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Supercharging Nightmare Begins
- Thread starter bayx
- Start date
Conversely, at the Newark, DE Supercharger (12 stalls) last night, there were 7 Model 3s charging and no S or X. In Springfield, VA, Model 3s easily make up at least half of the cars charging.
On a recent 1000 mile trip from Colorado, across Kansas and then back to Colorado, I saw a total of 6 Model 3s, 1 X and 1 S at my 5 Supercharger stops. I did see one other Model X when pulling into one town. I assume I just missed them at the Supercharger.
Damn you had great Wh/M! I did about 700 miles in a X90D and it was 3 each way...
I was in an S 100D for this trip and my first stop was in Colby, KS which was 250 miles from home.
Usually in my S 90D, my first stop would be in Goodland instead. This trip was Colby and Hays on the drive east and then Hays, Colby and Limon on the drive back.I actually found the supercharging infrastructure to be seriously lacking, even in southern California (top Tesla market along with bay area). The entire San Diego urban area rely on a single supercharger station inside a parking garage that charge you crazy parking fee and not to mention it is in a very crappy area with nothing else to do. The other supercharger 25 mins north of San Diego was already packed to full years ago.
As in LA metro area, all the areas from Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, LA downtown still relies on a SINGLE supercharger at Culver City with 16 stalls that were completely overwhelmed. The coverage is unchanged from more than 4 years ago in these areas. I think it is completely crazy that Tesla have ignored these areas for so damn long. What the heck is the supercharger team doing? All these happens right in their front yard where Tesla design studio are close by.
Also, what's up with supercharger coverage inside and around all the famous national parks. Forget about going to Grand Canyon with your Tesla unless you rely on destination charger somehow to charge overnight. The closest supercharger is at Flagstaff which is too far for you to go inside the park and back. Yosemite national park is slightly better, but still far from enough. Yellowstone has just one supercharger at one of the park entrances, and that's it, no other supercharger close by.
I am a EV supporter, and despite all the talks and hype about EV taking over the world. The reality is that much faster charging speed, much better supercharger coverage, and longer real world driving range are all needed to improve big time, especially for long distance driving. All these infrastructure and range improvement will probably take another 10 years or longer to be fully competitive and be truly accepted by most car buyer.
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The overall EV charging infrastructure (even inclusive of Superchargers) is years if not decades away from a widespread consumer-convenience level. Until the 100,000+ "Gascharger" stations out there are changed with some higher-number of visible, working, convenient and standardized high speed DCFC, the consumer base will still not run fast to EVs as their only-car or next-car. Keep the installation coming - no matter the brand name.
juliusa
Active Member
I'd say 5 to 10 years. Chicken and egg issue - and there are more chickens and eggs every year.
I think about half the BEVs on the road in the US today were sold in 2018.
My 2 cents says Tesla will start making all cars with CCS Combo 2 ports sometime in the near future. They are already doing it for Europe. And like Europe, they will make all Super chargers dual headed with a CCS AND regular Telsa connector. This will let us charge at Supercharger and CCS facilities like Electrify America, which is being built out with $2B of VW money from the dieselgate scandal. Tesla could then legitmately claim they "greatly expanded the Supercharger network" in 2019 and 2020 as Musk said they would.
If Tesla change any model to CCS standard (kind of like what they did to Model 3 in europe), the problem won't be with supercharger coz they can retrofit it with dual adapters. But i think the bigger issues are the thousands and thousands of Tesla destination charger already out there. The old plug just won't be compatible with CCS standard. Not being able to charge your car overnight during a long road trip can be a huge issue.
I agree. I think at least 10 to 20 years away is a fair estimate.
The whole non-Tesla DC fast charging infrastructure is still a huge issue even now. Who the hell wants to pay subscription to 4 different networks ahead of time, and the charger is either blocked or don't even work half of the time with charging speed significantly less than they advertised. The long distance travel experience for non-Tesla EV owner is still a nightmare. Tesla supercharging network is still far ahead, but could be a lot better like I mentioned before.
This is an interesting problem. But if Tesla can figure out how to dual head the hundreds of Superchargers They can surely figure a solution. Perhaps all that is needed for destination/HPWC, using the lower power A/C, is a new convertor plug like the ones we carry today for J-1772. Or something more sophisticated like the Chademo adapter might be needed
juliusa
Active Member
They could sell a J1772 cable to replace the Tesla cable, or use an adapter.
TeslaTap - Tesla compatible J1772 adapter | eBay
TeslaTap - Tesla compatible J1772 adapter | eBay
It isn't a problem in Europe, because all European Teslas had a Type 2 connector from the beginning - necessary because a lot of European charging is three phase, which the Tesla plug doesn't support.
The change in Europe is required by EU law. I'll be very, very surprised if Tesla makes a similar change in the US - as noted, it's much harder here because of the plug compatibility aspects, and they would spend a whole lot of money but gain nothing (except the ability for their cars to use a smaller and much more expensive network - an ability they can get for a lot less money by selling adapters, which I do expect to see because Tesla has committed to developing them for Europe and once they have those it's trivial to make a US version.)
What Tesla would gain is a expansion of the their network, and elimination of the costs of producing vehicles with different charging standards.
As of now, there's no set system. Some busy California sites have a concierge type managing the queue at some times of day I believe. The most common approach seems to be a line of cars waiting a little beyond the end of the row. But needing to queue is still a rare event except for a few locations in California AFAIK.
If the network doesn't expand quickly enough to prevent queuing from being a common experience, I expect Tesla will introduce a firmware update to automate it along with giving better guidance as to where the SpC is and what stall to take.
(Actually, I kinda expect to see that along with the Navigation using other folks' expected arrival times to guide you to less loaded chargers at some point anyway, but it'll likely come sooner if Tesla feels the network is overwhelmed.)
The lines are ad hoc. Usually everyone just lines up single file at one end of the superchargers. First in, first to charge. If the line gets long enough that it blocks entrances and exit to the lot, gaps are left for cars entering and exiting.
Since you are in the Bay Area, if you want to try it sometime go to any of the Superchargers in the Target lots, or Mountain View or Dublin after 8 AM and before 8 PM.
"the elimination of the costs"? Umm. They'd have to produce twice as many charger cables, and produce more complicated, presumably more expensive charge ports for every car. There might have been some savings in not developing the hardware and the software by going with an existing standard - except that Tesla invested that money before CCS existed. There's no savings for Tesla there now.
There's no expansion to their network, either. It gives the cars compatibility with other networks being built by other people, true - but that's not at all the same thing, and as of now those networks are 2x to 5x as expesnive to charge on, so no one is likely to want to unless they hit a long, long delay on Tesla's network - an event made more likely by the switch, since it'd take resources Tesla could use to expand the network and expend them retrofitting existing sites.
It'd also mean that the Supercharger plugs fit most other brands of cars, so even if Tesla doesn't open the network to other folks, you'd see delays from all the confused people trying to charge - and if they do open the network, you'd have a bunch of other brands of cars that charge slower choking things up.
Tesla gains nothing from doing it, but it has the potential to cost them a bunch.
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