Tesla announces 90 sec battery swap
twitter.com
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I. The Good
I was originally* a big fan, faster than gas stations, but still compatible with at home "pumping" for city driving. It's basically a propane refill model, shops could buy back your old battery while they sold you a new one, so eventually you're really just paying for the energy at basically no wait.
II. The Bad
I grew more pessimistic as I started shopping for aftermarket cell phone batteries, noticing that:
a) Batteries degrade over time (in terms of capacity or depth of discharge)
b) Batteries are expensive, especially car batteries (though this should improve over time)
c) It's impossible to really know the exact capacity of a battery without a power cycle or two
Would you be willing to swap phone batteries with a stranger? What if the battery cost $4000? Who eats the cost of lemon batteries on the market? Does a sort of Gresham's Law kick in where suddenly everyone's dumping a lemon in every transaction?
Buying gas involves some trust, trust that they're not loading it up with crud, that it really has the energy capacity it says it does, that it's not 30% ethanol instead of 0, 10, 15. But I believe, based on the factors above, the trust relationship with a battery refill is a little more intense.
III. The Beautiful?
That said, now I'm of course swinging optimistic again. Car and Driver taught us that Tesla's diagnostic tools are awesome. Serial individual batteries, let the owner see its entire history, hidden lemon problem basically solved. Maybe build some "insurance" into battery costs, guarantee certain lifespan, smoothe out the cost of duds.
Musk can dodge some of the authentication problems by just keeping a tight grip on the infrastructure and the technology, but for this to really take off, Musk will want to allow competition, standardize battery swapping tech, encourage mom and pop "battery stations" to quickly build out the infrastructure in all the small towns he doesn't know are on the map. Not sure if that's in his personality though...
* Originally = Few years back I sat on a few panels for energy and transportation, wrote some white papers, nothing big.
EDIT: formatting, headings
Tesla's Shareholder Meeting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3AcKTmaoE8
Worth watching if you got an hour and a half to kill :)
That's true, I'm talking about what role battery swapping would ideally play in the infrastructure long term, vice supercharging stations or home charging.
If 20 years from now Tesla's battery swapping operation means they control the entire fuel delivery system for transportation in the US, then we have other problems.
In this case you are swapping with Tesla though. It's a big difference.
Anyways, Tesla were smart; they made a product people desired before building expensive battery-swap infrastructure. In Denmark, only about 200-250 cars that could use the battery-swap facilities were sold, so no wonder the company went bankrupt.
:)
Someone should do the math of how many 'equivelent fill ups' it takes to pay for a battery, and then subtract that from the total amount of fill ups possible before wearing out and electricity cost. I have a feeling this could be a very profitable investment.
With the battery swap Tesla has finally alleviated the "cross-country road trip" problem in a way that superchargers really couldn't. Now when you are comparing car vs. car you have no reason to turn your nose up at electric. And with Tesla making the best cars ever in the luxury sedan price range, they will likely do the same as they scale and create an economy car. The cost of batteries and production will continue to drop until the only real choice you're making is Tesla vs. Chevrolet. And Tesla makes better cars.
If I weren't a broke startup founder I would pour in all my money to Tesla stock.
As someone who's taken a one-way cross-country trip before (NYC->SF), no, no they haven't. The system only works if it's round trip.
Gas powered vehicles continue to be more practical unless you are firmly confined to a 100 mile radius in your vehicular needs and can afford to supplement your electric with an extra vehicle (the case for all Tesla owners so far) and/or alternate modes of transport.
> The system only works if it's round trip
Why?
I'm confused, why is this? From the tweet:
"Return the pack on your journey back or keep it & we'll bill you the difference"
That'd be very Musk-like thing to do.
Sell me the car without battery, make me sign up for a battery service at $X per month which guarantees access to batteries at the swap-stations (The first 'swap' being done when I get the car) and done.
Let me treat batteries like I treat AWS servers, totally replaceable cattle. No ownership issues, no "swap YOUR good battery for a dud one" issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VH4JloWFEI&feature=youtu.be
Source: http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/21/4450664/tesla-model-s-batt...
So, if you use this regularly, the cost benefit of electric cars decreases. Probably not much of a problem, as most trips are short and doable 'on your own battery'. It is an incentive to get your own battery back, though, and also may keep the actual usage of the service down a bit, so that they don't need to store zillions of batteries everywhere.
Why are we going towards electric vehicles? To reduce dependency upon conventional fuels. From where will electricity come? Nuclear Energy.
Can long term derivative benefits and harm be predicted? Spent nuclear fuel storage and getting rare earth minerals seem to be only obvious ones to me.
Sure robotic drivers will be masters of fuel efficiency, and quiet likely we'll end up sharing one car between many different people when that happens. But Jevon's paradox[0] suggests that we'll actually be using more fuel, not less. And it makes sense as well: driving will be so easy and not constrained by human factors (needing to sleep, eat, boredom with driving, being intoxicated etc) there are millions of reasons to have more cars doing more work.
Even ignoring environmental cost, the fuel cost to the individual would remove a lot of this usefulness (Why not commute 8 hours while you sleep, start your weekend on the beach the moment you wake up? Because it's so expensive!).
I pretty strongly believe that without fully electric cars, we'll never realize the benefits of fully robotic drivers.
I don't know about other electric cars, but this one doesn't use rare earth metals in the motor or battery. They use an AC induction motor that doesn't require permanent magnets, invented by Nikola Tesla actually.
http://www.teslamotors.com/it_CH/forum/forums/no-rare-earth-...
Yeah, I don't really get the fuss about electric vehicles. They might move us away from oil, but we mainly use fossil fuels to generate electricity... so this is merely an indirection.
Even coal powered electric plants are far more efficient than an ICE. So they are a cheaper source of fuel for the consumer and are putting out less C02. They are also far away from populated cities so the pollution isn't choking up the air in the city.
In the future we'll be running out of fossil fuels and generating electricity with same will be uneconomical compared to alternatives. It will be nice to have a mature EV industry at that point.
If the current political climate is any indication, coal.
Tesla is giving free "solar" energy through its supercharger network.
A.k.a. Fusion. ;)
Are there different battery types/options available that cost different prices?
As a different example, in GCC countries immigrants also tank your car, but there it's just cheap means of comfort.
>specially in cultures where there is a social stigma attached to joblessness and living off benefits
That's part of the point of a basic income as opposed to other means tested programs, there is no social stigma attached because everyone gets the basic income.
> prevents side-effects like detachment from the job market, petty crimes, mental illnesses and addictions.
How does low wage menial labor prevent mental illness or addictions. Sure people who are mentally ill or are addicted to hard drugs are are less likely to hold jobs, but the causality is in the opposite direction.
>do you prefer an unemployed who's got cash for booze and nothing to do, or would you prefer him to be at work like all his peers and family?
I'd prefer people do meaningful work that benefits the economy, instead of useless menial labor. Gas station attendants are almost completely nonexistent in other states, so clearly they aren't needed or wanted by the market.
Here's a proposal that should mesh with that ideology. Enact regulation that says that grass must be cut by hand with scissors. Watch companies spring up overnight to employ tens of thousands of low wage laborers.
Economists on all sides from Milton Friedman to Keynesians, to die hard socialists support some kind of basic income over our current welfare system. These are people who are diametrically opposed on almost every other issue yet they agree on this.
BTW most people 'standing there doing nothing but X' in Japan are actually very valuable and can help you in a lot of matters, even completely unrelated to X. Unefficient but priceless if you have a special need or just don't know how things work.
For 95% of newish cars this problem is fairly trivial because the gas cap/fuel doors are so similar (there are exceptions, I'm specifically thinking of cars that require you to press a button inside the car to open the refueling port), and any college robotics lab could design a system to handle it that was much less likely to scratch your car/spill gas than a human operator.
The problem is that in Oregon/New Jersey it's a jobs program, so regulators are unlikely to allow something like that.
In every other state, gas stations have no incentive to pay for such a system because they have no labor costs to save.
Only the next gen which has been re-engineered will be able.