Is This The Future? Tesla Unveils 90-Second Car Battery Pack Swap
While there have been many electric and hybrid car models around for quite some time now, the idea of charging the batteries manually and “plugging in your car” didn’t bode well with many customers. That might just change now.
Tesla has unveiled a new system that allows people to change the battery pack in their electric cars in just 90-seconds, less than half the time it takes to fill up a car with petrol/diesel.
Musk and Franz Von Holzhausen, Tesla’s chief designer, demonstrated the system late yesterday at the company’s Hawthorne, California, design studio.
“There are some people, they take a lot of convincing,” Musk said at an event at Tesla’s Los Angeles design studio. “Hopefully this is what convinces people finally that electric cars are the future.”
The device removes and replaces the car’s 1,000-pound (454 kilogram) lithium-ion battery with a fully charged one in just 90 seconds, said Musk, who used it to swap packs in two cars faster than an Audi AG sedan could be refilled with gasoline.
A battery pack swap will cost between $60 and $80, about the same as filling up a 15-gallon gas tank, Musk said. Drivers who choose to swap must reclaim their original battery on their return trip or pay the difference in cost for the new pack.
These charging stations will cost about a half a million dollars each to build. They will be located alongside Tesla’s fast-charging stations, which take around 30 minutes to charge the car’s battery.
A boost for the clean fuel industry!
[Via]
