Naming Superchargers - supercharge.info

[juliusa]

There has been some discussion in various threads about supercharger naming.

Tesla names them, and we name them in supercharge.info. Should they match?

Often we name them first, because we spot them in permit or construction stage before they are on the Tesla website. In some cases Tesla has them listed as a coming soon and we can line them up, but often not.

If Tesla has a "bad name" (website and nav) should supercharge.info follow that, or should they use a better name?

Here is a prime example: Supercharger - Saint-Léonard-d’Aston, QC (Madrid 2.0)

Some recent posts related to naming I have seen.

In my opinion, all location names should follow what’s on the Tesla navigation system.

I suggest changing the name of the Lincoln Park location in supercharge.info to match plugshare or Tesla. Plugshare lists it as Schiller Street and Tesla lists it as Halstead street. Nothing on the map or other listings references Lincoln Park, which is confusing.

Nice! I haven't hit the second Philly charger yet. Who the heck at Tesla can I wag my finger at about the name "East Market?" No such thing. Market East, yes. Market Street, yes. Gallery, yes, but "East Market" isn't a thing!

 

[ewoodrick]

You know the answer, you lose.

And the reality is that Tesla has probably named them before you do, they just don't broadcast it to the world.

I'd also wouldn't be surprised as more Superchargers come online that a little more stringent naming convention wasn't adopted. Where there was a single Supercharger, multiples are now exiting and the obvious name for the first isn't as obvious any more.

About the only thing that I would suggest is that you create a possible better solution and keep the Tesla names as an aka/alias. I wouldn't even use the existing name as a unique key, as even Tesla may decide to rename them.

to a user, the car is right, whatever it says. But when doing online planning, a value add may be to provide better information, while maintaining the exiting official name.

I'd also add that you aren't the only one in this situation, PlugShare, I would assume, is in the same boat.

 

[theflyer]

You know the answer, you lose.

And the reality is that Tesla has probably named them before you do, they just don't broadcast it to the world.

I'd also wouldn't be surprised as more Superchargers come online that a little more stringent naming convention wasn't adopted. Where there was a single Supercharger, multiples are now exiting and the obvious name for the first isn't as obvious any more.

About the only thing that I would suggest is that you create a possible better solution and keep the Tesla names as an aka/alias. I wouldn't even use the existing name as a unique key, as even Tesla may decide to rename them.

to a user, the car is right, whatever it says. But when doing online planning, a value add may be to provide better information, while maintaining the exiting official name.

I'd also add that you aren't the only one in this situation, PlugShare, I would assume, is in the same boat.

My only gripe with the Chicago - Lincoln Park naming was it confusing. There were no obvious landmarks on the map stating Lincoln Park and it was inconsistent with both Tesla and PlugShare, so it took more cognitive energy than necessary to confirm I was headed to the right location.

I would just say that I do not think we (supercharge.info and the most superchargers visited crews) should name a supercharger just "city name" (e.g., Augusta) since it is very likely there will be other superchargers in that city at some point in the future. I think from the start, we should aim for a bit more detail to minimize future disambiguation problems. Since this data is crowdsourced and we often have pins well before Tesla officially announces the location, I don't think it is essential that we exactly match Tesla as long as it is pretty easy to correlate our site to Tesla's.

 

[cpa]

I think that the names conferred upon the Supercharger locations by Tesla should match the names used by supercharge.info and our friendly competition. We depress the red pins on our touchscreens to get a name, or we consult supercharge.info to plan a route, or we consult PlugShare to determine the exact location of the stalls.

As I mentioned elsewhere, there are selected locations that do not appear on the touchscreen (Blue Ash, Ohio) or on Tesla's "Find Us" web pages. We should use supercharge.info. Moreover, there had been some renaming around Indianapolis, and when I posted my visits, there was ambiguity as to the proper locations. Apparently, Tesla changed its original Indianapolis location to Beech Grove when they built the urban chargers downtown on Capitol Ave. That is what PlugShare listed.

It is going to become more difficult in the future as locations are added within the confines of a city or its metropolitan area as you correctly point out. We know that recently Tesla has expanded existing locations: At Mt. Shasta City, the expansion was directly across the street from the original four and received a new description and address. Yet at Springfield, Oregon, the expansion was directly across a fence at a new property with a different address but did not add (merely supplemented the existing location) a new description.

I guess a sensible solution will be to consult the Tesla web site when a new Supercharger location is opened in proximity to an existing one to see how they are named. But I would wait 60 days or so to allow Tesla time to figure out what they want to do.

 

[CharleyBC]

How about a standard something like this? When there is a significant variation or clarification from the "official" Tesla name for a site, title the corresponding thread here and on supercharge.info as:

Official Tesla Name [Better Name]

If there's no ambiguity, then just skip the brackets portion.

For example, the Gardnerville, NV Supercharger is really in Topaz Lake, NV. (This one is confusing since Topaz Lake is significantly south of Gardnerville, yet apparently it isn't a real postal entity, so it uses Gardnerville.) So it would be listed as:

Garderville, NV [Topaz Lake, NV]

Or something like that.