Why hasn't Tesla gotten into this sort of battery swap tech for their own cars yet?
Most people use their cars for well under 100 miles per day. With a battery-electric car, you can charge it at home. You never go to a station for anything -- not fuel, not fast-charging, not battery swapping. You come home, plug in, and get on with your life.
People will make a few long trips per year, and those cases are well handled by the supercharger network. It doesn't take long, and corresponds to down-time that most drivers should be taking anyway.
There is nothing for them to gain by a massive redesign that would gain most users little to nothing. Instead, they take the stable battery pack and design around it, even making it a structural part of the vehicle to save weight.
Replaceable battery packs for cars solve a non-problem. People who would want them would do better purchasing a gasoline car, which are readily available and will remain so for quite some time.
Most people in most big cities don't have private parking they can equip with a charger, and they struggle to even find parking at all. You'd have to make every single parking space in a big city a charger to make this approach scale.
... should use fast chargers, if they have no 'at home' option.
Most people in the US live in single family detached homes and can get enough juice from a 120V outlet to meet their daily driving needs.
People who insist on having cars in cities will either find places to charge, continue to own gas cars, or switch to ride sharing plus public transport. It is not a case for Tesla to change their entire design.
I don't know what portion of US drivers park either on the street or in a parking garage, but I'm pretty sure it''s tens of millions of people. Driveways pretty much don't exist in my neighborhood. It's all parking garages and street parking.
Lining every parking garage and neighborhood street with dozens of chargers may be the optimal solution, but I'm skeptical.
All the charger does is tell the car how much power it’s allowed to use, authenticates the car, and flicks the switch on at the command of the car. The charger also has a cheap-as-chips current transformer so it can make sure the car doesn’t consumer more power than it allowed, and will flick the switch off if the car misbehaves. The car is responsible for everything else.
So at the end of the day, and on street slower charger is a metal post with a plug on the outside, and a Raspberry Pi and relay inside. They can, and will eventually be, dirt cheap to manufacture. As for power cables, well, and can just slice into the cable already powering houses and lampposts.
DC fast chargers are more complex and expensive but still way cheaper than a robotic mechanical battery swap system that works across multiple makes and models of car. And more of these are being installed literally every day:
Tesla: https://supercharge.info Others (US): https://fastcharger.info
We're getting to the point where many newer EVs are coming with 300+ miles of range that can do an 80% charge in 20 minutes.
The swappable batteries seems like a great solution for mopeds etc. but for giant car batteries I think better and cheaper batteries will outpace any advantages that battery swapping has within a few years.
Is there public data about how big the network would need to be if 90-100% of long distance travel is switched from 5 min gas station stops to super charging; both in terms of throughput and latency? And/or studies of (probably rare) mass transit events that may or may not be expected; thinking natural disasters and large events away from population centers like burning man or Coachella.
It's a ton of fun for track, adventure trails etc, but for commuting, not having your body be the crumple zone is tough to compete with.
"In 2013, California revised its Zero Emissions Vehicle credit system so that long-range ZEVs that were able to charge 80% in under 15 minutes earned almost twice as many credits as those that didn’t. Overnight, Tesla’s 85 kWh Model S went from earning four credits per vehicle to seven. Moreover, to earn this dramatic increase in credits, Tesla needed to prove to CARB that such rapid refueling events were possible. By demonstrating battery swap on just one vehicle, Tesla nearly doubled the ZEV credits earned by its entire fleet even if none of them actually used the swap capability."
- The battery is expensive and makes up a large chunk of value of the car itself. Being able to swap out a dying years-old battery for a fresh new one doesn't make sense.
- Swapping an electric car's battery is time consuming and requires specialized equipment and labor.
- The real utility for battery swaps for cars isn't in the middle of the city but in remote highway stops, where setting up such stations isn't feasible.
I, myself, don't see how this can be more competitive than superchargers. But I do see that some customers would like to have this option.
Might as well just stop in for a 20 minute charge at a DC fast charger, many cars can do an 80% charge in 20 minutes.
My gas powered car gets around 300 miles of range before the fuel light comes on and I need to make a 10 or 15 minute stop to refuel. I think I could survive with an EV that gets 250 miles of range between charges (300 mile rated range, assuming 80% charge) before needing a 20 minute charge stop, I need to stop and stretch my legs, eat, or use the restroom more often than that.
We'll see these battery swaps right after FSD actually becomes L3.