If your HVAC is running and/or battery heating is active while charging, that can easily account for a few kW.
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Do supercharger users not care about price?
- Thread starter bradtem
- Start date
Or charging as a business goes out of business and we're left with just Tesla again.
JetFalcon
Member
I try to charge after 7pm which is the usual off peak time in Arizona. Since out of state trips is the main time I start using super charging.
andaconda
Active Member
I noticed that even a Electrify America has almost doubled their prices in this last couple months too! Keeping up with the Joneses I guess!
They still list as 31 cents/kWh nationwide (except where per minute is required) with their $4 monthly fee. Where have they doubled?
Tesla around here is almost double that during the day.
I am surprised that EA is the same price nationwide as local rates do vary a lot, but against, charging is a service, not a product.
SilverString
Member
Legacy owners with cars made in 2019 and before don't care, because they all have free unlimited supercharging. I have a wall charger and pay only $.15 per kWH at home, but I still use the two very nearby V3 superchargers for well over half my charging because its fast and free and I am there anyway.
I get the free part, but fast? Home charging takes zero time. You are "there anyway" in a much stronger sense than any supercharger, and it happens while you sleep. Nothing is more convenient or takes less time from your day. Even if there is a charger at a store you go to regularly, it usually isn't in a convenient spot, and you have to go out and move your car when the charging finishes to avoid idle fees. I presume people with unlimited still have idle fees. Also note that only model S and X have unlimited charging.
andaconda
Active Member
Yes, 43 cents is their nationwide price (and I thought it had been for some time) if you don't pay their $4/month fee which makes it 31 cents.
The $4/month fee is a no-brainer if you will charge more than once per month. Annoyingly, for Tesla owners who use EA only on a "if the supercharger is not convenient" basis, twice a month might not be dependable. But I would pay that fee when on a road trip. I never almost fast charge when I am in my home city.
andaconda
Active Member
Agree --- it's a no brainer when on a lengthy road trip. On my next trip out of state I will be joining the "Pass+" plan with EA. One 34kWh fill up will pay for itself.
TomServo
Active Member
When I travel I don't care. We take 3 maybe 4 long road trips each year to see the grandkids. I want the convenience of Tesla's SCer network. It's worth a few bucks to us.
This. Pricing isn’t easy as transparent as gas stations with their big signs. You have to dig into the menu. I do try to care about pricing. For one thing I ended up charging before 8am at a trip from San Fran to La. It was $.20 something per kilowatt vs $0.58. Huge difference. Spend about $14 for a ful charge vs what could have been $45. I charged to 100% while eating breakfast.
Does Tesla still charge the entire session according to the start time, or does the pricing switch the moment the quoted pricing is raised or lowered?
Well Tesla isn’t the most transparent so who knows. They don’t have the info available easily on the screen.
I take it you didn't try to cross the time boundary between the lower early off-peak rate and the peak rate then? I think once I started a session during the time of the higher day rates (but still had some "free" SC miles) and went over by about 2-3 kWh. I expected the overage to be charged at the lower off-peak rate but nope, the overage was actually charged at the higher peak rate.
I pulled in one time about 5 minutes shy of the switchover to peak rates. I fully expected to be billed for the higher rate, since I was there for like 30 minutes, 25 minutes being peak time... But I was charged the entire session at the off-peak rate.
I think it's the reverse. Nobody drives around shopping for superchargers. It's not like a gas station where you drive past, see a high price and keep going to look at the price of the next one. You find superchargers by using the screen (or maybe an app to find CCS chargers) and you go to one and you often can't change your mind after arriving, or would be very unlikely to do so.
It is true that if you ask the Tesla or ABRP to make a route, you don't see the price. As people start caring more about price there will probably be options in the routing to economize on price. (ABRP lets you select whether you want fastest trip or fewer stops or shorter stops, for example.) I don't think anybody does it but just about anybody might want "lower price, all other things being equal." The problem is that all other things are not equal. I just ran out of free supercharging this week, so I will start thinking about it, but one of my main criteria on a charger is "how good is the food next to it?"
It actually would be a challenge to come up with an accurate algorithm. I consider various things:
- Factors that affect trip time, such as
- How much detour from the route
- How low my SoC will be on arrival (but not too low)
- Whether I will precondition enough by arrival
- Charger speed
- If a shared V2 supercharger, is it half-empty, or more full so that I will get the 2nd in a pair
- How many spare stalls
- Cost
- Food and other activities at the charger -- including quality of food and walking distance to the food. But if it's a sit down restaurant, suddenly all the time constraints vanish as I will be at this charger longer than it takes to charge
- Distance to next charging stop that's a good one
andaconda
Active Member
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