwed ourselves during most of the twentieth century when gasoline-powered cars started to become popular. Lead in gasoline. No emissions or crash-safety regulations. Transportation planning driven by politics rather than logic.
We need to be a little smarter this time around. That means not allowing the market to evolve in a manner that leads to 20 different manufacturers selling us vehicles with hardwired proprietary batteries that we charge by plugging them into the same outlets that charge our electric toothbrushes. It's frustrating that nobody seems to understand how dumb that is.
7-8 hundred feet for the people on the other side of my building.
and that's for 120v
Sure, but not at the household 120V/240V "leaf nodes," where much of the power is wasted before it ever reaches my car.
Ideally, EV batteries could be swapped at any gas station. Just as gas stations don't need their own oil wells, the batteries they lease could be charged and maintained at centralized plants with minimum electrical losses and optimized load scheduling, and trucked to the service stations. At some point, probably very soon, the energy-management advantages will exceed the energy used by the trucks.
This scheme will ultimately require mandatory standardization of battery form factors, much like fuel standards are already legislated. Fortunately, with modern power conversion technology, only the physical sizes of the batteries will need to be specified. Manufacturers will be able to compete with each other on chemistry, pricing, weight, and other factors.
In engineering terms, migrating to EVs any other way is insanely goddamned stupid, and that's why I just bought a new fossil-fueled car. I keep my cars a long time, though, so I'm optimistic that by the time I'm ready for my next one, it'll be a Tesla. That will happen only if I can spend less time refueling it than I do now, and not more. And that, in turn, can happen only with swappable batteries.