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Let's get a Supercharger installed in SF

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SF is a difficult city to live and work in because so many of us live in condo buildings or pre-WW2 houses where it's hard (and often impossible) to install a high power wall connector. Given how many Teslas we have here and all the additional affluent eyeballs it would attract, a Supercharger installation in SF seems to make at least some sense.

Some interesting background info: Inside Teslas Supercharger Partner Program: The Costs And Commitments Of Electrifying Road Transport | TechCrunch

Any interest in getting together to explore this some more? I suspect Tesla would be happy to foot the bill if we can find a willing business along a main artery like Van Ness or Market.
 
Tesla from the start has mentioned superchargers are NOT for daily use. It's only to enable long range travel along heavily traveled routes (mainly interstates). Therefore, I don't agree Tesla would be happy to foot the bill for any station within city limits.

I would also like the charging problem solved for those without a dedicated parking space, but I don't think superchargers will be it (at the very least not at the current charge rates; when we reach ~250kW charging rates or beyond then it starts to make more sense).

More likely it'll be public charge infrastructure for street or public garage parking (but for that to happen the install costs have to go way down). For people in condos with a parking space (but condo unwilling to allow installs) legislation would be the way to go.
 
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Listen to what Elon said during the Q1 2014 earnings call, he specifically stated that Tesla would be installing Superchargers in Chinese cities and also stated he was considering doing the same thing in other cities like London and San Francisco because there were so many potential buyers who were unable to charge EVs at their residence for a variety of reasons.
 
Tesla has to do it in cities for now in China (given they are still working out deals for installing in roadways), but realistically superchargers are just not a practical solution to daily city demand. It may work okay in the PR sense, but not if you do the math.

The average charge rate of a supercharger is 200mph (and this is only up to 90% charge, not 100%, which takes longer), assuming the stall is not shared. That means an 8 stall installation will be able to charge at 800mph (keeping in mind the charge splitting). Over a 24 hour period that's good for 19200 miles of travel per day. Over a year, that's 7,008,000 miles. That may seem like a lot, but if the demand is for daily driving, an average driver drives about 13k miles per year (it's actually higher for a CA driver, but let's ignore that), meaning this station would be able to serve the daily demand for only about 540 customers a year.

If you change that to road trip travel, it makes up only ~5% of annual travel, meaning the station can serve the demand for 20x the customers (about 10800) which is far more reasonable for a viable station.

As such, unless the average charge rate increases drastically, quick charging is still not a viable way to support the demand for daily driving.
 
I agree, perhaps Elon might do it purely for the marketing reasons.

It might also work in general if the stations weren't free to charge. The station installation costs aren't a problem: even at $200k a pop, over 500 customers that's still only $400 each (easily covered by the supercharger fee). It's the electricity costs: at 38kWh/100 miles EPA, 13k miles per year would use 4940kWh meaning $494 per year at $0.10/kWh or almost $5000 over the 10 years that a customer might own a Tesla. The "free" electricity only makes sense for road trip travel given the 5% multiplier (works out to be about $250 of electricity per Tesla owner).
 
A Supercharger in San Francisco would work well for Model S owners who have a commute roundtrip of 20 - 60 miles daily, a range which probably covers well over half of SF resident commutes. They would only need to take the time to charge once, twice, or maybe three times/week, not every day. And for the times when they plan longer trips out of the city they only need start out with enough charge to get to the Gilroy, Vacaville, or future northern 101 Supercharger.

An SF Supercharger would likely get little use from Model S owners who commute in to SF from outlying areas because they will start out their drive every morning at a high SOC and would have no need to make a diversion from their usual route and take extra time charging when they don't need to do so to make it back home.

A Supercharger in SF could easily result in well over a hundred additional Model S cars being sold in SF over the next several years and that pays for the Supercharger installation and running costs.