Tesla offers battery swapping for Model S

Tesla has announced another range-boosting option for its Model S sedan: battery swapping. Later this year the company will open fully automated swap stations beside its Supercharger fast-charge points along the major freeway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A similar rollout will follow along the corridor from Washington DC to Boston.

To date, the company has not made it widely known the Model S was designed from the outset to accommodate a battery swap option. But in the lead-up to the announcement, the Californian EV specialist’s CEO, Elon Musk, told US media he had been talking about battery swapping for years. It’s not a revolutionary idea, he told Clean Technica during a teleconference in which the subject of Better Place came up. More, it was a matter of getting the swap technology and the business model right.

He now appears satisfied the time and the numbers are right. In an immaculately staged presentation last week, Musk ran a time trial pitting a Model S battery swap live on stage against footage of a Tesla employee refilling an Audi at what Musk assured his audience was a fast pump.

Naturally, the battery swap emerged the winner. Twice over, in fact – in the four minutes it took to swipe a card at the pump and fill the Audi’s tank, Musk was able to usher two Model S’s on stage for consecutive swaps, timed at about 90 seconds each.

Prices haven’t been officially confirmed yet, but each swap is likely to cost $US60-80. There’s a catch, though: drivers have to come back and have their original battery pack refitted. That will cost another swap fee, but failure to do so will cost them the difference between the value of their old power pack and the new one.

Owners have plenty of incentive, then, to instead settle down for half an hour at the Supercharger next to the swap station and top up their original battery for nothing.

As Musk put it at his presentation, “The only decision you need to make when you come to one of our Tesla stations is: Do you prefer faster, or free?”

The swap stations require some measure of stability in the power grid, an issue Forbes reports Tesla is nutting out with utilities. It’s useful, then, that with their racks of batteries stowed away underground, the stations bear loads of potential as energy storage facilities, effectively helping give themselves what they need. It also stands a good chance of minimising that element of each station’s running costs.

On the surface of it, Tesla’s announcement last week that it’s rolling out battery swapping stations in parallel with its Supercharger rapid-charge network looks like some cruel prank on Better Place. In reality, the two business models are dramatically different, as Forbes writer Mark Rogowsky points out.

For a start, battery swapping and leasing doesn’t lie at the heart of Musk’s business model. It’s merely an adjunct to the much larger enterprise of designing, developing and building automobiles. The swap stations are merely to help overcome the product’s early-life range shortcomings, making it more viable and therefore attractive to prospective buyers.

Costing an estimated half-million dollars apiece to build and more to maintain, they will cost Tesla money, at least for the time it takes to build a substantial customer base. That won’t happen at least until it goes to market with its affordable compact platform, currently mooted for 2016.

And unlike Better Place’s model, which the Israeli company was lobbying the entire EV industry to accommodate, Tesla’s model is Tesla-specific. That’s useful for Musk in that it means he’s not dependent on other makers for the whole enterprise to survive.

But the idea is not above backfiring. Apple’s citadel approach to technology sharing – ie as little as it could possibly get away with – nearly killed it in the early 1990s, and its demands of consumers and authorities didn’t extend anywhere near the land and other physical resources required for exclusive, branded charge/swap stations.

As CNET’s Wayne Cunningham put it, “watching Tesla's video, it gave me chills – the bad kind – when Musk said Model S owners could pull into a ‘Tesla station’. Will the landscape be populated with Nissan Leaf stations, Honda Fit EV stations, Ford Focus Electric stations?”

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