Tesla's 'Faster Than You Could Fill A Gas Tank' Recharge Is Battery Swapping After All

While Tesla Motors has taken steps to improve the speed and breadth of its high-speed Supercharger network, the true holy grail of electric-vehicle charging would be to match the speed of a fill up at your local gas station. And Thursday night at the company's Hawthorne, Calif. design center, Tesla will demonstrate just that, using a variant of the technology pioneer by Israeli startup Better Place. The magic? Swapping out your battery. And while Tesla hasn't stated yet whether it will offer to do that, a splashy public demo suggests they just might be adding it to the arsenal. Expect details at the reveal tomorrow evening.

CEO Elon Musk has been slowly building drama around this for a while, tweeting about it on May 9:

But it's clearly been something Tesla has been working on for a while. As I wrote back on March 23 in Tesla's BMW 3-Series Fighter Just Might Be Your Next Car: "There was a hint in the annual report about battery-swapping stations, a la struggling EV startup Better Place." Since then Better Place has declared bankruptcy, having burned through $800 million of investors money while Tesla reported its first profitable quarter. It's worth noting that while the technology might be familiar, the similarities between Better Place and Tesla end there. The former was leasing batteries and charging-station access to purchasers of one model of Renault Fluence cars mostly in Israel and Denmark. It was basically making already pricey electric cars even more expensive.

Tesla, presumably, will either talk about this as a possible future offering or an option for people on the road who want to go long distances. Given the company's recent announcement greatly expanding the Supercharger network, it's certainly not going to be in lieu of the relatively quick charges offered at those freeway stops. But given the cost of running facilities, storing fully charged batteries and the estimated half million it cost Better Place to build "swap stations," it seems less likely Tesla is going to also spend millions on a broad rollout of battery swap points in the immediate future either. Further, there is active cooling on the current Model S battery system, with some complex connections to the vehicle. While it might be possible to swap it out in 5 minutes, speculation is that the current design is not optimized for doing that and making sure everything is working properly. Update: Musk followed up on Tuesday afternoon clarifying that all Model S sedans can have the battery swapped with this method.

Much will be answered at the demo, which Tesla promises to make available on the web at 9:30 Pacific time. The announcement of battery swapping also marks the end of a series of Tesla announcements that included the aforementioned first profitable quarter, the charger network, a financing plan that attempts to combine the best of leasing and buying, and the repayment of the company's loan to the federal government. From here, thing get a bit quieter, but the company has challenges entering the second part of 2013.

First, it will begin selling cars to Europe, which will limit official deliveries in the current quarter (although all evidence is that production continues to run at the pace of the previous one). Cars being shipped to Europe will count as inventory but not revenue. In the meantime, Tesla's recent debt and stock offering means that won't present any kind of cash crunch. Second, Tesla's ongoing fight for the right to run its own dealerships promises to remain messy. Currently, the company is doing battle in North Carolina, Texas and Virginia, and other states might follow suit. A deeper look at that will come in a future installment. In the meantime, more details on the charging announcement tomorrow.

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