What Tesla owners are doing while you sleep

Re:What Tesla owners are doing while you sleep by pedrocr on Monday August 25, 2014 @06:49PM (#8224683)

Buy an extra Tesla battery and swap the batteries in the evening when you get home from work. I know this isn't presently practical, but the idea of swapping electric car batteries is being discussed for the future, to avoid long charging times.

It may not be practical to do at home but Tesla has already demonstrated automatic battery swapping on their Model S. They've timed it at twice as fast as filling up a comparable luxury gas car:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY

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Re:What Tesla owners are doing while you sleep by lutusp on Monday August 25, 2014 @06:56PM (#8224712)

Thanks! I managed to miss that development. I'm constantly amazed by how much advance thinking Elon Musk does -- it can't be an accident that the battery swap is so easy, it had to be planned that way.

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Re:What Tesla owners are doing while you sleep by toomuchtodo on Monday August 25, 2014 @07:36PM (#8224874)

It was because Tesla would receive the full EV credit amount in California, which has to be paid by other car manufactures if their vehicles don't meet emissions guidelines.

California appears to be phasing out that requirement (ability to swap the pack), which is why battery swap stations are no longer being pursued aggressively.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/05/business/la-fi-elect...

http://gas2.org/2014/07/02/ev-battery-swap-stations-may-be-a...

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Re:What Tesla owners are doing while you sleep by pedrocr on Monday August 25, 2014 @07:02PM (#8224733)

it can't be an accident that the battery swap is so easy, it had to be planned that way.

It had to be planned. I don't think it was feasible in the roadster because of the battery placement. But the model S has a nice flat battery on the bottom of the car, making for great weight distribution and easy access. I haven't seen any news of any actual swap stations though.

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Re:What Tesla owners are doing while you sleep by hueving on Monday August 25, 2014 @07:13PM (#8224781)

Well the battery swap has to be easy anyway since these will go bad after 6-8 years anyway.

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Re:What Tesla owners are doing while you sleep by mikeash on Monday August 25, 2014 @08:40PM (#8225060)

It doesn't have to be 90-seconds-with-a-robot easy for a replacement at 6-8 years. At likely costs for the replacement battery, a few hours of technician time on top of that won't make much of a difference.

Also, I don't think that battery lifetimes can be stated with such certainty yet. Few electric cars have been running long enough to know just how the batteries age with that usage. About the closest available is the fleet of older Priuses that are hitting a decade or more on the road, and they seem to have occasional failures but not the consistent aging that's been predicted... but of course they use the battery completely differently, and capacity is less important.

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