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Supercharger - Kettleman City, CA - Bernard Dr. (LIVE, 56 V3 stalls)

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Stopped by here while driving back to the Valley and there was some freeway closure on the 5 so traffic was a little crazy for a Wednesday night. Got there around 6PM and guys were working on installing the Charging cabinets and there is quite a few stalls already in. This is going to be a great addition here in Kettleman come Holiday season.

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great pictures but I doubt they will open this year.
 
It is all but a foregone conclusion that it will go online before the year end holidays. Outside chance it’s online for turkey.
I agree - Tesla's construction crews get things done fast - it looks like the bulk of the Supercharger work itself is already done. Major items on the todo list:

1. Solar install (given that Tesla uses basically the same design at most places, this should be plug-and-play)
2. Pavement (should be very quick)

Running at full speed with a good crew, the work could be done in 2 weeks. But more realistically 4 weeks, I am sure they are pushing to have it done by Thanksgiving.
 
Running at full speed with a good crew, the work could be done in 2 weeks. But more realistically 4 weeks, I am sure they are pushing to have it done by Thanksgiving.
Telsla might then install some temporary MegaPacks...

I really doubt that the bureaucratic PG&E will install a transformer in any short notice !!!

I saw PG&E recently installing a new transformer for an hopital.
There was at least 20 white-collar high-rank managers spending all the morning doing nothing else than chatting
while there was one employee wearing a scaphandre with a big helmet and pouring some kind of gas or liquid inside the transformer....
I guess every manager of every department need to be present and sign every step of the process.
 
Hopefully we will see more Lounges... Kettleman is always on our list of stops for that reason alone, clean bathrooms, and nice place to relax. They have the nice tables out front, always picnicking while we charge. Would be nice if there were more food options, but the kids are like the Carls across the street.
 
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Agree. I always choose a v3 at Kettleman if one's available. I don't feel bad about it.
I personally always go to the closest 150KW charger to the building as I have the standard range+ model 3 and usually I am hitting the charger with between 30-50% charge already so I don't need to be taking up a 250KW stall and me and the wife are usually eating dinner we brought with us as we charge. Pretty convenient with nice bathrooms this location.
 
Tesla needs to write in some instructions for supercharging. If the car is navigating to a supercharger location the navigation screen should give you a suggestion on which stall to use, based on all available information. They know if a car on a shared charger is nearly done and that the paired stall could be used at near maximum speed, versus using a paired stall with someone else who just arrived. The arriving driver doesn't know any of this and picks a stall at random.

This is a MAJOR feature request that I wish Tesla would address. It's another way electric vehicles could be ahead of petrol vehicles. When a gas station gets busy you don't know which line to get in and there's no way to know without actually asking drivers how close they are to being ready to leave the pump. EVs can do all that behind the scenes and speed the entire process up dramatically.

Also, in this specific install example, I get that it's easier to build a parking lot with 50+ charging stalls, but man it would be great if they instead contracted with each of those restaurants to put 12 or so charging stalls AT each of the restaurants. Then you wouldn't even have to walk across any roads. You're just ... there. The very few Superchargers I've stopped at that were actually in the parking lot of a restaurant were IDEAL, and of course we at at the restaurant. What else are we going to do for 45 minutes?
 
Tesla needs to write in some instructions for supercharging. If the car is navigating to a supercharger location the navigation screen should give you a suggestion on which stall to use, based on all available information.
This will never and should never happen. The solution is more chargers. They would have to label every single charger cleanly. Sort out when chargers fail to work, or are not working at 100%. People would still blindly move to another charger complaining about low charge speeds on their assigned one when it's -5 below and the battery is cold soaked. Others park in spots but not plugged in, it would be just chaos.

The paired problem will be less and less every year as more and more V3's get deployed. The slower charging cars will slowly filter out of the fleet in the next 10 years also. We just need more chargers, preferably V3.
 
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This will never and should never happen. The solution is more chargers. They would have to label every single charger cleanly. Sort out when chargers fail to work, or are not working at 100%. People would still blindly move to another charger complaining about low charge speeds on their assigned one when it's -5 below and the battery is cold soaked. Others park in spots but not plugged in, it would be just chaos.

The paired problem will be less and less every year as more and more V3's get deployed. The slower charging cars will slowly filter out of the fleet in the next 10 years also. We just need more chargers, preferably V3.

More chargers is a more costly solution than suggesting which stall to use. I was at an 8 stall V2 location a few weeks ago with no other cars and another car parked directly next to me. I said "hey you'll get faster charge speed if you park at an unshared location. He just kind of blew me off and continued talking on his phone. Then a minute later said "Oh I thought they made them all that faster type" and moved his car.

There are a lot of V2 installations that have little reason to be upgraded, but get enough traffic for it to be annoying. Software is cheap. Hardware is expensive.
 
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More chargers is a more costly solution than suggesting which stall to use. I was at an 8 stall V2 location a few weeks ago with no other cars and another car parked directly next to me. I said "hey you'll get faster charge speed if you park at an unshared location. He just kind of blew me off and continued talking on his phone. Then a minute later said "Oh I thought they made them all that faster type" and moved his car.

There are a lot of V2 installations that have little reason to be upgraded, but get enough traffic for it to be annoying. Software is cheap. Hardware is expensive.
I would agree with you if V2 was the standard but V3 has been the standard for years now and for the most part what is installed. V3 having power sharing capability really solves the problem and I tend to agree with others that pointing to a specific stall will potentially cause more headaches. Also when the charging network begins to allow non teslas in it will only get that much more difficult to try and navigate people to specific stalls.

V3 has been the solution and unfortunately the V2 or older stations are going to suffer a bit sometimes.
 
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