More accurately, Tesla is being slow in finishing and commissioning Superchargers. People are assuming that there's a hardware shortage, but we actually have no idea. It could be that they are avoiding opening new Superchargers in order to avoid additional losses from demand charges at sites that would have a low volume of paying users.
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Supercharger - Portland, ME
- Thread starter MiaGiada
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More accurately, Tesla is being slow in finishing and commissioning Superchargers. People are assuming that there's a hardware shortage, but we actually have no idea. It could be that they are avoiding opening new Superchargers in order to avoid additional losses from demand charges at sites that would have a low volume of paying users.
AustinM3LR
Member
Yeah hadn't thought about that. It could be something as simple as they only budget X dollars for supercharger builds during a quarter and they fund partial construction based on what's available. That would make as much sense as a hardware shortage.
Isn't there an increase in construction costs when crews must go back at an unknown date to finish the job?
Well...that's certainly the more "tin foil hat" version of the events.
The facts are that moved construction of the pedestals to the New York factory (Giga 2) and since then there has been a shortage of those parts all around the country. The shortage only started when they moved production. So for your theory to be correct, they would have needed to move production and simultaneously decided to delay finishing chargers.
Truthfully, I don't think your theory holds any water at all...because if you really wanted to "avoid additional losses" then you wouldn't even start building the chargers in the first place. Why spend millions of dollars all over the country to get chargers to the point where they only need the pedestals to be complete just to try and save some money by not incurring demand charges? Even for Tesla that would be way outside what is normal.
Tesla is now making Supercharger V3 and energy products at Gigafactory 2 - Electrek
Nikxice
Active Member
One can flip back thru the New England forum to 2014 and find initial Portland ME speculation. Five years down the road, it's likely that many here are happy and relieved to see a once uncertain Portland SC getting close to the finish line. I'd cut them some slack. For the record Tesla's website does state, "Coming Soon. Target opening in 2019."
Pedestals have arrived in Quispamsis (St Johns), NB, so hopefully they'll start showing up in other places too. Worth doing some regular checking:
Supercharger - Saint John, NB
Supercharger - Saint John, NB
Tesla very obviously _wants_ to build more Superchargers. More Superchargers is a good thing and a selling point. But the construction costs for a site are essentially fixed. So it's easy for them to allocate and budget for it.
But, once the Supercharger is powered up, they will start paying utility fees, power charges, and demand charges.
Even being generous with demand charges at $10/kW, that would be $1.2k ($14.4k for the year for each simultaneous 120kW session, plus the per kWh costs. A few Model 3 owners per month paying $0.28/kWh isn't going to cover those costs much. Plus, if you have S and X owners using them, those owners won't pay anything at all to Tesla so they're just additional overhead.
In addition, once up, they will have to handle any ongoing maintenance.
The work they are doing in lots of places, noticeably along the TCH in Canada, is laying the ground work, installing all of the conduit and the Tesla cabinets. They have cables in the conduit, which is capped or covered. With that work done, Tesla won't have to dig in frozen ground.
Once that work is done, the rest of the installation is just making connections, which means that they won't have to dig and should be able to enable the sites quickly, even in winter.
So, Tesla can allocate budget to the fixed costs, but hold back on commissioning to avoid the ongoing variable costs, while also being able rapidly to commission sites if their finances improve.
Although they have supposedly moved production of the pedestals to GF2, the total number of pedestals they need to produce is relatively low. There are 186 sites known to be somewhere from location agreed to under construction worldwide and many have been sitting for months awaiting commissioning. Tesla builds many more cars in a week than they need new pedestals to supply all of the current projects. It would be very odd for them to have a production problem with the pedestals.
I think the lack of installed pedestals is a symptom, not a cause of delay.
It's an interesting theory, but seems a bit unlikely. For some of the delayed SpC locations, for example in NB and ME, I doubt if you'll see more than a couple of Tesla's charging at the same time, so the monthly demand charges are unlikely to be much more than $2,400 per location, which in the scale of things is not even a rounding error. If they were going to delay SpC openings because of demand charges, doing it in California would make more sense, where almost any SpC location is likely to be fully occupied at some time in the month. In fact Tesla has opened 72 SpC locations in the US & Canada since the beginning of May, which is when the lack of pedestals started being noticed - 18 of those in California and many others in high traffic states like NY, NJ, FL, TX etc.
On top of this, the loss of customer goodwill and resultant loss of sales would likely more than offset any potential short term savings on demand charges.
Occam's razor is much more likely - someone screwed up - they didn't anticipate how long it would take to bring a new production source up to speed, or maybe staff turnover caused this to fall through the cracks.
Let's start here... That's a very inaccurate statement. Costs for the charging equipment might be very fixed, but construction costs at different sites around the continent can vary significantly. What are the labor rates, how much is it going to cost for the crew to go there? How about the condition of the site, do they need drainage, do they need to pave, do they need to trench, how far? I could go on, but hopefully you see the flaw in that statement.
Clearly they are still building Superchargers all over the world. So I think I trust their math more than yours on this point.
This was my point. Why start doing all of this stuff if you're worried about the ongoing variable costs of maintaining a Supercharger. If money is an concern, you don't start construction at all.
That's assuming facts not in evidence.
And thank you for introducing more FUD regarding Tesla, as clearly there isn't enough out there already.
I still stand by my initial assessment of this. You're making significant speculations about things that are clearly unknown by those of us in the general public. I think I'll stick to the facts we have, rather than assign new motives where there is ambiguity.
Half Dollar Bill
Traveller, teacher, poet, accountant, innkeeper
As one of the early S owners, I'll slightly disagree with this.
Yes, we don't pay for active supercharger sessions but I fully expect that an estimate for my expected lifetime usage was included in my purchase price.
Tesla took your money years ago. It's still losing gobs of money. Every time you use a Supercharger in your S, you're adding to Tesla's losses. And, with FUSC, you and X owners have the largest incentive to use it.
Half Dollar Bill
Traveller, teacher, poet, accountant, innkeeper
You're a cheerful fellow; I suppose we'll run into each other at some point in the state.
Since Tesla treats supercharging expenses as marketing on their income statement I view my driving habits as doing my part to provide advertising for the company. In your mind I suppose that's a bit like an ouroboros where the more cars Tesla sells the more money they lose.
I respect your view and hope your wrong. Ultimately we'll see how it all shakes out over the next few years. I do look forward to Portland being finished and hopefully that's soon.
Surfertom
Member
hey 1/2 dollar
you made it to Maine!
welcome
I met u at some SC awhile back,
Tom from Cape E
Half Dollar Bill
Traveller, teacher, poet, accountant, innkeeper
Hello again Tom!
We had a guest that was going to be a student at Bates a few weeks ago who was a surfer from CA. I'm sure he could have used your recommendations for where the local breaks are. I've got their email so PM me if you want to provide any local insight - or even meet up for lunch or something.
I do believe I saw some construction workers in the parking/charging area or close vicinity, yesterday afternoon and this morning. Though perhaps unrelated, as I thought other than dropping on the pedestals, not much of any "construction" was needed.
If this site goes online like next week (start of Q4) I am going with the tin hat theory. Free supercharging may be booked as an Opex loss or something where as construction is Capex. Perhaps they want as little operating losses as possible in Q3??
I think that they are managing Supercharger costs carefully by controlling openings. In my view there is no pedestal shortage, just a rate at which Tesla decides to produce pedestals, based on a rate at which they want to build and open Superchargers.
Worldwide open Superchargers, rolling 12 months:
09/20/2019: 1630 + 275 ( v 06/20/2019 + 64 )
(06/20/2019: 1566)
09/20/2018: 1355 + 396 ( v 06/20/2018 + 84 )
(06/19/2018: 1271)
09/20/2017: 959 + 286
09/22/2016: 673 + 198
09/19/2015: 475
So, we can see a decreased rate of opening from the peak, but it's not extremely low compared to historical rates.
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