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Tesla discontinued battery swap because people do prefer to spend 1/2 hour charging, even when traveling with sleeping children. Note that this is only an issu

Tesla discontinued battery swap because people do prefer to spend 1/2 hour charging, even when traveling with sleeping children. Note that this is only an issue for long-distance travel; for day-to-day driving, most people will charge in their garage, their apartment's garage, or at a street-side charger.

bonzini 10y ago
Well, there was one battery swap station, and you had to book it and pay for it. Not exactly encouraging. Who is going to scale the street-side charger network? In Europe, a lot of cars are parked outdoors during the night. In smaller towns, parking spots around residential areas aren't even painted. Many other cars are parked in shared garages that don't guarantee one plug per car. I guess garage owners could install the chargers (but that would be hundreds of kW if electric cars were really commonplace---that is expensive infrastructure) and meters, but still it's hard to reach critical mass.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  I'm not sure how to reply, given that the things you say are hard are beginning to happen already.
  - bonzini 10y ago
    In a handful of big metropolitan areas. Good luck doing that throughout multiple continents. Most European countries are still on the order of magnitude of 1000 total EVs sold per year. Growing, sure, but still hardly a serious market penetration. And I am talking about problems with scaling: "beginning to happen" and "available for everyone who needs it" is not the same as "available for everyone". Installing a dozen chargers, unused most of the time, in a shopping mall's 1000-car parking lot is not the same as installing a few hundred chargers in a multistorey parking downtown that previously only needed to power some neons.
    - mseebach 10y ago
      Your error seems to be that you insist on seeing a big-bang overnight solution that works for Everyone(tm). That never happens. There are millions of people in Europe who has a private garage/carport/parking spot and can afford to install a charger there, and who lives within round trip battery capacity of where they need to go. Millions more who don't, but whose employers can be convinced to install chargers. That's more than enough for the kind of critical mass where apartment block landlords, employers and shopping centre parking lots will start to install chargers, not for novelty or green credentials, but for naked self interest. It's not overnight, but it will be very quick.
FireBeyond 10y ago
"Tesla discontinued battery swap because people do prefer to spend 1/2 hour charging, even when traveling with sleeping children." That was set up to fail. There was only one battery swap station. It was aimed at people commuting between LA and SF. Except: - you had to book in advance to use it - you had to pay a fee to use it - it was set up across the street from a Tesla Supercharger - despite ostensibly being for the commute between those cities, it was actually 15 miles away from the freeway, making for a significant detour If I was Elon Musk and wanted to demonstrate how people would much rather use charging stations than any kind of battery swap program, I think the above is a pretty good example of how I'd set up my battery swap program (for failure).
- greglindahl 10y ago
  15 miles from the freeway? Try less than a mile from I-5: https://goo.gl/maps/bDJACbS8XNE2 https://goo.gl/maps/bDJACbS8XNE2 As a Tesla owner, I didn't think all of the past back-and-forth about the swap station in blogs was that interesting. I eat dinner in Harris Ranch.
- Reason077 10y ago
  Battery swap doesn't really scale. It's hard to imagine battery swap stations being set up wherever you could conceivably need one, with all the associated infrastructure and labor costs, just so you can swap a battery in 10 minutes rather than supercharge in 30. And remember, chargers of the future will be faster still. CCS has been designed to scale to at least 300kW.
  - superdude 10y ago
    Yeah, it definitely seemed like it was too complicated of a process to be able to be anyone near as simple as recharging or refueling is.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    From first principles, a battery swap station seems to add just one relatively isolated component to an existing charge station... they would use the same power infrastructure, the same authorization protocols, the same locations...
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
I believe that battery swap was effectively a scam. There was some arbitrary full recharge time that had to be met to access some rebate program, and Tesla did exactly as much as they needed to do to meet the terms and then stopped. Electric cars are the future, and Tesla's are cool, so don't take this as a negative. The complexity of battery swapping was in ownership of the batteries, not in the physical swapping. It maybe makes sense for big taxi firms, but not for standard consumers. edit: adding a link with some corroboration since I got downvoted: http://insideevs.com/carb-zev-program-changes-tesla-takes-largest-hit/ http://insideevs.com/carb-zev-program-changes-tesla-takes-la...

bonzini 10y ago

Well, there was one battery swap station, and you had to book it and pay for it. Not exactly encouraging. Who is going to scale the street-side charger network? In Europe, a lot of cars are parked outdoors during the night. In smaller towns, parking spots around residential areas aren't even painted. Many other cars are parked in shared garages that don't guarantee one plug per car. I guess garage owners could install the chargers (but that would be hundreds of kW if electric cars were really commonplace---that is expensive infrastructure) and meters, but still it's hard to reach critical mass.

greglindahl 10y ago
I'm not sure how to reply, given that the things you say are hard are beginning to happen already.
- bonzini 10y ago
  In a handful of big metropolitan areas. Good luck doing that throughout multiple continents. Most European countries are still on the order of magnitude of 1000 total EVs sold per year. Growing, sure, but still hardly a serious market penetration. And I am talking about problems with scaling: "beginning to happen" and "available for everyone who needs it" is not the same as "available for everyone". Installing a dozen chargers, unused most of the time, in a shopping mall's 1000-car parking lot is not the same as installing a few hundred chargers in a multistorey parking downtown that previously only needed to power some neons.
  - mseebach 10y ago
    Your error seems to be that you insist on seeing a big-bang overnight solution that works for Everyone(tm). That never happens. There are millions of people in Europe who has a private garage/carport/parking spot and can afford to install a charger there, and who lives within round trip battery capacity of where they need to go. Millions more who don't, but whose employers can be convinced to install chargers. That's more than enough for the kind of critical mass where apartment block landlords, employers and shopping centre parking lots will start to install chargers, not for novelty or green credentials, but for naked self interest. It's not overnight, but it will be very quick.

FireBeyond 10y ago

"Tesla discontinued battery swap because people do prefer to spend 1/2 hour charging, even when traveling with sleeping children." That was set up to fail. There was only one battery swap station. It was aimed at people commuting between LA and SF. Except: - you had to book in advance to use it - you had to pay a fee to use it - it was set up across the street from a Tesla Supercharger - despite ostensibly being for the commute between those cities, it was actually 15 miles away from the freeway, making for a significant detour If I was Elon Musk and wanted to demonstrate how people would much rather use charging stations than any kind of battery swap program, I think the above is a pretty good example of how I'd set up my battery swap program (for failure).

greglindahl 10y ago
15 miles from the freeway? Try less than a mile from I-5: https://goo.gl/maps/bDJACbS8XNE2 https://goo.gl/maps/bDJACbS8XNE2 As a Tesla owner, I didn't think all of the past back-and-forth about the swap station in blogs was that interesting. I eat dinner in Harris Ranch.
Reason077 10y ago
Battery swap doesn't really scale. It's hard to imagine battery swap stations being set up wherever you could conceivably need one, with all the associated infrastructure and labor costs, just so you can swap a battery in 10 minutes rather than supercharge in 30. And remember, chargers of the future will be faster still. CCS has been designed to scale to at least 300kW.
- superdude 10y ago
  Yeah, it definitely seemed like it was too complicated of a process to be able to be anyone near as simple as recharging or refueling is.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  From first principles, a battery swap station seems to add just one relatively isolated component to an existing charge station... they would use the same power infrastructure, the same authorization protocols, the same locations...

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

I believe that battery swap was effectively a scam. There was some arbitrary full recharge time that had to be met to access some rebate program, and Tesla did exactly as much as they needed to do to meet the terms and then stopped. Electric cars are the future, and Tesla's are cool, so don't take this as a negative. The complexity of battery swapping was in ownership of the batteries, not in the physical swapping. It maybe makes sense for big taxi firms, but not for standard consumers. edit: adding a link with some corroboration since I got downvoted: http://insideevs.com/carb-zev-program-changes-tesla-takes-largest-hit/ http://insideevs.com/carb-zev-program-changes-tesla-takes-la...