

An aspirational shot of the Tesla Model S

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If you thought that Tesla’s network of Superchargers, which can give your electric vehicle 200 miles of range in 30 minutes of charging, was too slow, Elon Musk’s company now has an even better solution: Swapping your depleted Tesla Model S battery for a fully charged battery in 90 seconds. That’s less time than it takes to refuel your gas- or diesel-powered car. This technology, dubbed Battery Swap, will hopefully come to Model S owners in California in 2013, with the Boston-Washington D.C. corridor sometime after that.

Battery Swap is exactly what it sounds like. You will drive into a Tesla Supercharger station, maneuver your Model S into position, and then stop the car. An automated mechanism then reaches up, unbolts the car’s battery pack, lowers it, and then ferries it away (presumably to be held and charged somewhere underneath the station). A fully charged battery is then lifted up by the robotic arm and bolted into place. That’s it: You can drive away.

In the video below you can see two Model S electric vehicles having their batteries swapped in just over three minutes, while an unfortunate Audi owner (in exciting, 24esque split-screen) takes three minutes to refill his car with gasoline.

While Supercharging is free (and always will be, according to Musk), Battery Swapping will cost the same as “15 gallons of gas,” which equates to around $60-80, depending on where you live. On the return leg of the journey, you pick up your (now fully charged) old battery, again paying the same $60-80 cost. Another option will be paying the price difference between your old battery and the new one, which will probably only be desirable when your old battery is actually fairly old. You can also return home with the borrowed battery pack, and Tesla will ship your old battery pack to you for an as-yet-undetermined “transport fee.”

Somewhat surprisingly, it seems Tesla always planned for battery swapping to be a feature of the Tesla S, but kept it a secret until now. “We designed Model S from the beginning to be capable of swapping out the battery pack faster than you can fill a gas tank,” says Tesla CEO Elon Musk. As it stands, the current goal is to get Battery Swap into Californian Supercharger stations before the end of 2013, with Superchargers on the Eastern Seaboard being upgraded sometime after that. Eventually, if Tesla continues to go from strength to strength, most of the Supercharger network should be upgraded with Battery Swap technology. As we reported recently, Tesla’s current plan is to build a Supercharger network that covers most of the East and West coasts by the end of 2013, and provide multiple routes across the country by 2015.

Tesla Supercharger network, 2015

As for why Musk is only telling us about the Model S’s Battery Swap capability now, it’s probably just a case of Tesla’s marketing department trying to keep the company and its cars in the limelight. In recent months and years there have been a few semi-related innovations in quick battery charging and swapping techniques, and Tesla undoubtedly wants to be ahead of the game. A couple of years ago, a MIT research group demoed a battery that can be recharged by filling it with fresh goo. Earlier this year, we wrote about an aluminum-air battery that can power an electric vehicle for 1,000 miles — and can then have its aluminium plates switched out, at a cost of around $50, providing another 1,000 miles — equivalent to around 90 mpg.


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  • gogarty

    I’m looking forward to the Teslas being practical soon. There’s a lot to like about them. But just showing the duration of time to fill a tank on what looks like an A6 that is going to give about twice the range of the Tesla that’s charging in half the time omits the fact that would have provided the full story.

  • orenmaurice

    This system sounds very similar to the one deployed by “Better Place” in Israel and the Netherlands. It failed miserably here, but by all that I know, mostly because of a bad pricing model. Lets hope it’ll work better for Tesla.

    Personally, I think it’ll be better if they allow you to replenish your battery by filling it with “fresh goo”, or replacing the Aluminum bits. This way, if you go cross-country, you don’t have to travel back the same exact route, replacing batteries at the same stations to avoid extra fees.

  • Joel Detrow

    It’s about time someone started attempting this! I’ve thought for a long time that this is a great idea, mainly because it allows for multiple methods of recharging. If you’re in a hurry, find a Tesla station and swap out for a fresh battery while paying a little extra for the service; if you can wait, any charging station will do just fine.