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Mapping Supercharger locations
- Thread starter Jim Dean
- Start date
"changed" We won't have much idea unless you describe in what way it has changed. What is different than you used to see before?
What was easy before? What makes it not easy now?
On the NAV screen, Superchargers used to appear, and it was easy to navigate to them, giving me the choice of when and where to charge while on a trip. Likewise on the Tesla Supercharger site on the web. Over the past 6 -8 weeks that has changed. On the website for example - Go Anywhere | Tesla plotting a trip gives me only 1 suggested Supercharger. It used to show me all of them between start and destination, allowing me to choose where to charge. The new system can get me to my destination, but does not enable me to plan the level of charge I would need to have a functional vehicle when I arrive at a place with no local chargers.
In June I travelled from Burlington VT to Colchester CT (where there was no local charging options). The Find My Route option showed me all the Superchargers in VT, MA and CT, allowing me to plan accordingly. Today it shows only 1 SC, in Brattleboro VT. That would get me to my destination, but with a depleted battery. Something happened to make the trip planner much less helpful.
In June I travelled from Burlington VT to Colchester CT (where there was no local charging options). The Find My Route option showed me all the Superchargers in VT, MA and CT, allowing me to plan accordingly. Today it shows only 1 SC, in Brattleboro VT. That would get me to my destination, but with a depleted battery. Something happened to make the trip planner much less helpful.
You can make them appear by touching the screen to make some extra buttons show up, and then hitting the lightning bolt button at the bottom right. That will make all Superchargers appear on the map.
I have never known the navigation to ever give any choices. You pick a target, and it figures out what it thinks is best, (by least amount of stops) and no choices.
Which one? Are you talking about the map or Trip Planner on Tesla's own Tesla.com website? The Trip Planner there has always been awful and useless.
Oh, yep, that's the one--utter garbage. People here will always recommend against trying to use that. Here are a couple of alternatives that are infinitely better:
www.abetterrouteplanner.com
www.evtripplanner.com
People usually prefer one or the other, just based on some preferences about the interface. ABRP seems to be more full-featured, but I find the interface much more cumbersome to use, with more stuff hidden away and hard to get to than EVTrip Planner.
It's going to be hard for any website to read your mind of what you want there, but it doesn't surprise me the primitive one on Tesla's site doesn't do that. I think A Better Route Planner may have that feature. But really, these things are for really general planning if you can get to somewhere. It's not going to dictate your actions. So on the day of it, when you're actually there, you will get to the last Supercharger before your destination and then just stay as long as you feel like it to have enough extra "driving around juice" for the last segment. And then that's where Plugshare is something you would probably want to look at if you are going to be staying in a city for a few days and need to see what charging resources are available there. But for me, if there's a Supercharger in that city, I usually don't want to bother with anything else unless it's really convenient.
For just generally looking around at where Superchargers are, this site is pretty nice:
www.supercharge.info
It is actually sourced from threads here, so it shows where upcoming sites are either already in construction or have building permits that have been found. and each one in the map has a link to the discussion thread for it here in this forum. So that's cool for seeing where all the Superchargers are, and the other two sites mentioned above are excellent for plotting your actual trips, with really good customization, like planning for temperature (heating or cooling use) and speed adjustments to calculate your energy consumption rates if you know you usually speed some.
Thanks for the alternate sites. But no one has addressed the fact that the display map and the Tesla Supercharger website were MUCH more functional in the late spring and early summer (I got my Tesla on 3/29/21). I also tried the suggestion to click on the lightning on the lower right of the display screen. It showed me SC locations in VT and part of MA, but not any in CT, which was my destination. On a June trip, all were displayed. It looks like automatic updates take away at times, as well as adding features at times. End result - I am much less likely to take a long trip than I was previously, when I was able to plan better.
I can’t say I have seen the change but I have two thoughts:
1. For more options you really are best off with a 3rd party route planner. I mean the in car route planner is one stop only, no options, no waypoints. It’s dumb but that’s the reality. I generally use ABRP on my phone and agree with an above poster that some of the options in it are not obvious but they are there.
2. Tesla routing changing may be to reduce supercharger congestion. That was discussed just this week in their earnings call.
Thanks for your thoughts. All I can say is that around mid-summer, Tesla drastically reduced the visible SC locations, both on the NAV screen and on their website. The result is that it is much harder to plan a trip than it was before those changes. Maybe they will restore that functionality at some point????
bschippers718
Member
Yes. Know what you mean. Found a fix for that: press the right steering wheel button to invoke the microphone for verbal commands and say "Display superchargers". Boom. There they are. You can do the same thing to zoom the screen in or out. Say "zoom in" repeatedly to get to the scale you want and "zoom out". Nicer than playing with the screen when you're supposed to have your attention on the road.
