Question on European Supercharging Implementation

[jackbowers]

The U.S. Supercharger connector is Tesla's own design. I have noticed that it throttles back the current on hot summer days when the connector pins (or handle) get hot, which happens frequently at popular stations where heavy use has made for looser connector pins. I sometimes move to less popular parking slots where the connectors pins have seen less use in order to speed up the charging.

The European connector, on the other hand involves an industry standard connector that Tesla was more or less forced to adopt due to the priority placed on 3-phase AC charging, and the pin design does not appear as robust for handling large amounts of DC power. Does anyone know how Supercharging is accomplished with the European connector, and whether the implementation includes current throttling when the connector pins get too hot from a less than tight connection?

 

[widodh]

Tesla uses the L1, L2, L3 en N connectors in parallel. So L1 and L2 are paired for the positive (+) and L3 and N are paired for the negative (-).

Handles 360A without any problems. I've never seen it throttle back due to heat. But probably because the Netherlands and Germany don't see that warm weather as Nevada does.

 

[LuckyLuke]

Additionally the pins in the eu supercharger plugs are longer compared to the pins in the normal/official "type 2" (aka Mennekes) plugs.
So a supercharger plug fits deeper in the Tesla socket and thus creating a bigger contact area which makes these crazy amounts of current possible.

 

[Robodoc]

Dont know yet. Just got my model S the other week. Love it. At supercharging (lucky me, available in my hometown) I noiced that the cahrging speed varies during loading and maybe also depending on the number of occupied charging spots the same time? Is that normal?

 

[jackbowers]

Thanks. They must be running half of the DC supply units through one pin pair and half through the other. At 180A it would take more than 5 thousandths of an ohm to create a fire risk, so unless some salt water corroded one of the connectors and the heat sensing / current throttling failed it's hard to see how the connector could be the problem. Beginning to think the problem with the Norway vehicle was a loose termination in the car's wiring or possibly a defective contactor.

 

[Rocky_H]

Dont know yet. Just got my model S the other week. Love it. At supercharging (lucky me, available in my hometown) I noiced that the cahrging speed varies during loading and maybe also depending on the number of occupied charging spots the same time? Is that normal?

Congratulations. Yes, a couple things about charging speeds at Superchargers.

Tapering—If you read the page on Supercharging on Tesla’s website, they tell about the slowing of charging as the battery gets full. In short, filling the bottom 80% or so of the battery takes about the same amount of time as filling that last 20% at the top. The really fast charging speeds are when your battery is at a very low state of charge. So on longer trips with several Supercharger stops, it would be very slow to try to get it really full, run it down to 50% and then try to fill it up full again. You will continually be using the slowest charging. So you want to try to fill about as much as you need to get to your next stop, plus a little extra margin, so you are mostly recharging that bottom half of your battery state, which is faster.

Paired Supercharger stalls—I don’t think they even talk about this on the Supercharger page on their website, but there is one stack of charging hardware that is shared across two Supercharger spots for more efficient equipment cost. You will see numbers on the Supercharger stalls: 1A 1B 2A 2B, etc. The number corresponds to one stack of charging hardware, and the A and B units are sharing it. So if you pull in and someone is plugged into 1A, it would be better not to use 1B. Try to find if an A and B set are both empty and get one of those. The sharing does use the logic that the first car plugged in gets most of the charging power, but as it slows down (see tapering above), the extra power will shift to the second car.

 

[jackbowers]

Dont know yet. Just got my model S the other week. Love it. At supercharging (lucky me, available in my hometown) I noiced that the cahrging speed varies during loading and maybe also depending on the number of occupied charging spots the same time? Is that normal?

Yes, it's normal for the charging to throttle as the pack gets more fully charged in order to maximize battery life. And each DC supply unit serves two parking spots, so if another car is charging off the same unit you'll be splitting power with them.