So far all of my reduced charging experiences correspond to the supercharger team telling me that the stalls I'm using are experiencing reduced service and that a ticket has been submitted to repair it/them.
The problem is that it continues to happen repeatedly month after month at the same superchargers and they always say the same thing.
I've never contacted Tesla about it. Sometimes I skip from stall to stall. Other times I wait it out. Sometimes, I leave with insufficient charge, end up running out of charge someplace, and having to pull over and get some sort of nuisansome situation to remedy the problem. I've ended up in all sorts of oddball situations because of slow SuperCharger charging. I've come to depend less and less on SuperChargers and more and more on EVGO Fast DC chargers.
But, on my last three trips, I had good luck at the SuperChargers and got full speed almost every time. I used EVGO Fast DC to spot fill gaps in the SuperCharger network to great effect. And, one of the only slow SuperCharge experiences I had was at Seaside. It does seem to be worse at certain locations. I'd say Fremont and Dublin usually get the slow bug. The spots out in the long Interstates tend not to have this problem, and the spots in close to residences tend to be the ones with the slow bug.
One of the things that depending on EVGO Fast DC chargers does is it makes you get used to "32kW" as normal and "42kW" as fast, so when you get to a SuperCharger only outputting 30kW, you look at it and say "ok, normal speed then, nothing Super this time", and it doesn't bug you as much. You end up going to do shopping, or bugging the people in the neighborhood, or whatever, and make a nice walk out of it. I get 30kW - 50kW at the slow SuperChargers quite often, and just deal with it one way or the other. 50kW is still fast from that point of view. When it goes to full speed (97kW), I feel lucky!
Another thing I do is almost always charge to 100%. I never know when the next charging spot is going to be slow, broken, or hard to reach. This has saved me a huge bunch of hassle. This makes more sense in a 60 that is a software limited 75; if I ever unlocked the last 15kW, I'd have all this planning around leaving on time and stuff to consider, and right now, I just don't need the headaches.
View attachment 216398 This was from last month in Tarrytown.
Nice. Full speed!
Your comparing Tesla to other EVs. I'm comparing Tesla now to Tesla the way it used to be. My 15 to 20 minute stops for long distance travel have doubled in time. Too long now to be acceptable to my wife on long distance trips. It was a tough enough sell to convince her when it was faster but it in the beginning it panned out as promised by Tesla and long distance travel only cost a little bit of extra time. With it taking double on average it's no longer viable.
Hopefully Tesla will get this sorted out because as long as charging is twice as slow on average, stall occupancy will be much higher and lines longer.
I think you must have an experience with a larger battery than mine. That does a number of things:
- It means you can afford the luxuries of family, and passengers that have standards. They will notice a doubling in charge time, and bumming out at the charge place to drink 2x the amount of coffee you should have is not acceptable.
- Your larger battery lets you go further, meaning less of stopping to charge. If your battery was smaller, this would compound the problem.
- Your larger battery lets you charge faster. My 60 only charges at 97kW (it is a 75 inside). You said you sometimes get OVER 100kW; I never can.
Your expectations are based upon a reality that no longer exists. I sit at the charging stations, shop, browse, and generally take a lot of time. I read, I listen to podcasts. I don't think that works in a family setting. While you bought out of most of those problems with the higher range and larger battery allowing faster charging, Tesla no longer offers that fast charge capability.
Sorka, I think you have a good point.
My experience echos yours. It is, at best, annoying, and in my case, it puts me back in my ICE.
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This isn't the first time I've had these kinds of problems when I use the Tesla for a relatively long trip to a destination where I'll have additional miles to drive upon arrival. Before, the superchargers (without crowds and operating at full speed) made Tesla use tolerable.
Bingo. This is the newest difference now. I think Battery Swap stations make a lot more sense now than back when Tesla tried it out in completely different circumstances. I'd start with five battery swap stations:
- Gilroy
- Santa Nella
- Tejon
- 101 near Santa Maria / Santa Barbara or so
- Reopen the one in the middle of Hwy 5 (it would cover a fair number of use cases, worth enough to be open, mostly because less capital costs for the existing station)
- Hollywood or so
They would be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all holidays. They would swap out whatever battery you have, and put in a "Highway Special", able to take you to the next Battery Swap on the other end of a North-South or South-North journey through California; probably a 100kWh pack with special Highway chemistry (it can even slow charge since it will be Tesla owned and charged, never charged by customer; in case the customer unwisely decides to self-charge, it would be limited to super slow charging, of course). Then, when you get to the far end Battery Swap, you'd swap again, and get the "Urban Special", one that allows fast charging, probably just the current 100kWh formula. On the way back, you swing by, pick up another Highway Special, and get yours back at the far end coming back. 4 swaps for a California North-South type trip. If you happen to be going To and From California and not up and down it, you can just swap in a regular fully charged 100kWh for regular use, and go out to where ever you are going, having to stop less often at SuperChargers since you have that extra 0kWh - 40kWh over what you normally have (unless you already have a 100kWh, in which case, you're probably too paranoid to try Battery Swap anyway).
During the party, Elon showed us it only takes two minutes to do a battery swap. That's not 1.5 hours!
I think a lot of us smaller battery type car drivers care a lot less about how special our very own personal battery is, and care more about just getting there. We won't mind swapping our battery out every so often! Maybe, very often.
Sometimes I get the impression the bosses over at Tesla never use their products, the way us customers do. We don't fly in jets (all of us); we
have experienced Mercedes S and E class vehicles and other luxury brands before; etc.. Now, things have been sliding.
I was in Manteca last week and got one of my rare 118KW starting charges when I was at 10% or so SOC. I was the only one there. Two more teslas arrived within just 2 or 3 minutes and plugged in. I dropped almost immediately to 75KW while at 15% SOC. Neither of the arriving Teslas plugged into my stack.
That suggests that Tesla is facing some sort of demand charges or feeder cable issues. I don't know if that's true. I'd love to know what's actually going on. Is "0 users" the new perfect SuperCharger to show up at now?
