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Persistent issues with V2 superchargers

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Saabstory88

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Over the past months I have been dealing with a steadily escalating number of incidents with V2 superchargers. Firstly I want to say that I have had 3 different Tesla's over the past several, and am quite familiar with each cars charging curve, and the dynamics of supercharger stalls both in shared and dedicated configurations. I know what to expect at what state of charge and in which weather conditions. I also drive the same or similar long distance routes for work, about 1500-2000 miles a month, so I am familiar with the foibles of specific bad performing superchargers, and which ones should be reliable. Service has already completed diagnostics on my vehicle and determined that the car is not requesting throttling, and that with my current pack health and usage I should be seeing full speeds. I also want to say that my cars performance at V3's is completely as expected every single time, I have had zero lifetime poor charging sessions at these stations. My old 100D still get's almost 190kw peak. I also have not had occasion to test our new 2021 model 3 to see if the problem can be reproduced, as the vision speed limiter / auto-high-beam combo has made it uninviting for long trips.

I have had this trouble at completely empty stations, no other cars present. When I pull into a station and first plug, charging starts in a normal amount of time, and it ramps up to about 84kw immediately. In a normal session it will then proceed on all the way up to about 145kw. However during these trouble sessions, the time remaining to my charge target will be double what I expect right from the moment I plug in the vehicle. It will spend a couple moments at ~84 kw, and then either settle to 72kw or 60kw for the rest of the session. If I unplug and re-plug, sometimes it will jump up to 145kw for less than 30s before dropping back to 72kw or below. I used to be able to find 1 or 2 stalls in a station where I was able to get full speeds, sometimes having to try all of them, but as of this weekend I have been unable to get over 72kw on at least three different V2's in my region. I am going to a different part of the midwest later this week, and on the one hand, would like to take my 100D to see what rates I get, on the other hand, don't want to add an extra hour to my trip. Fast charging > 80mph vision cap. Unfortunately there are no V3's on my route this week, otherwise it would be a non-issue.

Has anyone else had experiences like this lately? Is there a problem like a worn charge port that could cause this (V2 cables are heavier so make poor connection vs V3)? Or is the network generally aging poorly and this is just a thing now?
 
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I’ve also encountered many v2 Superchargers charging at 72kW at completely or nearly vacant supercharger locations. I’d say this happened more often than not during my three most recent 2000+ mile road trips. The battery was always plenty warm and I arrived with low SoC. In order to get full speed, I would have to switch stalls (sometimes twice). I didn’t think to unplug and replug
At the same stall

At first I thought it was the hot weather affecting the supercharger or the handle, but it also happened at night when the weather cooled down. I also tried the damp towel trick to help cool the handle down, but it didn’t affect anything.

V3 locations have been extremely consistent, and I’d love to see more v2 being replaced by them. They also start charging and ramp up much faster than v2.
 
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2018 Tesla Model 3 LR RWD. Located in SF Bay Area, California.
That's unfortunate. Hopefully it has something to do with our cars, that can be remedied, rather than the charging network itself, but there should be basically no commonality. I also heard from a Model 3 owner in Europe that had the same problem with their Model 3 on a CCS V2... Not encouraging.
 
We drove from Arizona to Maryland last week in a 2017 Model X 100D without any problem unless we were paired at a V2 Supercharger.

I assume this is not just a single Supercharger location.

I would guess at a charge port communication problem, like a dirty contact, that causes your charge to be at a default "safe" speed. Worst case at older well-used V2 stations, but good at newer (tighter?) V3 stations. Try cleaning the contacts?
 
We drove from Arizona to Maryland last week in a 2017 Model X 100D without any problem unless we were paired at a V2 Supercharger.

I assume this is not just a single Supercharger location.

I would guess at a charge port communication problem, like a dirty contact, that causes your charge to be at a default "safe" speed. Worst case at older well-used V2 stations, but good at newer (tighter?) V3 stations. Try cleaning the contacts?
I've had the issue at over 10 unique supercharger locations across 4 states. I gave the ground, pilot, and comm pin a clean when I first started seeing the issue, but I can always give it another shot.
 
At first I thought it was the hot weather affecting the supercharger or the handle, but it also happened at night when the weather cooled down.

I'm glad you did note that. Everything else in this whole thread leads me to think that it's a case of one or more of the internal DC/DC converters in the charging cabinet dropping out, and I've assumed that basically they've overheated prompting the shutdown. IIRC, each DC/DC converter in the Supercharger is an 12kW unit (same 48A unit in original Model S), with 12 converters total per cabinet. This is why when you get a reduced charge rate that's more or less divisible by 12 (such as the 60, 72, 84 noted in the original post), it points to a limitation on the Supercharger, rather than the car, side.

Here is a charge session of mine from last summer:
1626119125302.png


Note it started out high, but then within 3 minutes dropped to 72kW. Unfortunately I had gone into the store after seeing it had reached >140kW charge rate!--when I came back out I noticed the issue and moved to a different stall where I got the expected higher charge rate. This stall was not being shared.

My conclusion, because of the initial high charge rate, is that the high temps that day caused several of the DC/DC converters to drop out. I still think this is possibly the case, even though your experience at night would imply otherwise. Nonetheless, it pretty obviously is a fault on the Supercharger side with individual DC/DC converters failing. I do not suspect it has anything to do with the cable, connector, pins, or the car. Perhaps these V2 units are simply starting to get to their end of life and the hot summer weather is pushing the DC/DC converters over the edge.
 
I'm glad you did note that. Everything else in this whole thread leads me to think that it's a case of one or more of the internal DC/DC converters in the charging cabinet dropping out, and I've assumed that basically they've overheated prompting the shutdown. IIRC, each DC/DC converter in the Supercharger is an 12kW unit (same 48A unit in original Model S), with 12 converters total per cabinet. This is why when you get a reduced charge rate that's more or less divisible by 12 (such as the 60, 72, 84 noted in the original post), it points to a limitation on the Supercharger, rather than the car, side.
I am familiar with that, and that was my thought as well. I didn't want to bias the conversation with that observation, and was hoping that there would be something obvious that I overlooked that could be corrected with my vehicle. Getting max charging speeds given SoC and weather is absolutely essential for my current work to be possible, enough that shared stalls can ruin my day. I am really hoping that the answer isn't that I need to go back to an ICE vehicle.
 
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Yeah I mean an occasional bad stall or two is one thing, but if you are seeing persistent issues at multiple stalls at multiple sites, that is not cool at all.

I would expect Tesla to be able to remotely detect such a fail, but then the question is how timely are they in getting out into the field to replace those parts, especially given their focus seems to now be on V3 expansion.
 
Yeah I mean an occasional bad stall or two is one thing, but if you are seeing persistent issues at multiple stalls at multiple sites, that is not cool at all.

I would expect Tesla to be able to remotely detect such a fail, but then the question is how timely are they in getting out into the field to replace those parts, especially given their focus seems to now be on V3 expansion.
Agreed. Now that I look back through Teslascope, all of my bad sessions this summer have been between 12:00 and 22:00, never in the morning. I'm guessing if I correlate the sessions with the local weather in that city I'll see it was a hot cloudless sunny day. I can probably switch over to morning (04:00 starting) on my drives and that will solve it for the moment. I'll give that a shot this week. Thanks for identifying the possible cause.
 
You think this may be related to heat to some degree?

Well, my driving pattern last year was pretty different, and in a Mid Range model 3 which charges slower in many circumstances. My last summer experience not comparable. I never experienced this issue until May, and now that it's July it's happening at just about every V2. Some of these stations are typically very high usage during normal commutes, so people may not have noticed much to complain? I usually hit them after they've cleared out for the day.
 
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The V2 SCer in Louisville is a mess. Over the July 4th weekend 4 stalls were reported INOP on PlugShare. When we went through Louisville on the 6th I noticed the SC icon on my display was grayed out with a wrench displaying, when I clicked on it to check its status it displayed "reduced service". Granted it was over the holiday weekend, but the "reduced service" status lasted for at least 72 hours.