Also showing for the sites open to Non-Tesla EVs (who of course hasn't had access to see peak usage times at all previously)
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Superchargers in Australia
- Thread starter JOH
- Start date
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- Australia Supercharging
Tesla had their own distribution sub put in (which the Chargefox site also uses).
AussieOwner
White M3 2021 LR
If the feeder was out then the servo and fast food joints would all have been out as well.. were they?
Well, I must say, such an article would be justified. What a disaster for anyone driving the Sydney-Melbourne route and pulling into Gundagai with 10% or so SOC. What are the other options available from there if you find yourself in this im situation? ABRP tells me there are no valid route out of there either towards Sydney or Melbourne.
Yep, no sugar coating this. A disaster.
What is good though is that I can’t find reports in Plugshare of any significant problems heading north from Sydney. No queueing reported at Heatherbrae, worst case of 3 cars at Port Macquarie, full house but no queues at Coffs, no queues at Maclean, no queues at Knockrow. There’s been quite a few new DCFCs installed on that route in the past year.
The Syd-Melb route needs a lot more DCFCs. 15 stalls at Albury will be a big help. Plus a forensic review of what happened to take Goulburn and Gundagai offline, which would completely shaft people. Accommodation would have been full too, so what the heck would people have done? Expect a lot of angry venting on forums and in the media, and it would be justified. I would be struggling to maintain composure in that situation.
PS. Goulburn is back online this morning.
Don't think Tesla Goulburn went down. Just some queues.
Was Tesla Gundagai, Campbeltown, and seemingly today Kirrawee that have gone down.
Somewhat amazingly the ever unreliable Chargefox Goulburn and NRMA Mittagong actually survived the day.
And according to the app (haven't checked the car), Gundagai still down @ 1135 today. The forensic review suggested by @Vostok is a must.
AussieOwner
White M3 2021 LR
Hope they get these issues fixed up and mitigated before the upcoming ANZAC long weekend.
Imagine going to the petrol station and having no petrol, same thing.
Complete disaster .
Imagine going to the petrol station and having no petrol, same thing.
Complete disaster .
I think that’s right - Gundagai (and the ChargeFox DC chargers that apparently share the same transformer) then later in the afternoon Campbelltown.
Goulburn - and anywhere else that people could reach or take on extra charge at - just seemed to get smashed as a second-order effect.
Something I saw on PlugShare yesterday evening and I want to call them out to thank them (because I would hope it helped a lot of otherwise-stuck people) was @QBN_PC had made a series of very helpful comments on the various DC chargers on that route - the dead ones and those within 100-200km of them - spelling out how best to work around the outages (alternate routes and which chargers to take a big charge or a small extra top-up at) and still make it to where they needed to go.
Chuq
Active Member
Tesla has previously used an alternate method to deal with these peak travel weekends in the US. They made charging free, at selected superchargers (the ones vulnerable to congestion) if you charge at off-peak times.
This is incentive enough to encourage enough people (might not be many - 10%, 20%?) to alter their travel times, which avoids cascading queues, and makes everyone happy.
How much would it cost? A few tens of thousands of dollars in free charging, maybe?
This is incentive enough to encourage enough people (might not be many - 10%, 20%?) to alter their travel times, which avoids cascading queues, and makes everyone happy.
How much would it cost? A few tens of thousands of dollars in free charging, maybe?
Chuq
Active Member
I think there are other intangible costs - like how much is it worth to NOT have dozens of negative news stories about crowding in the following week?
These outages are disappointing - clearly there's some way to go with charging infrastructure. Up to now I thought I could rely on Tesla's rock-solid Superchargers but if you reach Gundagai with minimal SoC expecting the Superchargers will be fine, and the whole site with other chargers go down it's a bad situation to be in. I think I'd be in even more trouble had I bought a non-Tesla EV. Really hope there aren't many more holidays/long weekends with this as a repeat.
I think from what we know now:
* Some piece of shared power supply infrastructure at Gundagai (shared by the Tesla supercharger and ChargeFox DC chargers) failed during the day yesterday.
* The Gundagai supercharger came back online around 1-2pm today. Not sure about ChargeFox.
* The Campbelltown supercharger didn’t exist until a few days ago, so shouldn’t be critical for anyone who had planned to travel this weekend. Obviously disappointing - bordering on hugely embarrassing - that it totally failed yesterday afternoon (presumably the first day the site got hit hard by charging load) but Tesla had it back in service by this afternoon.
* Kirrawee apparently wasn’t actually down at all, just had some comms problems talking with the Tesla mothership (aside: Wouldn’t it be good if there was - I don’t know - a satellite-based system of some sort the Superchargers could use to communicate
).I don’t _think_ any other Superchargers have been down this weekend, beyond a stall or two that have been out of service or half speed for a while (looking at you stalls 1A and 1B at Macquarie Centre).
To be clear I am not excusing any of this - and I would have been royally ticked off to have been stuck somewhere as a result.
The Chargefox app still says their Gundagai site is down.
Tesla paid for the transformer onsite.
Chargefox came along later and share the same transformer. Chargefox came to the agreement that Tesla take the power first and Chargefox can have the remaining capacity. This has been operating for quite a while, so I don't see that being the issue. I would say the storms took the power out in the area.
