MDK
Aussie Member
what sort of different charging ports exists for teslas?
I assume there Is American, Australia/UK/Europe/Africa and Japan?
There are only two kinds. The original "proprietary" Tesla socket is used on USA/Canada/Japan cars.
These countries use 110V/120V domestically and three-phase sockets aren't really a thing, so they only have 5 pins (Active, Neutral, Earth, Control pin and PIlot pin - the same pins as Type1/j1772 so a simple adapter is possible.
Each house actually has two 120V phases that combined give 240V, so they can charge from 240V (Active, Active, Earth, cp, pp) at up to 80A (19kW) or 72A (17kw) on facelift models
When Tesla first started building cars for Europe, which has 240v domestically and is covered in three-phase sockets, they realised they needed another couple of pins to allow three-phase charging. Rather than reinvent the wheel again they used a socket compatible with Europe's type2 (aka Mennekes) charging infrastructure - but modified to allow the much higher charge rates from superchargers.
Then when they started deliveries in Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand etc - all of which have three-phase infrastructure - they used the same port as in Europe.
As you can see these have 7 pins, allowing for up to 3 active phases, plus Earth, Neutral, CP and PP.
They can charge at up to 32A per phase (23kW) or 24A (17kW) on facelift models from standard three-phase sockets.
The control pin / pilot pin protocols are the same, so that Japan-spec could charge from AC charging infrastructure with the appropriate adapters, and they can use a US/CA/JP spec CHAdeMO adapter to charge from the ubiquitous charge.net.nz fast chargers , but supercharging will be a problem.