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They probably had acceptable conditions. Who knows if the $7.5B incentive will or not.
Tesla is the Apple of automakers. TPC is Lightning: superior to the alternative (CCS1/Micro USB) but proprietary. Of course, you can connect the two together with adapters. However, there is no reason to switch all Apple products (or Tesla products) to an inferior standard (Micro USB was always frustrating because you'd try to insert it the wrong way half the time). But eventually, we did end up with something that is superior to both Micro USB and Lightning: USB-C, which put the pins on the inside of the connector rather than the outside. USB-C is basically a connector with all of the mistakes made with Micro USB and Lightning fixed. And it's up to Tesla to know when that time comes and unlike Apple, actually switch over when we get something that's superior to both CCS1 and TPC.
Mockingbird
Member
If Tesla doesn't accept the money, plenty of others will.
CCS charging stations will easily outnumber Superchargers.
gglockner
Member
Midnightsun
Active Member
They are starting to slip. Brand new 8 stall Supercharger near my home opened Dec 9th, went there only 2 times. First time the stall I chose did not work. Second time a guy pulls in beside me beside me could not get the car to charge, said too low to charge so I told him to try another charger where it worked fine. At least 2 of them are dead, maybe more since I never tried all of them. My S never went above 110kwh even though it is a 250kw V3 station. A guy I talked to had been there for a while and complained his M3 never went over 50kw charge speed.
Yup. I am sure that eventually - and I don't mean all that long into the future - some further new 'standard' will be developed. EVs are still relatively early into their development and I do not think that any of the current charging connectors are sufficiently advanced to hold up in the long term. Hopefully, the new 'standard' when it comes out, will be adopted universally and be able to stand a considerable test of time, though I am not entirely confident about that: experience has shown that true universality is hard to achieve and also that standards, in any event, do tend to get upgraded with the passage of time.
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Yeah I'm aware of that, I've used a MacBook with USB-C for several years now. But I'm convinced that Apple only did that because at the time, MacBook products used Intel CPUs and Intel included USB-C on their chips. Otherwise they'd have stubbornly kept pushing their own proprietary Lightning connectors just like they have continued doing to this day on the iPhone. The day USB-C came out is the day Apple ran out of excuses to keep pushing Lightning because USB-C solved the frustrating "can't insert the connector upside down" problem and also fixed Lightning's issues with the pins on the outside.
I really don't like proprietary interfaces but I'll support them when when they provide a way better user experience than anything "standard" that's out there. So I could see Apple's purpose of pushing Lightning, but only up until the point USB-C was developed. And I think TPC falls into the same category and the analogy of Tesla being the Apple of auto makers is a pretty good one: Tesla has the most popular product, it makes technology, well, "S3XY", it has a very large volume that means it can push whatever interface it wants and get away with it, its interface provides a way superior user experience than the "standard" alternative, etc. So I'll support them on pushing TPC up until the point we actually get a standardized connector that solves all of the problems with J1772 and CCS: the latches that break, the fact that the DC pins look like they're kludged onto the bottom of the connector, the fact that holding a CHAdeMO or CCS connector feels like you're holding a fire hose, etc.
What was the SOC of your cars and were the packs fully warmed up? I'd guess that both cars had cold packs and were at relatively high states of charge.
Even here in Southern California at this time of year, if the pack isn't warmed up, SC speeds are noticeably slower.
It would be useful if Tesla would give you actual battery pack temps and what the maximum theoretical speed is for the Supercharger you're using and battery conditions.
Midnightsun
Active Member
No clue about the other guy but mine was at 30% and had driven for a good hour so probably warmed up enough then again it was -20C outside. Did not tell the car I was on the way to a SC so it did not prepare for SC charging.
stopcrazypp
Well-Known Member
With the latest cold weather updates (see the whole investigation about a possible recall), the car may prioritize cabin heating instead of battery heating if you don't tell it that you are going to an SC. I don't know how true it is, but people say it even steals heat from the battery to aid in cabin heating.
In weather that cold, even an hour of driving is not enough without conditioning. The battery needs to be up at 40-50C or something to get max SC speeds...
Example comparing two recent SC sessions - one after driving 4 hours with a SC stop in between and preconditioning - I got about 150 kW at 50% SOC (this is normal for my Model 3). Another, I drove 90 minutes in 40F/4C temps at freeway speeds after L2 charging 3.5 hours overnight in a 60F/15C garage, but only 10 min of preconditioning, and only got 80 kW at 50% SOC a few minutes into the session. At 70%, normally get 90 kW with a hot battery, but was down to 63 kW on this "cold" battery session.
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Apple has never used lightning on their Macs. They never used the 30 pin iPod connector before lightning either( which went back to their PowerPC days). They have always been USB/Thunderbolt( before USB-C merged the two)/FireWire( when FireWire was superior to USB and before Thunderbolt). The closest they have ever come to a proprietary ports on the Mac would be Mini-DVI/DisplayPort( though these were free licenses for those that wanted to adopt it).
iPad Pro moved over since USB-C is on USB 3.2 standard and Lightning is still stuck in the USB 2.0 days. And how Apple is positioning the iPad Pro as a laptop alternative, it requires fast transfer capabilities and ability to plug in external storage, etc.
iPhone hasn't moved over due to A) Yes the lightning port provides Apple a HUGE cash cow with the whole Made for iPhone accessory program B) the fact Lightning is still on the USB 2.0 standard is pretty much irrelevant given everything is done wirelessly these days. You only use the lightning port for charging or accessories that don't need high transfer rates. So little motivation to change over.
I've seen broken Tesla connectors, but they are at high usage sites. This place barely gets used and already had one broken. The latch just isn't a good design.
The Tesla ones tend to break over a long period of time due to heat cycles. Its a much more durable connector in general, though.
stopcrazypp
Well-Known Member
Yep, that matches the accounts of other people I have read. The CCS stations aren't even high usage stations (even in this thread people say even with only a few stalls, practically no one was using them), while superchargers have far more people. It's just not a reliable design. I posted a previous Bolt article and it's easy to see why. It's putting a lot of leverage on that small part (and the CCS connector/cables being heavier does not help in this regard).
The other reason for broken CCS latches is that the implementation of charge port locking is not consistent. Sometimes people can't get the port to unlock, so the only way to release the cable from the car is to push on the button so hard that the plastic lever breaks.
RTPEV
Active Member
As the respondent to that tweet, let me offer additional color that is not possible in a limited number of characters.
If Tesla were going to switch to any other format other than TPC (in North America) the time to do it would have been prior to the Model Y launch.
They didn't do it then, and now I'm afraid that genie will never be put back into the bottle. Like it or not, TPC is here to stay in NA. I'm pretty sure we don't need to debate that any further. The only question is whether future V4 Superchargers will remain backward compatible with current vehicles, or if there will be required adapters or dual-format sites (e.g. 8 V3 stalls + 8 V4 stalls). At this point, however, it doesn't make a lot of sense to speculate.
But when it comes to the number of CCS stalls available nationwide (or continent-wide, I don't mean to leave out Canada), it is inevitable that CCS stalls will eventually greatly outnumber TPC stalls. We can debate when that will happen, but we can't debate whether it will happen. That is an inevitability:
Give me your most optimistic prediction of how many vehicles Tesla will be producing in 5 years' time and selling in North America, and it's almost a guarantee that the number of non-Tesla EVs is going to be greater. I'm not trying to knock Tesla here, just acknowledging the reality that Tesla is a single manufacturer, and the number of other makes that will be hitting the market, taken in total, is going to exceed what Tesla is capable of producing (unless, as @rhuber pointed out, something goes horribly wrong with the EV transition). Tesla may be at 2 million vehicles produced w/w in 2022 (optimistically), and then at 50% growth for 4 more years that brings them to 10 million vehicles w/w, with probably only 25-30% going to North America. US new vehicle sales are around 15 million units per year, so if 50% of the non-Tesla portion of those are electric, that's going to be around 6 million non-Tesla EVs sold to Tesla's 2.5 million. Granted, it will take some time for the electric fleet to catch up with all the Teslas sold prior to 2027, but unless you see a future where Tesla is producing over half the vehicles in the world (and I don't think even the most extreme Tesla fanboy is going to argue that), there are going to eventually be more non-Teslas on the road than Teslas.
And those cars are going to need a place to plug in. The market will ensure that adequate and reliable CCS charging stations exist. Whether the connectors are atttractive, or the sites are laid out properly, or the latches are prone to breakage is immaterial: the charging stations of the future will be more prevalent and reliable than we are used to today...if a particular network cannot provide a reliable solution, there will be another provider that comes in and does.
And once we get to the point where there are sufficiently large numbers of vehicles with CCS ports on them, and there are adapters or some other means for Tesla vehicles to plug into CCS stations, potential site hosts will be faced with the question of whether to host TPC Superchargers or CCS chargers (or perhaps a Supercharger site with CCS capability). As they go to make this decision, they will undoubtedly consider that the CCS options will draw in 100% of customers, whereas TPC Superchargers will be limited to 30-50% of drivers. Anyone that can do math will probably choose CCS. Sure, Superchargers are the obvious choice now. But at some point in the future, this will not be the case.
If I was working in the Tesla charging group, I would advocate for dual cable (TPC + CCS) on Superchargers going forward. This would make them eligible for Federal Infrastructure $$$ and provide an easy path for opening up the SC network. As stations need maintenance, change existing stations to the dual cable setup. They know how to do this since they already did it in Europe, albeit with smaller installed base of stations / stalls. After a few years, Tesla could start changing cars over to CCS because the vast majority of stations will have both connectors. Maybe CyberTruck could be CCS from the beginning. If they don't start converting the SC network, they can never change the cars over. It's hard to see this perspective now because Tesla has the majority of the North American EV market. This cannot last unless the rest of the automotive industry completely fails at the EV transition. That would be bad for everyone.
I don't think CCS1 vs. CCS2 vs. GB/T vs. TPC vs. is ever going to be resolved, but what's going to happen is that the entire industry will move on to a new generation of chargers and a different connector type. It'll likely be very similar to what happened with the WCDMA/UMTS vs. CDMA2000 standards war that wasn't ever resolved in 3G, but people basically decided to all use the same standard for 4G when Verizon bailed on CDMA2000 and then Qualcomm decided to stop developing it.
There is no obstacle on the horizon to drive such a migration for light duty automotive DCFC. The drive for a new charging connector standard is all concentrated on heavy duty trucks and eVTOL. The existing CCS and TPC connectors are sufficient for light duty vehicles and will be for the foreseeable future. GB/T and CHAdeMO are moving to ChaoJi because they have their own limitations that don't apply to CCS and TPC.
