A long time ago, I ate dinner with Martin Eberhard, and the subject of battery swap came up. He was incredibly dismissive of the idea. He said the first problem is safety: to pass the required safety standards, you've got to attach the pack very, very firmly - a problem you don't have with things like Fundamentally the problem is economics: in a car you have a $100 tank that you're filling up with $50 of fuel. But in an EV, you have a $40,000 pack that you're filling up with $5 of fuel. And that's just crazy. Swapping an old pack for a new one means you might get an increase of $20,000 in value for the $20 cost of a swap. In the 8 years since that dinner, the price of a pack has gone down, and the price of the electricity up, but the imbalance is still there: you're filling a $20,000 tank with $10 of electrons. It makes almost as much sense to just swap out the car.
One thing I'll never forget: his comment about Shai. "Shai Agassi is leading the fight for battery swap not because it's a good idea, but because he has incredible charisma. And in the end, that will be incredibly important, because battery swapping is going to fail and he'll need every ounce of that charisma to convince people to go in a new direction" On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 9:38 AM, Robert Bruninga via EV <ev@lists.evdl.org> wrote: > I always wondered why someone as smart as Tesla would stoop to the > stupidest idea ever (battery swapping) for highway EV’s. Surely they > understood EV’s enough to know that EV’s generally charge while parked, not > while in use. But then Superchargers make it possible for distant > convenient travel… > > So how could Tesla be so dumb to invest in “battery swap”… > > The answer, is smarter than we thought… > > > http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1097214_tesla-battery-swapping-useful-service-or-minimal-effort-for-extra-income > > It looks like all they had to do was demonstrate ONE working battery-swap > station and then they got full extra credit for the California State > requirement for full-range-replenishment in under 10 minutes. They met > that goal (one station) and then collected $66,000,000 in EV credits! > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20150317/d0030aa7/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
