Supercharger network needs work

[Shock-On-T]

I think Tesla is artificially limiting cars, based on some criteria. An I would guess it's something they've learned about keeping our batteries healthy, and they are just not telling us.
I think this is an additional throttling to the previously discussed throttling for cars with excessive DC charging history, which @Naonak first discovered.

The reason I think this is that many, many people are recently reporting getting throttled at around the 50-70kW mark, even at low state of charge.

I'd like to add my own report. I've tried several superchargers recently, even late at night being the only car there and trying multiple stalls, and have been sitting at 62kW with 35% state of charge.

When I first got the car I would always get a rock solid 98kW consistently, from 5% up to 60% with my S75D. Something has definitely changed, and I don't think it's the hardware.

 

[DarkMatter]

Oh, I'll add my anecdote, too. I got great charging rates over 100 kW with a high taper at a station during the middle of the hot day, with seven other cars there.

The neat thing about anecdotes is that you can look at them however you want. There are certainly cars such as yours which are getting low rates. To say it's a pattern is tough when we have no real data to go with it. Even just asking all the other folks at a station for a day would be a good start, for instance. Depending on people's posts is going to get skewed by the posters. Very few people participate in a 'Supercharger network needs work' thread if their Supercharging is going great.

It's possible that Tesla is throttling things. It's also just as possible that they have a batch of cars with iffy charge connectors, and you got one of them. This is a system with a lot of pieces to it that have to all work for best performance.

 

[tnt1971]

I'd like to add my own report. I've tried several superchargers recently, even late at night being the only car there and trying multiple stalls, and have been sitting at 62kW with 35% state of charge.

I have seen this too. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to it and it appears random. On my trip, one of my SC stops was in Decatur, near Atlanta. There is a gym there and I was going to work out while I charged my car. A woman pulled up right before me with an X, and since I had the time, I went to the paired stall right next to her to give me more time in my workout. Of course, that time the charge rate goes right up to 115kw and does a normal taper, giving me a 10-90% charge in about 45 minutes, causing me to go to take my car off in the middle of my workout.

 

[donauker]

Everyone has opinions and my personal one is that it's handle temps and or resistance of the connection. A lot cars have worn out connectors and no amount of contact cleaner will fix that. You see those SpC techs changing the handles? (Yeah, I talked to the 2 guys also at Burbank for a long time and inspected and took lots of pics of the new and old used ones)..

What do you think our car plugs look like? They also get the same abuse too (at home/SpC/etc)... so consider that. You're only changing one side of the problem.

Just food for thought

This exactly mirrors my testing over 6000 miles of supercharger based travels during June and July this summer. This was with a newly delivered P100D. During much of this time we charged at many locations with temperatures over 100* with one stop as high as 120*.

I identified two different hot handle situations that were clearly affecting charge rates. The one seemed more driven by high ambient temp and direct exposure to intense sunlight. In this case that ramp down was not as rapid as some but the entire handle became so hot that it was painful to even touch. This type of situation was able to be improved by shading and active cooling of the handle. This resulted in considerably longer sustained charge rates with much slower ramp.

The other situation which active cooling had little benefit was the older most worn handles which obviously had well worn contacts. In these most extreme cases the charge rate dropped rapidly from 110 kW into the 60s and even some cases into the 40s. When this happened the main portion of the handle was just warm but the contact area of the handle was already getting very hot.

At one stop I had a perfect opportunity to further prove the old handle effect. It was an empty location with 8 stalls so I was free to move at will. After 2 moves with charge rate dropping from 110 to the 40s within minutes I decided to take a close look at the handles and found that the four in the section I had been trying were quite old scarred handles while the adjacent section had what looked like brand new handles! My next move to one of the stalls with a new handle resulted in some of my best charge rates of my trip.