Tesla Talks Battery Swap Station

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that EV drivers will soon have the option to swap their vehicle batteries for fully charged units rather than wait 30 minutes at a charging station. Swapping batteries on the Model S will take just 90 seconds, but will cost about the same as buying 15 gallons of gasoline. Drivers can also pick up their original charged battery at the same station later.

The swap option will eliminate the time-consuming charge process for drivers on long trips who don’t want to linger at a charge station for a half hour.

“There are people that take a lot of convincing. I think it’s important for us to address the reasons people are not buying electric cars. People need to feel they have the same level of freedom they have with gasoline cars. If they need to get somewhere in a hurry, they can do that. In fact, they can get there faster,” Musk said at the company’s design studio in Hawthorne last week.

The battery swap stations will each cost roughly a half a million dollars to build. Musk said the company plans to build stations along the L.A./San Francisco and Boston/New York corridors first.

We wrote about a battery swap system for an electric motorcycle not too long ago. A third-party battery swap company, Better Place, attempted a similar model but filed for bankruptcy this year.

Source: L.A. Times