So long time no post in this thread. Here in Europe we are jealously seeing US deliveries speeding up. Meanwhile, no news here on pricing, deliveries or on the all-important details of the 3-phase support. I've been thinking a bit about the actual connector-charge port. There are some options here that I think (hope) we can rule out: 1) A separate, second, charge port somewhere else on the car (other side?) 2) Same connector to the car but able to connect to a 3-phase plug however only utilizing one leg (phase) - that would not be 3-phase support so hopefully we can rule that one out as well.
Also, I am a big fan of Tesla's "one connector fits all" approach - I.e. AC and DC charging via the same plug. Now, as we are all aware of the current plug has only two large dimension connectors together with the smaller signaling connectors (see linaser's pictures above in this thread). Now, to be able to still use the plug for supercharging DC at 90 kW (120kW in the future?) I assume we must keep the dimension of the two big connectors. To have true 3-phase support we need to add two more large connectors (for leg 2 and leg 3 of the system). Now these don't have to be as big as the connectors that are already in place since the leg 2/leg 3 connector will most likely maximally handle 10kW of AC power (each). So the question is: Is it possible to fit these two additional connectors in the already slender plug? Well, electrically speaking, in theory, the plug could be as small as the cross section of the cable, but in reality no contact surface is going to be 100% efficient so because of that, and for safety reasons, you need quite a bigger contact surface than wire cross section area.
Now, what interests me with regards to the design of the connector is how "two-dimensional" it is. By this I mean that it's just a 90 degree cross-section and the contact surfaces are completely round and flat. In no way does it take advantage of depth = the third dimension = z axis. If you would just cut the connector (and of course the "female" connector on the other end accordingly) at say a 45 degree angle you would have quite some more cross sectional area. If the contact surfaces had an added depth, maybe in the form of flat pins (like the ones on a regular 110V US plug) you could have a lot more contact surface without increasing the cross sectional area. Also, you could let the connectors run in close proximity (just like the wires do in the cable), and instead of separating them so much in the x and y plane, you could separate them in the z plane - i.e. one could be "shallow" and one could be "deep" in the charge port. This would of course add some depth to the whole device, but I would think that would be less of a problem than increasing the cross sectional area of the "hole" in the car and also the cross sectional area of the plug it self?
Am I doing some kind of fundamental error with these assumptions?