Tesla Is Into Swapping While Nissan Is Watching

Bertel Schmitt
by Bertel Schmitt

Now that Better Place went belly-up, Tesla joined the battery-swapping lifestyle. As promised, Tesla unveiled a system to swap battery packs in its electric cars. According to Reuters, Tesla “will roll out the battery-swapping stations later this year, beginning along the heavily-traveled route between Los Angeles and San Francisco and then in the Washington-to-Boston corridor.”

“There are some people, they take a lot of convincing,” Musk told the wire. “Hopefully this is what convinces people finally that electric cars are the future.”

The swapping transaction itself needs a little polish. Says Reuters: “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.”

The technology garnered attention from an unlikely corner: That of Nissan, maker of the Leaf. The swapporama was featured in today’s issue of “The Week in Autos,” featuring the always elegant Coco Masters and the dapper Ian Rowley, both of Nissan’s global newsroom, and both familiar faces on TTAC.

Interestingly, their series does what other makers rarely do: Talk about the competition. They even talk nice about the other guys. Tesla is partially owned by Nissan’s rival Toyota, which makes the matter even more interesting.


Bertel Schmitt
Bertel Schmitt

Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.

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  • Da Coyote Da Coyote on Jun 21, 2013

    Actually, a battery swap scheme may actually work....given the requisite infrastructure. This would eliminate the excessive waiting for a recharge, and if we could standardize battery packs (in some modular fashion perhaps in order to facilitate different power requirements), we could eliminate the long-term battery replacement charge fears. Given all that, we still have the problems of providing adequate "juice" to feed all those battery charging systems. Our power infrastructure is - shall we say - about as adequate as is the IQ of our congresscritters.

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    • Corntrollio Corntrollio on Jun 24, 2013

      @mkirk ::especially with respect to California. Don’t they already have issues keeping the lights on out there? It may be better for the enviornment to build more power plants and charge the batteries due to how they run, but good luck with that in California.:: You're talking about an event that happened over 10 years ago because of wide-scale price manipulation by Enron among others. This is the quickest source, although I'm sure there are better ones. California's deregulation of the industry allowed it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis There was never actually a shortage of power plant capacity. California has also had no trouble building power plants, despite claims that environmentalists are preventing them from being built. In fact, even Cato noted that 11 power plants (one of which was coal) were built in the 90s, and only one was rejected outright. According to Cato, between 1998 and mid-2001 (all post deregulation) alone, California approved 9 new power plants with a capacity of over 22GW.

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