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.

Tesla estimates that the battery swap procedure will cost between $60-80, depending on the battery pack (Model S cars can be built with two different battery pack sizes—60kWh and 85kWh). The only caveat is that drivers must swap back in their original battery pack on their return trip or pay a fee equal to the difference in value between the new and old batteries (there are no details yet on how much this fee might be).

In a write-up by Reuters, Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk explains that building out the network of battery-swapping terminals will require an investment of between $50 million and $100 million, and that another company with a similar business model entered liquidation less than a month ago. However, if there's one thing Elon Musk and Tesla Motors have proven to be good at, it's succeeding where others have failed.