Electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors made a splash last June with the announcement that it planned to offer 90-second battery pack swaps for Model S owners. The battery pack swaps were to be a fast alternative to actually charging the car’s battery; a quick 100-mile top off at a Tesla Supercharger station still takes between 15 and 20 minutes, while the automated battery swap demonstrated by Tesla took less time than it took to fill up an Audi A8 sedan with gas.
However, the demonstration was just that—although Tesla continued to build out Supercharger stations around the US at a quick pace, none of them were equipped with the battery-swap technology.
It’s taken about eighteen months, but this appears to finally be about to change. In a Friday afternoon blog post, Tesla announced that certain invite-only customers can have their cars’ batteries swapped out at a special facility across the street from the company’s Harris Ranch, California, Supercharger location. The post notes that because of the addition of titanium and aluminum "shields" to the bottom of Model S sedans, the swap will take somewhere in the neighborhood of three minutes to complete rather than the 90 seconds demonstrated on stage in 2013.
According to the post, the battery swap is expected to cost "slightly less than a full tank of gasoline for a premium sedan." This jibes with the estimates discussed last year, which put the cost in the $60-80 range. However, Model S battery packs have a rated design life, and customers would be expected to eventually return to the swap station and reclaim their car’s original pack; failure to do so would incur a fee equal to the difference in value between the two battery packs (there are no details as to how high this fee might be, but out-of-warranty battery pack replacements for the Model S can range as high as $12,000).
When the on-stage demo was performed, some sites speculated that not all Model S sedans would be able to undergo the battery swap because the battery pack is a stressed member—that is, it’s secured to the car’s frame and bears some amount of load, increasing the chassis rigidity, and replacing it would be a complex operation involving the removal of a significant amount of fasteners and glue. However, when Ars reached out to Tesla for comment, the company explicitly confirmed that all production Model S cars can undergo the automated battery swap procedure.
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