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Supercharger - Knockrow (Byron Bay) NSW
- Thread starter Chuq
- Start date
LGGD
Active Member
No, not ICE'd. This is a pre-completion photo but you can see there are two spaces. The supercharger space is on the left. The 4WD with the trailer is parked in the right spot.
WhiteStar
Member
Ha OK. I thought it was a bit too soon although I've already been ICE'd there with the Chargepoint some time ago. Just give it some time, the SC'll get ICE'd.
I guess just like everything there will be parts that Tesla choose not to do and others that they fail to achieve, regardless what they have achieved is simply staggering, you don't see any other global behemoth investing in any global electric infrastructure, in Aus we're lucky to even have a single electric car. With all the data going to Tesla HQ I am guessing they will be continually analysing the needs of the SC network going forward and modifying the plans to make it as useful as possible. With regards to perspective on the SC network I can quite happily tell you that my three sole motivations for the the MS were 1. it is an amazing vehicle 2. it is electric and my family are very keen to transition to a zero carbon future (and we need about 400 km of range regularly so the leaf wouldn't cut it) and 3. I am very keen to give my dollars to a company that seems to be hell bent on providing a better future for this planet. The fact that I live in the middle of the SC highway is purely a convenience, in all of my 6000 km road trip that we're having fun on not once was the SC highway a necessity, it will be convenient though, we will be staying at each stop for more than a week so even a trickle charge and I will be fine and with a one year old in tow we don't travel more than 400 km in one burst, so even for Kempsey to Sunshine Coast, our longest stretch, will be broken up by at least a very long break or an overnight stay, which a destination charger will comfortably give us sufficient juice to reach our destination. I was not in a position in life to buy this car two years ago, otherwise I would have been right along with the original Aus purchasers of the Sig models. Having to plan charges and your journey only adds to the fun for me, it gives Tesla ownership an irreplaceable sense of being somewhat pioneering. In 15-20 years chargers will be everywhere, electric cars will be everywhere and service stations that sell fuel will be fast becoming a thing of the past and very very hard to find for people, and then the irony of electric convenience will truly dawn.
championi
Member
Yeah someone arrived. Wasn't sure who it was though, I didn't meet themDid someone else arrive after I left?
Blue heaven
Fair Dinkum Tesla
Thanks Blue Heaven, personally I just find it confusing that we wouldn't consider blaming Ford or Holden or Toyota or any other vehicle manufacturer for not being able to get fuel but Tesla get bad press for not building out the entire 'fuel' supply network for their vehicle. I am always impressed by what Tesla have achieved in the last 13 years. The fact that they set out to change the vehicles we drive then they built a network to charge them and now are building an enormous battery factory and equipping a vehicle factory to really start getting a lot of EVs on the roads and this is only the beginning......with Autonomy, Solarcity, Model Y, Semi's, Buses/vans, Utes, Powerwall 2, 3 etc I honestly see Tesla becoming a enormous footnote in the history of the human race. When people look back in 100 years time and identify a time or moment (or item) when things changed they will, I hope, look at the Model S as the catalyst that spurred the adoption of electric transportation for the entirety of society. I will quite happily not even worry for one second that they didn't build the odd SC or two that they said they would in 2015/2016/2017 etc, they're frying much more important fish!!!
Aussie Yank
Member
Well stated Novo. I don't understand why people get so negative. Some time to the extent of suggesting filing a suit. Having been a CEO of a number of public companies, when someone threatens legal action is the day we stopped negotiating and servicing them and suggested they just "go for it" and sue us. After spending lots of money and time, they usually just gave up with nothing accomplished.
Perhaps it is the nature of blogs to just turn negative
Tesla is a great company, doing great things as you enumerated
Certainly not a perfect company. If someone dislikes the company, they should consider buying a GM Bolt! Marginal range EV and nothing more. No OTA software, no SCs, no autopilot. And brought to you by a recently bankrupted company led by Bob Lutz!!
Perhaps it is the nature of blogs to just turn negative
Tesla is a great company, doing great things as you enumerated
Certainly not a perfect company. If someone dislikes the company, they should consider buying a GM Bolt! Marginal range EV and nothing more. No OTA software, no SCs, no autopilot. And brought to you by a recently bankrupted company led by Bob Lutz!!
LGGD
Active Member
Giving Tesla a 'free pass' on failure is not doing them any sort of favour. Some current owners may be happy to poke around for GPOs and three phase plugs and take weeks to do a trip an ICE can do in a day but there is no mainstream future for this.
Every time Tesla fail to deliver they lose sales, maybe never to return. If Tesla are going to achieve their long term objectives then they need to appeal to mainstream buyers not plug searching pioneers.
No Superchargers in Queensland, no service centre in Queensland means hundreds of lost sales. Simple as that. Every month delay is dozens of more sales lost.
None of this is to denigrate what Tesla have delivered to date but to ensure survival they need to move into the mainstream and the mainstream needs service centres, Superchargers and kept commitments.
Every time Tesla fail to deliver they lose sales, maybe never to return. If Tesla are going to achieve their long term objectives then they need to appeal to mainstream buyers not plug searching pioneers.
No Superchargers in Queensland, no service centre in Queensland means hundreds of lost sales. Simple as that. Every month delay is dozens of more sales lost.
None of this is to denigrate what Tesla have delivered to date but to ensure survival they need to move into the mainstream and the mainstream needs service centres, Superchargers and kept commitments.
I totally agree 110%!
I really want Tesla to survive. Not only survive, but to become very successful. And no, I do not own any Tesla stocks. I do believe that if Tesla becomes very successful (meaning profitable) then the transition to electric vehicles will happen at a much faster rate and ICE producers will transition more into electric vehicles and less with ICE. More electric vehicles will mean more infrastructure to accommodate these vehicles.
Then, hopefully, politicians will join in the quest for a cleaner and greener environment.
Then, hopefully, cancer will be cured.
Then, hopefully, there will be world peace.
Then, hopefully, Elon will invent faster than light ships.
You're putting the cart before the horse. You need to consider the policy backdrop and level of support offered to electric vehicles in this country, which is practically zero. We have a government which is ideologically opposed to renewable energy, full stop. We have a vast established refuelling infrastructure provided by a competitive industry (note, not car manufacturers). Then you have Tesla, trying to do it all, globally, replicating what Shell, Exxon, BP, Ford, GM, Toyota and various other have spent 100 years building on. It is going to take time, and they're going to make promises that they cannot keep, lots of them. But, they have kept promises, many of them and this is what we should reflect on.
Yes, if a company promises to do something then they should do it, however, perhaps a company states they will achieve something ie. a GC Supercharger and then realises that this actually provides little benefit to it's users as a whole, to then do this entirely counterproductive and a destruction of free cash flow.
I certainly wouldn't point to a service centre and supercharger in QLD or any other state in Australia as being the point at which Tesla are considered mainstream. I would perhaps consider, something like, over 300,000 reservations for a vehicle that hasn't even completed design yet being mainstream. The service centres and chargers will follow once sufficient critical mass has been achieved in a given geographical catchment area, you can refer to Maccas, Woolies or any other business for population and user density required to establish new franchises or services. The fact of the matter is we are lucky that Tesla have a service centre in Australia at all, although, they have clearly determined that Australia is an important market in spite of our lack at a federal level support for EVs.
If Tesla keep on installing service centres and charging infrastructure ahead of time (ie. not sufficient owners to warrant it) then the company will absolutely fail. You might consider on a very simple level that one service centre with one service technician would at worst need to service one car a day to at least pay the wages of the technician, say at least 200 cars in the area, within say 200 km, nevermind the enormous cost of the service centre itself. With such simple servicing regimes you would expect that one technician can probably complete a service on several vehicles a day and at 20,000 km intervals you would need a significant number of vehicles in the area (1000+) to even warrant basing a single technician there. This is the exact reason Tesla is struggling to achieve strong profitability, as they're having to swallow enormous overheads upfront, with just not enough vehicles to warrant them. The St. Leonards centre is vast, more than sufficient to handle the entire Australian fleet, but they've built another one in Melbourne, another showroom in Sydney, a showroom in Brisbane and I'm sure a service centre will follow. All suggesting that Tesla is expanding at a rate that they can cope with the significant overheads associated with these undertakings, but hopefully not too fast that it inhibits growth too much in other areas. I imagine every service centre bar a couple is a cash drain on Tesla, paid for by the sales of current vehicles and this cycle has to stop at some point, most likely with the 3 when the centres end up with plenty of cars to service. Likewise with the superchargers, the network will expand at a significantly lower rate, level 3 charging will eventually have a much more significant impact on charging capabilities than more charging stations.
I personally admire and greatly appreciate the work of the plug finding pioneers crossing the Nullarbor and travelling counter clockwise around Australia as this is demonstrating that EVs and in particular Tesla's are quite capable of being utilised for such adventures. Such activities will encourage more people to buy Tesla's (in spite of the apparent lack of infrastructure) and that will eventually lead to more infrastructure being built. Meanwhile the bunch of people with their hands in their pockets in QLD refusing to buy cars until a service centre is built will not achieve much at all if anything, in my opinion. These are the exact same bunch of people that will not buy solar or home batteries until they become cheap enough!! At some point someone, somewhere needs to buy EVs or solar or home batteries, for the sake of the greater good otherwise they will never become cheap enough for mass consumption. I was told by everyone that I should not bother buying my S until it became cheaper or wait for the 3 or they opened a service centre in Newcastle, well, if everyone took that approach there would not be a 3, or a service centre in Newcastle (@MangroveMike we can dream!!) My current trip will not take weeks extra and at maximum I may have to take an extra few hours charging somewhere, my point was that I don't have to and have quite happily planned to only need GPOs.
Without the initial purchasers of Tesla's at a time when all of this infrastructure did not exist, Tesla would have failed. I would not have the opportunity to purchase such a fantastic vehicle and therefore I am very grateful for the leap against conventional thinking that those initial purchasers made. I think that until about 2020 many more people will need to support Tesla until it becomes truly self sustaining with most existing infrastructure barriers removed, service centres built and manufacturing in wash rinse and repeat mode, rather than tooling and establishment.
Mark E
Member
Nicely said Novocasgreeny. When I ordered my car in Jan 2012 it was also a demonstration of support for a company that was doing something new, and something that would never succeed without support. I'm glad that I did. I'm glad that I reached out to Tesla to enquire about the Roadster, and there is still a twinge of regret that I couldn't make it work for me.
Tesla have done an awesome job and linking Melbourne to Brisbane while showing expansion to SA and western NSW (Bathurst) is an incredible feat for a startup.
Tesla have done an awesome job and linking Melbourne to Brisbane while showing expansion to SA and western NSW (Bathurst) is an incredible feat for a startup.
LGGD
Active Member
Honestly, you have made so many assumptions and assertions in your statement that are incorrect that your whole argument is greatly weakened.
I have no desire to go into details of more issues in a public forum but I can assure you that firstly, there is no showroom in Queensland and secondly the number of cars in Queensland long ago justified a full service centre here. Your back of the envelope calculations (especially on service requirements) are way off but I hope you never need to find out that for yourself first hand.
Further the number of cars in and visiting South East Queensland also fully justifies the three Superchargers that were originally planned not just the one that is now planned or the none that currently exist.
By the way, good luck with your strategy of scolding people who haven't bought Tesla's in Queensland yet as being wrong for "keeping their hands in their pockets". The customer is always right and if they don't feel that Tesla have enough presence in Queensland to justify pushing the button on an order then that's their choice.
I think the key point that you are missing is that there is a strong psychographic difference between many who have already bought Teslas in Australia and those who are starting to consider/buy or are potential buyers.
Tesla cannot remain successful if they don't move on from the early-adopter/bleeding edge market.
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LGGD
Active Member
I actually had to google where Newrybar was. I thought it was a surprise location! Tesla calls it Knockrow, I notice.
My apologies LGGD, obviously I didn't realise that you are such an omnipotent source on Tesla information that you yourself know better than Tesla when it comes to what number of vehicles in a geographic area would mandate a service centre. It is also odd (as well as hypocritical and arrogant) that you have stated that my argument is weakened by incorrect assertions and assumptions but yet you offer only your assurance (your own personal assurance) that there is a sufficient number of owners in SEQ to justify three supercharger locations, a service centre and a significant retail presence. Not data, facts, figures or something tangible, yet rubbish my statements as incorrect. I didn't make mention of the absurdity of your assertion that 'Every month delay is dozens of more sales lost', because that's exactly what it is, absurd. Sydney is a more affluent and populous city, with a showroom, service centre, the flagship store and two supercharger locations and yet......there were 50 registered deliveries in Q3 16 for the whole of NSW, adding to total of 453 Tesla's registered in NSW, not Sydney!! I was incorrect on a showroom, but there is a retail presence and permanently based demonstrator (which clearly Tesla think is enough for such a strong market registering hundreds of sales (oh sorry, make that lost sales)?? Tesla obviously felt a permanent retail presence in QLD was absolutely essential, given the hot bed of potential purchasers, yet in their ignorance they doubled their retail footprint in both Sydney and Melbourne. Perhaps all of this is based on data, ie. how many cars are based in which locations, how many orders are currently placed in those locations and the richest source of data of all would be the Model 3 reservations list, not forgetting they would be aware of the origin of the traffic frequenting their website. Tesla previously used the S reservations list to build out it's initial service centre network, this perhaps suggests why Auckland for instance has a service centre and retail presence announced but yet, there is still nothing announced for SEQ. Or perhaps things like Charge Net NZ | Electric Vehicle Charging Network suggest to Tesla that NZ may be a better market to assign it's very limited and precious resources to.
My back of the envelope calculations on service were based on a $75,000 cost of labour for a technician and an average of a $600 service with 50% labour cost. Warranty issues are not counted as revenue, and revenue was the basis of my statement, they're an accrued liability on the balance sheet and something that Tesla must provide for. To build out service centres based on low concentrations of vehicles simply to deal with one off or bleeding edge warranty issues would be futile, if these can be fixed in an alternative non permanent footprint fashion. The service centres are a very long way from paying for themselves, and the cost of service centres is subsidised by the retail and admin functions provided from them. Refer to the Tesla financial results, ie. Q3 16 sales 'Services and other' revenue was ~$150 m but cost was ~$147 m ('Services and other' includes powertrains, the energy division, servicing and pre-owned vehicles) of which realistically a very small portion would be actual servicing of vehicles whilst the cost of sales, admin and general was $336 m. It would be ridiculous to suggest that the annual cost of ~130 service centres was only in the early tens of millions.
My assertion that the company would fail if they build too many service centres in areas of low concentrations of vehicles and likewise for superchargers is not incorrect, it is absolutely correct, review the financial statements and you can see that new vehicle sales is funding the cost of the retail/service centres. It is also just common sense, if you encumber a company with too many overheads too soon, it will run out of money!! Ignoring SEQ is quite easy to do when you have concentrations of vehicles/service centres significantly exceeding SEQ, as of Q2 16 Netherlands (1070), Canada (1104), USA (1315) and Denmark (1687) and you would be in the best position to answer the Australian concentration, just over 1000 vehicles for 2 service centres? The data suggests that Tesla is currently expanding its service footprint at the cost of it's existing owners, this can only happen for so long before it's key markets stall and feel the impact. It is also worthwhile noting that the 'average' service centre in the USA handles 1300 vehicles, as you would be aware, whilst not directly, if you build an 'average' service centre to handle maybe 200 vehicles (you can confirm for SEQ) then another 'average' service centre would have to handle 2400, otherwise the 'average' needs to come down and more capital applied to more service centres (rather than the design and tooling for the 3, the Y, the Ute, the Semi, Solar Roofs, Powerwalls and let's not forget the gigafactory). Underneath the St Leonards retail store is an absolutely vast service centre, when I was down there I noticed around 12 hydraulic lifts (I didn't count exactly) and plenty of space for more, without knowing what the average footprint is, it certainly didn't seem average. That centre would be capable of handling several thousand vehicles per annum, if not more. By having nothing in SEQ your only inconveniencing a few hundred owners max, well worth it in my opinion, considering it is not and was not available at the time of purchase.
Tesla victim of its own success in Denmark: 2 to 3 months wait for service, some owners are furious
Tesla’s global fleet has 1068 cars per service center and offers room for efficiency improvements
To review 'mainstream' lets consider that Tesla make up less than 1% of 1% of the entire global fleet of passenger vehicles and their current manufacturing capacity is getting to just over 1% of the 5th largest automotive manufacturer. Tesla is very firmly in the niche category in many countries and will be for a few years yet. With regards to Australia, zero government support for EVs and some significant geographical issues do not lead to it naturally being an EV market, hence the low number of Teslas and EVs in general. With regards to the USA (it's core market), Tesla has moved beyond the mainstream and it the best selling luxury sedan, by a country mile, Tesla Model S is the best-selling US luxury sedan, by a wide margin. Again, you're expecting that Tesla expend more of it's capital per capita in a non core market that is not supportive of EVs at a state or federal level of government.
To say that I am scolding people for keeping their hands in their pockets is wrong. It is a simple statement of fact, they're not prepared to buy a Tesla until there is a local service centre, therefore they're keeping their hands in their pockets, I didn't scold them nor would I, I simply stated that this approach is useless in my opinion. Refer to the above point, more car sales equals more money to pay for these, more sales in the area will mean it is more likely to be serviced....cart or horse?? It is necessary for people to be early adopters and essentially pay for the rest of society to reap the benefits of the early discomfort. If no one decides that the discomfort is worthwhile then advancement ceases. If not one single person bought a Tesla until a service centre was located within 100 km of it then Tesla would not have sold very many cars at all. It is just the same for home batteries and PV. If everyone waits for it to make absolute financial sense and have no element of inconvenience associated with it then it can never get to that point.
Anyways, back to the original point, a Brisbane supercharger charger is not required to link Bris-Mel. I hope you have sent off a furious email to NBN News to let them know that the Macadamia Castle was not the final link in the Bris-Mel SC Highway and Tesla have failed as they haven't built a supercharger in Brisbane. Tesla vehicles with a range of 400 km are rendered useless in Brisbane because they cannot retain sufficient charge from the supercharger 170 km to the south of Brisbane and cannot make it there from Brisbane because it is just too far away and they don't have sufficient range......er....
RichardMcN
Member
