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Tesla SC says no Upgrade to High Amp Charger for early 2017 MS

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Just as a datapoint - I have a February ‘17 build S90D delivered in March ‘17 (ordered right before the 100D announcement). It was delivered w/ 48A on-board.

This past fall I had my garage re-wired w/ a 100A circuit to the HPWC. The local service center charged me $1900 for the upgrade to 72A, and they DID have to do “under the hood” work - it wasn’t just a software push. Was a pretty straightforward half-day service appointment.


Thanks for the data point. From a manufacture timing perspective, it certainly seems my vehicle was built during a time that the internals should have been capable. I’m thinking that perhaps Tesla quietly ceased performing onboard charger upgrades for a subset of vehicles in this time period. In my opinion, they should provide honest technical justification for their policy not to provide my vehicle a charger upgrade. It seems arbitrary absent that.
 
I am considering adding a Model X to our family but I won’t make a decision until this onboard charger upgrade is either resolved or answered with an appropriate technical explanation.
Seems like a curious reason to wait.

Should you go ahead with the X purchase, your investment in the 100A circuit won't go to waste. You can purchase a second Wall Connector and have them share the circuit, whether either car has the 72A charger or not.
 
I am considering adding a Model X to our family but I won’t make a decision until this onboard charger upgrade is either resolved or answered with an appropriate technical explanation.

Our S 100D has the 48A charger, providing around 10 KWhr of recharge per hour. Assuming we normally keep the car between 10-90% of charger (going lower or higher on a regular basis might have a long term affect on the battery), that means with 8 hours of charging, we can go from 10-90%, and in most cases we need less charging time (80% of charge would be around 240 miles of driving - for one day).

If you have a 72A charger, that would provide around 15 Whr of recharge per hour, reducing a "full" 80% recharge to around 5 hours. But if it's overnight, in most cases, you'll never notice the difference between a 48A or 72A charger - at least for overnight charging.

The only time this has an impact is when you are trying to charge during the day - and you can't reach a supercharger. And, to get the advantage of having a 72A charger, many chargers don't support that level of charging.

With our first Model S - I purchased the "dual charger" configuration - to get 80A of charging, because I was concerned about range anxiety. In the 5 years we've owned the car, I can recall only one time when we needed to charge that quickly - and that was after driving locally during the day, before heading out on a road trip that evening. Since there weren't any superchargers at that time, I had to leave with enough charge to get all the way to my destination, which had a public charger. Once the supercharger network was in place, haven't needed to charge at 80A.

When we ordered our S 100D, we no longer had range anxiety - and chose the 48A charger based on our experience - and likely won't drop $1900 to upgrade the charger, since we're not likely going to need it.

If this is the only reason why you're delaying a purchase of a Model X - then make some estimates of how much charging you are going to need - and where - and I suspect you'll find that whatever charger comes standard will be enough.
 
Just heard from our local service center.

Our S 100D was one of the first manufactured last year, likely the first delivered in Texas, after Tesla received approval to sell the car (there was a several week delay last year, waiting for government approval).

According to the Service Center, for our car, upgrading to the 72A charger is only a software update - the onboard charger already supports the faster charging.

While that's good news, it is a little disappointing that Tesla is asking us to pay $1900 for to flip a few bits in the software, after they made the 72A charger standard in the 100D's shortly after we received our delivery...

At least for us, there's no urgency to give Tesla more money - if the hardware already supports it, if we determine there's a future need, then we'll schedule a service visit for them to flip the bit.

Anyone else in this situation, should at least check the status of the car's onboard charger - and determine if it's only a software update.