jvonbokel
John VonBokel
I understand what you are saying... but the only report of long lines at superchargers that I ever read come from California... you have to look at density of superchargers in relationship to density of Model S/X
Bah - I call that horrifically close to bad S/N feedback (close - not perfect - analogy. Can't come up with a better one off the cuff).
For example, ein gedankenexperiment: What would happen to the number of Teslas sold in California at t=1, {given at t=0 there are what? 20,000 or so?} if five additional Superchargers were emplaced there? Now place them not in California, but in Alaska (n=14 at t=0). Answer: The Sales to Installs payback would be far better.
Not sure what S/N feedback is, and Google was no help. Could you explain?
5 new Superchargers in CA might not directly lead to more sales in the way that new Supercharger locations elsewhere could, but sales in CA are strong (due to factors like local incentives), and if they fail to keep up with network expansion, it will negatively impact sales in the future.
Many Superchargers (i.e. in the midwest) were built with enough capacity to support local sales a couple years into the future, so those areas will not see expansion for some time. California sales continue to be high, so the network there is more at risk of becoming saturated.
Consider the negative publicity of Supercharger wait times. Dec 26th was a special case where an already heavy travel day was impacted by some closed routes, forcing even more traffic along one specific corridor. However, if that were to happen with any regularity, there would be articles suggesting that Tesla's free Supercharging model is not sustainable, which would impact sales (and not just in CA).
All we have to go on are maps of existing chargers (and Tesla's vague planned future maps), and maybe a little bit of general driving/population data. Tesla, on the other hand, can generate a map of all their owners, or potentially even where the cars are at any given moment (not sure how much access they have to real-time GPS data of the fleet in aggregate). They can also most definitely see usage history for each Supercharger location, and generate utilization percentages by geographic area. Surely they have a good reason for building more Superchargers in California, and I suspect it has to do with one or both of those pieces of information.