


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.

Now read: Tesla Model S is now the best-selling luxury car – with an asterisk