I have been thinking about this since seeing the
roboarm Supercharger mockup Tesla did seven years ago. If we have cars that can drive themselves and thus we can send them to get a charge we will need something to keep from hiring teenagers to plug and unplug driverless cars.
But I was reading
@bradtem in the thread
Tesla forced to open superchargers to unlock billions and he suggested something I was thinking while reading his otherwise relentless tirade:
Once Tesla has perfected "Go Find Parking" mode, they need to add, "Free Up Charger" mode. As you arrive at a Supercharger it will tell you all the stalls that have finished charging, you simply pull up in front and unplug it, that car will have already unlocked the plug. Once the car is free from the Supercharger it will move to another free spot waiting for its owner to return.
This would mean not needing to worry about leaving your car at a Supercharger stall in case it gets busy (and it only needs to be over 50% busy for a second to start the idle fees). Sure it would be nice to arrive at a Supercharger and have lots of empty stalls, but at malls where LOTS of them are, this isn't always easy. This would also be an advantage of being a Tesla owner once they open Superchargers to CCS vehicles, they would still have to deal with idle fees until their manufacturers offer "G.F.P." mode.
Oh, that's an old plan I've written about many times before...
Even when slots are empty, you still must move. Elon Musk has bragged that soon the "Summon" mode in Teslas will let you summon the car from across the country. They are a very long way from that, but there is a summoning application which they could implement which would actually be useful and...
ideas.4brad.com
And I got quite frustrated and I guess I'm not too shocked that it turned into a "relentless tirade." It's intellectually interesting to see the emotional way our opinions get driven. To me it's clear that the issue at hand is a stall being blocked by somebody when somebody else needs it, but people instead focus on various means to bring that out as though they are the true goal, rather than the means. And it's surprisingly hard to get them to talk about the actual goal, as though, once we found one means (idle fees at 50% full or all the time, or policies of moving your car immediately) that only this approach is acceptable. But enough about that.
There are many things Tesla can do, with various levels of complexity. I think they should actually manage a virtual line, and tell people when it is their turn and when to move their car out. Others find that complex and seem to prefer to wait in a physical line (which to me is a strange choice, but I hate any line that is unnecessary and if restaurants can handle virtual lines for tables I think Tesla can handle it.)
The ability of cars to move themselves in and out of stalls is somewhat independent of that, but it makes sense to do them together. A car can leave a stall on its own without any concept of a line, but it needs to know it is its "turn" to drive into a stall. There are always drivers coming and going -- and when there is a line, there are always drivers arriving and sitting around waiting -- so manual plug/unplug is pretty easy to get done by those drivers.
For Tesla, the challenge is to get parking lot operations (smarter summon) good enough to operate in a parking lot with other cars and pedestrians with no supervision. That's not trivial but it's a lot easier than getting FSD to work. There are a few tricks that could make it work better:
- For some superchargers, there is a row of parking stalls right across from the SC stalls. If the opposite stall is free, the car only has to do a very simple trip across the aisle. Of course, it would not always be free. And if a 2nd car wants to leave that stall and the 1st is not removed, it can't do this trick.
- They could rely on the other Teslas in the line (this is a full station after all) to report that the coast is clear and that a free spot is close. But what happens if somebody then enters the area? You will know about it to stay safe, but do you just freeze or retreat? Not good.
- The waiting driver could actually deliberately block the lane in one direction, so that the car can get out without fear a car will come from that direction. But only that direction, and once it's out it still has to be able to be sure to get to a space. The waiting driver could also be on foot stopping people from coming from the other direction, even pedestrians, but you have to trust them and again, what happens if there's no spot in that blockaded zone?
In the end, you probably have to wait until you have a reliable smarter summon, so the car can pull out, and start cruising the lot for a clear spot. Fortunately, SC are usually at the back of the lot and there are tons of spots around them. Though some SC stations are in crowded lots with nothing free unless it's reserved for waiting Teslas only. You might need to reserve 2x the spots for waiting Teslas. That would be rare to fill up.
It's ideal if the car is unplugged and moved before a new driver arrives, of course. Which should happen almost all the time. If a station is truly full, you don't want the arriving driver to have to waste time getting out, unplugging, waiting for the car to leave and then getting back in their car. I mean that's not a lot of time in the grand scheme, but more ideal is the car left a few minutes before that driver arrived and it was unplugged by any other driver who came or went before that.
