Hypothetical Supercharging Situation Etiquette - What would you do?

[Rocky_H]

If Tesla ever implements a virtual queue, then it will have it's own rules written by Tesla, and we will follow those. Although personally, I rather hope they don't. I don't see it working very well.

Reservation systems do help the customers feel better by putting more of a predictability and certainty to it, relieving the anxiety of the unknown, but by their nature, it reduces the utilization of the resource. It introduces these small segments of time, where stalls would be held empty, unused, for some small grace period, waiting for the one "right" person to get there and plug into it, rather than stalls always getting filled immediately by whoever is there. It's worse throughput and use of resources in the big picture, but people usually like it.

 

[shinytop]

The only fair way for a queue system to work is for Tesla, using the car's position, does not place you in the queue until you enter the location. No down time for the charger and a fair queue. If a car leaves the SC location they are removed from the queue. No other way makes sense. Full disclosure, I charge at home and live in the Florida panhandle so don't face the issue of lines ... yet.

 

[bob_p]

A huge advantage Tesla has over the other manufacturers is the Supercharger network. Tesla knows where vehicles are located, for vehicles on routes they'll know how much charging is needed, and they know which chargers are being used (and their state). With that data, Tesla could do much more to better share the superchargers between vehicles - and to better predict how long vehicles will wait and how long they will take to charge.

Another factor - all vehicles built since late 2016 have hardware that will support Smart Summon. Beyond providing virtual lines, Tesla could also automatically park vehicles at the best available charger (when it becomes available).

And if Tesla ever deploys the automatic "snake" charger, they could even automatically connect and disconnect from the chargers - and fully implement the virtual queuing for superchargers...

 

[Mewtwo]

I have already started to see increased utilization at all supercharging stations I’ve been to in the past year. Sooner or later we may have a national supercharging congestion problem. I think at some point of time Tesla will need to implement a tiered cost system. For example if your SOC is below 50% then the cost will be normal. If your SOC is between 50 and 80%. the cost to charge will double. If your SOC is above 80%, The cost Quadruples.