Tesla: It's faster to 'recharge' electric car than pump gas
csmonitor.com
csmonitor.com
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.
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.
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.
Well, there was that time in the last year that I drove from New York to Jackson, Wyoming and back (~2000 miles each way). If I did that in a Tesla I'd want to battery-swap once or twice a day. Um, it looks like that might be possible sometime in the next year or two. Hurray!
(right now there aren't even any supercharger stations along that route, much less battery-swapping ones. There's an interactive map of stations here: http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger )
Though there's another question about that: How do you charge overnight at a hotel? Do you stay at motels and run an extension cord out the window? Is there a special database somewhere of hotels with convenient charging stations?
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.
They are gonna have a peak demand problem on holiday weekends, etc.
Take one out, start it charging on a super charger. 60 minutes later it's ready to be used.
And I really don't get why people stand in line at a Costco for 20 minutes to save 15c gallon. $3 savings for 20 minutes "work"? Is their time really that cheap?
When a battery comes out of a car, it goes on a charger(underground, or wherever). Each charging station starts with 42 batteries(2 extra for good measure) and each spot that a battery sits in wait is a charging station of its own. At minute 0 a battery goes on the charger. After 40 battery changes, one every 90 seconds, an hour has gone by. At this moment the first battery we put on the charger is full, and we have 39 more charging batteries each finishing their charge at 90 seccond intervals in the same order they went in.
In this way, we never run out of batteries.
Of course first they have to change the system to leased batteries so they dont have to give do the whole 'come back for _your_ battery' thing.
You are correct that this only really would work with leased batteries, but this would require owning up to the actual wholesale manufacturing costs of the batteries, depreciated across the number of miles before the battery is no longer practically usable. Tesla stockholders tend to get upset and confrontational when these numbers are discussed, despite that they are easy to determine since the cost of the Panasonic NCR18650A cell, the number used per Tesla (6831), and the lifespan of the cell, are all known.
Are you saying that 500(or however many) teslas would all be rolling into the same charge station from 200+ miles away within the same 30 minute(or whatever) window?
And what happens in the rare, almost zero-probability chance that there are no batteries there for you to take in the 90 seconds? You wait 30 minutes for your car to be charged.
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?
This particular solution seems very specific to Tesla (or even only model S), is there any standard or independent initiative for battery-exchange stations?
Just listened to the podcast the other day and was struck by how similar Tesla's model is to what he presented. The entire segment is around the question of "how would Steve Jobs run a car company".
1: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20081207_0055...
The Audi A4 takes three minutes to get a tank of gas which will last 448 miles. (http://autos.aol.com/cars-Audi-A4-2013/specs/mpg/)
Battery swap is for long road trips, not everyday usage.
I'm happy it made it through (while Fisker didn't), if only for the cool factor... or whatever is the reason Tesla made it and Fisker didn't. I hope it keeps on rocking, so it can fund more research into improving the battery life until EV are decidedly better than gasoline vehicles.
On a side note -- I get 70mpg from my Prius C class when I'm supermiling. The car cost me 20k USD as I bought it new. I understand Toyota has a plugin hybrid too: http://www.toyota.com/prius-plug-in/
Personally, I am strongly rooting for Tesla. Even is Tesla fails, they will have significantly changed the automobile landscape.
And they're largely succeeding. This is a company that will do anything to improve the product. Even build a nation-wide network of superchargers. That makes all the difference.
Anyways, I’m still rooting for an initiative akin to BetterPlace[1] to take off worldwide. I think having battery swapping stations at lots of places (like say, at every gas station) is a good solution to the action radius problem of electric cars.
58.9 miles per imperial gallon in miles per 16.1 US gallons = 789.6 miles.
Diesel fuel is denser, but it comes out of the pump just as quickly. Add perhaps 20 seconds for donning and discarding your disposable gloves.
N.B., the Tesla probably accelerates better and with less noise than the 2L diesel. But that said, for the cost of a Tesla, you could probably buy an Audi A4 and run it for 25 years (in the rather unlikely event your car search has narrowed itself down to exactly these two types of car).
For insanity, the Army fueling procedure involves putting a drip tray underneath the vehicle, wearing gloves/mask/etc., etc. Which maybe makes sense for some tactical vehicles, but is silly when they're putting regular auto gas into a leased SUV. This might have just been a contract requirement in Iraq/Afghanistan/Kuwait. The contrast with the civilian Iraqi fueling (plastic bottles by the side of the road...not fuel bottles, but 1.5L water bottles), and the Kuwaiti civilian stations (leave the vehicle running, remain in the vehicle smoking/on phone/etc. during fueling), was quite marked.
Virtually all petrol stations provide disposable gloves near the fuel pumps for this reason.
Tesla's numbers are good for distance driving and the EPA estimates are good for in-town driving. But since the battery swap is mainly applicable to distance driving, I would use Tesla's estimates.
It is still weird that they didn't find a solution where a supercharger station takes a few minutes to charge a car. I am sure they're working on it, and also I can't help but think that this is how it will work eventually.
Battery swapping is just an intermediary solution.
Tesla is very much at the forefront of electric car development, it's pretty exciting. Problems arise, solutions are tried, some will be discarded again - but the point is, they're doing it, and they will succeed, eventually.
Reuters reckons it'll be the same as filling a petrol car about $60 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/21/us-tesla-swap-idUS...
Edit:$60 apparently.
So yes, absolutely when talking of the cost of operation, we should consider both the electrical cost per recharge, and the cost of the battery.
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.
Conversely, the X has a huge technology overlap with the S. So it's extremely likely that it will work compatibly.
As for licensing the tech to other manufacturers, Elon has already said he's willing to talk with other companies about making the superchargers available, although there's accounting to be worked out.
What does this mean?
Suppose I'm driving two thousand miles and I swap batteries once or twice every day along the route. If I don't take the same route back and stop at the exact same spots, I've moved a dozen batteries 200 miles away from where they were before. Whoever dropped off the batteries I picked up now can't plausibly get them back.
On the other hand, suppose I DO plan to take the same route back. Suppose I drive 2000 miles, spend a week at my destination, then drive back. All the batteries I moved will be out of place for that week, so my schedule prevents their owners from getting the batteries back on their preferred schedule.
I'm sure they'll work it out somehow. At least with the new system long driving trips are finally somewhat practical! (Or will be once the stations are in place, anyway.)