Battery Swap Station

5

Closed

Description

Instead of charging stations how about manned or automated swap stations – turn up and your battery is swapped with a charged one and off you go. You only ever own a single battery and don’t have to wait hours at charging stations. The station will have a stock of batteries that we constantly being recharged ready for the next customer.

Competitive/Pricing/Notes

Of course, a charge/subscription would be made for this service but seems like a great way to remove the wait times from a journey?-

Status

Moderator: Implemented, but ultimately failed. Very few users doomed this project, although the test might not have been ideal. The entire system is very complex, very expensive, and requires huge capital outlays for Tesla. The last company, Better Place that tried this went bankrupt.

Update 2: With more and more range, over 400 miles with the Model S in 2020, the need for battery swapping makes even less sense.


Category: CY3XS Applies to:
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     Created 31-Jul-2017

6 Comments

I would never willingly swap out my battery packs, for which I have cared lovingly, for some random packs that could be in any arbitrary condition with any history of abuse/neglect. Odds are very good that my own packs are in better condition than some "fleet" packs would be.
    Created 11-Dec-2018
Very hardware configuration specific and not scalable to other brands of cars to be a long-term success.

i think higher capacity and faster charging battery technologies have a better hope for the future.
    Created 2-Dec-2018
I always assumed this was a technology demonstration for fleets, such as taxicabs and police cars.
    Created 2-Nov-2017
Harris Ranch may not be the most desirable location to test this feature and it was early on in production.
    Created 18-Sep-2017
As already stated this was tried and Tesla customers did not use the service in financially practical numbers to warrant further development.  In fact Tesla shut down the experiment.
    Created 1-Aug-2017
Implementation was tried at Harris Ranch, and Tesla has been nearly silent on whether this will be a product for the future.
    Created 31-Jul-2017
AndyM
3,995