Tesla introduces battery fast-swap for its Model S! 90 seconds!!! [View all]

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OK, this is pretty cool! Worried about running out of juice in your Tesla while on a long road trip? Elon Musk has a solution!

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/06/long-trip-tesla-motors-will-swap-your-model-s-battery-while-you-wait/

Long trip? Tesla Motors will swap your Model S battery while you wait
Electric car maker can slap in new battery in less time than it takes to get gas.

by Lee Hutchinson - June 21 2013, 9:28am MDT

Weirdly profitable electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors last night showed off a new piece of its plan to make electric cars usable by everyone: a 90-second battery swap.

The one-two punch of limited range coupled with a lack of places to charge up is still the Achilles Heel of electric car ownership (well, that and the fact that at a starting price of $62,400, the Model S is still priced out of reach of a typical car buyer). The Model S is an amazingly successful electric vehicle, but in its base configuration it still only gets between 200 and 230 miles on a full charge, with the exact mileage depending on driving conditions and whether or not you're using the air conditioner. This isn't an issue for commuting around town, but for a road trip between cities, the range suddenly becomes a highly limiting factor.

One way Tesla Motors is working on the problem is by constructing "Supercharger Stations" on main highway corridors between major urban areas. These Superchargers use jumbo DC plugs to juice up a Model S's battery pack to 50 percent of a full charge within 20 minutes (the fastest home chargers, by way of comparison, take at least four times longer to deliver the same amount of charge). By 2015, Tesla plans to have built enough of the stations that Model S drivers can drive coast-to-coast without running out of juice. And the Superchargers are free for Model S owners to use.

But waiting 20 minutes for your battery to charge halfway so you can continue on a road trip isn't always an option. To address that, Tesla will offer an alternative at the Supercharger stations: in less than 90 seconds, Tesla will swap your car's battery pack out for a fully charged one. The Model S's battery pack is a sealed unit that sits underneath the floorpan; it's made up of more than 7,000 individual 3.1 amp-hour cells and weighs over 1,000 pounds. Using a computerized system of automated wrenches and lifts that sit in a pit beneath the car, the battery-swap process quickly detaches the existing, presumably spent battery and lifts a new battery into place, all without the driver needing to exit the vehicle. The car can then be driven away.