Sorry, I just came across this thread catching up on my e-mail over the past week. Seems like it asked for trip reports of Thanksgiving travel, but quickly devolved into the old reservation vs. queue vs. free-for-all debate (not sure how many times we have to revamp that old discussion)...
Anyway, I had posted a report on my experience traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday here:
Thanksgiving 2022 (eastern US) - very little trouble
I would ask that the post be merged here, except I think this thread is already way too off topic for the requested stories already. So I'll just leave you to visit the linked thread.
It wasn't that off-topic, in fact it was here many of us learned about Tesla's new feature where they are managing charger demand by redirecting people away from full chargers to less used ones mid-drive with the navigation system. This is the first step in what a system to manage stations during periods of high demand would look like. That doesn't guarantee it will progress to actually allocating stalls, of course.
I think many folks would like to see stall allocation at V2 chargers even without reservations. As not everybody knows, your charge rate at a V2 stall depends greatly on who you park next to. The system knows what's going on in every charging pair, including how much power is available at the empty stall and also how long the existing car is going to be charging, and at what likely rate. There is definitely a "best" stall to pick and the system should know it and should tell me as I drive up.
You want that for yourself, but you also want it for everybody else at busy times, because faster charging rates mean faster turnover at the charger, though when a station is full, most people would go for the empty slot and you want them to. It turns out though that if you arrive at a V2 station with one empty stall, but that empty stall is paired with a freshly arrived model X, and another stall is paired with a car that's leaving in a few minutes, it is actually faster for you to wait for that other stall to open up. That's useful, except when there is a line, because in that case you would prefer somebody take the slow stall -- bad for them, but good for total throughput.
Does it work on a 2014 Model S?
