Worthless urban supercharger?
People in North Dakota would take a few of those!
The sense of entitlement is truly stunning.
For someone who has no food, a carton full of Twinkies is a godsend. That doesn't mean that eating them for every meal won't kill you pretty quickly, nor that anybody who had a choice between a box full of Twinkies or a couple of small cheeseburgers would choose the box of Twinkies, despite it ostensibly being more food.
The purpose of urban superchargers is to make the charging network more generally useful by getting locals to charge there instead of at the V2 superchargers. The problem is, it isn't working very well at all in the Bay Area, from what I've seen. Every time I look at the supercharger map, the urban superchargers at Santana Row are mostly empty, and the normal V2 superchargers just a couple of miles away in Cupertino are ~100% full, as are the superchargers just a couple of miles from there in Sunnyvale. What this means is that, with the possible exception of a few hours in the evening,
nobody is using these things.
An urban supercharger in Santa Cruz would be even more useless for most Tesla owners, because approximately 100% of people who live in Santa Cruz who own or can afford to own Teslas
work in the Silicon Valley. That means approximately 100% of them work within a ten-minute drive of a real supercharger. And it also means that approximately 100% of them have a commute that is anywhere from 1–2 hours each way.
Because Santa Cruz is separated from the Bay Area by mountains, a round trip from Santa Cruz to, for example, Google, requires a whopping 110 miles of range. A round trip to Apple is only shorter by about 4–10 miles, depending on route and on whether you're in Apple Park or in and around the IL campus. And Facebook is farther by probably about 10 miles. (About half of all South Bay tech jobs are at one of those three companies, so that's a really good approximation of a typical commute.)
To keep a sane cushion, you don't want to go below about 140–150 miles, or ~50% SOC. This makes that market very different from the South Bay. Santa Cruz Tesla drivers can't just charge once a week when they go out shopping. Rather, they typically need to supercharge their car either to 90% three times per week or to 50%
five or six times per week.
So if you live in Santa Cruz and work in the Valley, your options are:
- Charge to 90% 3x per week at an urban supercharger near your house (3 hours, 45 minutes total)
- Charge to 50% 5x per week at an urban supercharger near your house (3 hours, 45 minutes total)
- Charge to 90% 3x per week at a real supercharger near work (3 hours total)
- Charge to 50% 5x per week at a real supercharger near work (2 hours, 30 minutes total)
Needless to say, I would not expect anyone to choose to spend half again longer just to charge closer to home. With that in mind, the only reason for putting an urban supercharger in Santa Cruz would be to have an emergency solution for Silicon Valley tourists who go down for the weekend, drive more than they planned, and run their batteries down. And they could serve that need just as easily with a CCS-to-Tesla adapter chained to the side of a few of the existing DC fast chargers in the area, for a lot less money. An urban supercharger certainly won't serve the needs of the locals very well at all, so they'll continue to charge over the hill at real superchargers if they can't charge at home.
With that in mind, if you're Tesla and you have a given number of dollars to spend on superchargers, do you put in one V2 supercharger that people will actually use or two urban chargers that people will ignore in favor of the real thing? If you're sane, you do the former. So I would argue that, at least in that region, an urban supercharger would be nearly worthless.
In fact, the Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Cupertino superchargers all desperately need to be upgraded to V3 superchargers because they're so hopelessly short on capacity. When they do that, they'll have a giant pile of V2 supercharger equipment left over. Why not use that to add some limited V2 capacity in Los Gatos and Watsonville and to build out a full V2 supercharger in Santa Cruz?
