Tesla Battery Swap Pilot Program To Begin Soon

Tesla will soon come good on its promise to offer customers ‘fast or free’ charging for their electric vehicles, with a pilot program set to begin next week.

The EV-maker already has 1748 Superchargers up and running at 312 sites around the world (including two in Australia), which offer customers free recharging for the life of the car.

As ever with EV-charging, time is the drawback here as a half charge takes around 20 minutes while a full battery charge takes around an hour.

But earlier this year, Tesla demonstrated how the battery in the Model S could be changed in less time than it takes to refuel many conventional cars using a fuel bowser.

A Model S driver casually parks upon the robotic system and doesn’t even need to alight from the car, as the robot arms do all the work and the driver departs with a fully-charged battery in around 90 seconds.

The carmaker’s goal of establishing the battery-swap service by year’s end is about to be realised, with a pilot program to operate in California opposite an existing supercharging station.