I saw this post, where one of the Tesla owners had extremely bad luck at two Superchargers. Since I've been studying this issue for the last 6 months, I have a rough estimate of the probabilities that a SuperCharger site experiences problems on any given day.
I have been daily checking/logging my Nav for Tesla-reported outages (Reduced Service / Temporarily Closed) since the beginning of the year. I skipped looking during my vacation, and sporadically through the year. I have a slight tendency to overlook outages, perhaps missing about 5% (stare at 300+ red pins, and you'll see what I mean). Sometimes, looking at the Nav, its like finding a red needle in a haystack of rose-colored needles. To compensate, I add 18 to my count of 362 daily, cumulative outages.
I also compensate my numbers, because the SuperCharger network is probably granularly reporting to the tune of every hour, but outages persist in a distribution from 1 hour to 30 days. Accordingly, I probably missed, ROUGHLY another 10% that came and went because of a brief power outage that happened between my observations.
Best estimate is 362+18+36 (416) outages over 190 days for, on average, 355 SuperCharger sites (count of sites has risen from about 345 to 376 over this period).
355*190 = 67450 site-days during my period of observations
A typical site can go about 162 days without Reduced Service or Temporarily Closed shown to the car's Nav (assumes that Tesla does not conceal charger status at the remote ends of the continent).
Based on data collected in Houston, TX during Jan - mid-July 2017, for a given SuperCharger site, odds are:
A road-trip that takes you through 16 SuperChargers has this probability of an issue:
Given those odds, you could go for 10 years without seeing a problem like this -- truly an event that is as risky as having a road-side flat, except you still have options:
I have been daily checking/logging my Nav for Tesla-reported outages (Reduced Service / Temporarily Closed) since the beginning of the year. I skipped looking during my vacation, and sporadically through the year. I have a slight tendency to overlook outages, perhaps missing about 5% (stare at 300+ red pins, and you'll see what I mean). Sometimes, looking at the Nav, its like finding a red needle in a haystack of rose-colored needles. To compensate, I add 18 to my count of 362 daily, cumulative outages.
I also compensate my numbers, because the SuperCharger network is probably granularly reporting to the tune of every hour, but outages persist in a distribution from 1 hour to 30 days. Accordingly, I probably missed, ROUGHLY another 10% that came and went because of a brief power outage that happened between my observations.
Best estimate is 362+18+36 (416) outages over 190 days for, on average, 355 SuperCharger sites (count of sites has risen from about 345 to 376 over this period).
355*190 = 67450 site-days during my period of observations
A typical site can go about 162 days without Reduced Service or Temporarily Closed shown to the car's Nav (assumes that Tesla does not conceal charger status at the remote ends of the continent).
Based on data collected in Houston, TX during Jan - mid-July 2017, for a given SuperCharger site, odds are:
44% an outage occurs during the year; and
0.12% that any given SuperCharger has an outage on the day you travel to it.
0.12% that any given SuperCharger has an outage on the day you travel to it.
A road-trip that takes you through 16 SuperChargers has this probability of an issue:
.9988^16 uptime = .981 uptime ... or 1.9% of ANY SuperCharger causing a difficulty.
Given those odds, you could go for 10 years without seeing a problem like this -- truly an event that is as risky as having a road-side flat, except you still have options:
1) Find fuel on inbound leg, using alternative charging site(s)
2) Slow down ... identify hotels/restaurants, even grocery stores and gas stations that would tolerate your plugging in
3) Find fuel while using your buffer, after passing the SuperCharger
4) Waiting it out at the SuperCharger, depending on what prospects SeviceNA gives you on it being operational soon
5) Since many of the 'outages' were merely 'Reduced Service', just plan to be at the SuperCharger an extra hour, getting refueled
6) Bedding down for the night, assuming you were on last leg for the day
Many things could change over the next few years to change these resiliency statistics:2) Slow down ... identify hotels/restaurants, even grocery stores and gas stations that would tolerate your plugging in
3) Find fuel while using your buffer, after passing the SuperCharger
4) Waiting it out at the SuperCharger, depending on what prospects SeviceNA gives you on it being operational soon
5) Since many of the 'outages' were merely 'Reduced Service', just plan to be at the SuperCharger an extra hour, getting refueled
6) Bedding down for the night, assuming you were on last leg for the day
- change in ownership of the SuperCharger network (e.g. create a non-affiliated federation of auto-manufacturers)
- normal wear/tear on the cables
- updates to the SuperCharger design
- Rosie the Robot plugging the cable to your car, and giving it a quick feather dusting after every use;
- financial distress of Tesla
- AI taking over the world and showing who is boss by shutting down the entire SuperCharger network
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