Supercharging in Colorado with 5.6 Firmware

[GlennAlanBerry]

My wife and I made a quick little trip from Parker to the Tesla Supercharger at Silverthorne on Saturday. I had my Model S in the Denver Service Center this past week to get the tires rotated, take care of a couple of proactive TSBs, and get the 5.6 firmware installed.

We averaged 360 Wh/mi going from Parker to Silverthorne (which has quite a bit of elevation gain). We got there about 10:30AM, and there were no other Teslas at the Supercharger when we arrived. I was plugged into spot 2B.

I was seeing 274 mi/hr when I first plugged in, which is a little lower than I was expecting, since this is one of the newest Superchargers and I have the 5.6 firmware.

Even so, it was pretty cool to see it charging so fast compared to my NEMA 14-50 at home. Silverthorne is a great location for a Supercharger, with the Silverthorne Outlet Mall and a few restaurants nearby. It is pretty easy to spend some time here while the car charges. I wore my black Tesla jacket while we were walking around, so I got quite a few questions from various store employees.

By the time we were leaving, we saw another Model S from Wyoming, that was just leaving after a charge.

 

[apacheguy]

I'm surprised to see the SC rate taper that early in the charge. At 140 miles you were only seeing ~80 kw. My understanding was that there is only very slight tapering until 80% SOC, however, you were no where near that. This interpretation seems consistent with the chart displayed at:

Supercharger | Tesla Motors

Any chance someone with 5.6 wants to do a power vs SOC graph such as the one cinergi created way back when?

I found cinergi's original data:

Typical Supercharging rate? - Page 6

It's hard to tell, but at 140 miles it seems he was getting ~70 kw. 80 kw isn't much improvement.

 

[Cottonwood]

I'm surprised to see the SC rate taper that early in the charge. At 140 miles you were only seeing ~80 kw. My understanding was that there is only very slight tapering until 80% SOC, however, you were no where near that. This interpretation seems consistent with the chart displayed at:

Supercharger | Tesla Motors

Any chance someone with 5.6 wants to do a power vs SOC graph such as the one cinergi created way back when?

I found cinergi's original data:

Typical Supercharging rate? - Page 6

It's hard to tell, but at 140 miles it seems he was getting ~70 kw. 80 kw isn't much improvement.

I regularly drive Boulder to Pagosa and back. My charge on the way to Pagosa is from 140-150 up to about 260 so that I can make it the 237 miles over 3 passes and often into the wind. This gives me the fun of Range Charging on a Supercharger. Pagosa to Boulder, I often have 20-40 miles left and get to see the fast charge rate when nearly empty. I will put these data together for 5.6 when I drive back to Boulder, but that will not be until sometime in December. I did get the top end (range part) the day after loading 5.6. I can assure you that it has improved from 4.5, but I am not sure if it is quite as good as the graph at the Tesla Supercharger Page. I do know that what used to take 1.5 hours to go from 140 rated miles to 260 rated miles with 4.5, now takes about 1.0 hour with 5.6

Here are some data taken with the App. As a comparison to Glenn's data, I got a very similar charge rate of 75 kW at 142 miles with 5.6:

I happen to have charging data at 159 miles for both 4.5 and 5.6. 4.5 was doing 45 kW, and 5.6 was doing 65 kW at that point. This point roughly corresponds to me seeing the end-game charge time being reduced from 1.5 to 1.0 hours. Be very careful about mph charge rate. In both the car and the App displays, the mph charge shown is the average rate for the charging session. If you display charge rate in kW, it may be average also, but I have not checked. If you want the charge rate at this point in time, you must do a calculation of Volts * Amps / 310 W-hr/mi. As always, your mileage may vary.

Looking again at the 159 mile data, it is amazing how the charge power, the average mph, and my charge times of 1.5 and 1.0, are all very close to a 3:2 ratio. Very big extrapolation from a few data points, but I would conjecture that the second half charge rates have improved by a factor of 1.5 and thus second half charge times are reduced by 1/3; new charge times with 5.6 are 2/3 of old time in the last part of charging on a Supercharger.