Teslas per Supercharger Stall Metric

[GalaxyExplorer]

I put together a metric of that shows the number of US Tesla’s per US Supercharger stall as a quick number to understand the pace of the SC network build out compared to the size of the on road fleet and relative demand. This has change a lot over the past 6 years, see the table.

At the end of Q3 2019 there were 68 Tesla cars per Supercharger stall in the US, with 6,656 opened stalls. This metric doubled since the end of 2017, when there were about 38 Tesla cars per super charger stall, with 3,850 opened stalls. This high level metric of changing SC demand captures fleet growth rapidly outpacing Supercharger network growth since teh Model 3, and there may not be a quick reversal in the metric anything soon. As locations get added so does the relative demand. This got me wondering what is the golden number of cars/stall for Tesla longer term? And once there are SC locations every 30/50 miles on major highways, V3 is common place and more SC in urban centers and at destinations there may be no golden number, but rater a network that can handle increasing demand.

As a control I looked at gas pumps per ICE car. There are about 146 ICE cars per gas pump in the US (2015 numbers, ~150,000 stations*~12 pumps avg per station/263,610,000 cars) . With a decades long trend of declining numbers of gas stations and increasing numbers of cars, this has only gone higher over the past 4 years.

Anyways thought I’d share, there are probably better/more accurate numbers out there. I’m going to track this in the future to see how it changes.

Sources:
Teslas on the road: http://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-data/tesla/
Superchargers: supercharge.info
Gas Stations: How many gas stations are there in the U.S?

 

[Missile Toad]

A few years ago someone else calculated this metric. At the time, it was clear that California had more Teslas on the road, per charger stall, than the rest of the country. I suppose that remains true today. One rationale for that, would be, that there are abundant non-Tesla, public, chargers throughout the state.

In the last three years, I've tended to rely, initially, on RV parks and J1772 chargers to help me bridge gaps in the Supercharger network. Now, I can go from Houston to Yellowstone using only Superchargers -- and without any significant departures from the most direct route.

Some factors that should make fewer chargers support more cars:

1. People are now smart enough to charge at 'the bottom of the battery', and minimize their time at each charger;
2. Chargers can operate at higher kW, and, the cars help with on-route warm-up;
3. Greater availability of destination chargers. These chargers relieve the Superchargers of some 5-15% of the load on multi-day journeys; and
4. Larger average range for the fleet.

On the other hand, in the last 3 years, urban chargers have been introduced. Those places that I've used the 'urban chargers', have, more often than not, been unusually busy. In at least one case, I believe the transformer on the site must have reached capacity, and my charge was, accordingly, throttled well below the nominal 72 kW that they can provide. These limited chargers probably should not be categorized in the same metric with the 150kW-capable superchargers.

Additionally, many of the chargers are aging, and in disrepair. Many have 'soft-failures', but others have damaged handles and are left in that state for many months. This too can be a factor.

 

[nwdiver]

It's gonna be interesting to see how this evolves over time. I'm a little frustrated that it seems L2 >12kW is fading in favor of L3 <100kW like urban chargers. It also would have been nice if J1772 was explicitly compatible with 277v instead of just 240v. Having the ability to install L2 @ 277v would be almost as good as L3 at <10% the cost.

 

[Missile Toad]

For fun, I tried to get a sense of how many chargers lie within 1 km of the Houston-Yellowstone path. I'm sure that the majority of these are not Tesla chargers. 189 chargers -- or about one for every 8 minutes of travel along this route (well, maybe except for that long stretch through Wyoming).

https://afdc.energy.gov/stations/#/find/route?start=houston&end=w.%20Yellowstone,%20mt&distance=1&distance_unit=km

 

[GalaxyExplorer]

A few years ago someone else calculated this metric. At the time, it was clear that California had more Teslas on the road, per charger stall, than the rest of the country. I suppose that remains true today. One rationale for that, would be, that there are abundant non-Tesla, public, chargers throughout the state.

In the last three years, I've tended to rely, initially, on RV parks and J1772 chargers to help me bridge gaps in the Supercharger network. Now, I can go from Houston to Yellowstone using only Superchargers -- and without any significant departures from the most direct route.

Some factors that should make fewer chargers support more cars:

1. People are now smart enough to charge at 'the bottom of the battery', and minimize their time at each charger;
2. Chargers can operate at higher kW, and, the cars help with on-route warm-up;
3. Greater availability of destination chargers. These chargers relieve the Superchargers of some 5-15% of the load on multi-day journeys; and
4. Larger average range for the fleet.

On the other hand, in the last 3 years, urban chargers have been introduced. Those places that I've used the 'urban chargers', have, more often than not, been unusually busy. In at least one case, I believe the transformer on the site must have reached capacity, and my charge was, accordingly, throttled well below the nominal 72 kW that they can provide. These limited chargers probably should not be categorized in the same metric with the 150kW-capable superchargers.

Additionally, many of the chargers are aging, and in disrepair. Many have 'soft-failures', but others have damaged handles and are left in that state for many months. This too can be a factor.

Any idea where a good source of registered Tesla’s per state and year could be found? This would give a shade more local relevance.

 

[Matsayz]

Any idea where a good source of registered Tesla’s per state and year could be found? This would give a shade more local relevance.

Maybe using www.supercharger.info ? You’d have to manually dig through it but there’s some good numbers there.