But they haven't kept pace with demand. It was actually easier and quicker to do a trip from San Francisco to San Diego when there were only 6 superchargers because they weren't busy. Now they are overloaded and even when not overloaded, Tesla isn't keeping up with maintenace to avoid Supercharger slow downs.
In that brief few days before Tesla asked the site owner to take the site down, we got to see which superchargers were busy where. And southern CA, unique across the entire US, was a disaster area for access to superchargers.
We need lots more superchargers in CA, especially in southern CA.
Four years ago, if you wanted to road trip from SD up to the SF Bay Area, you had to go through Hawthorne. And originally, I think there were something like 5 or 6 stalls there. That was a bottle neck. So was Tejon. And do you remember when Harris Ranch had 1 (one) stall?? Waits were not only common, they were the norm. There was just no other way to get from SF to LA, let alone SD, without waiting at Superchargers unless you went mid-week. Then Tesla electrified 101 with Atascadero, Buelton and eventually Oxnard. They have now added additional SCs in and around Tejon at Buttonwill and Bakersfield West to make waits in that area non-existent. (We stopped at Buttonwillow and then Bakersfield on weekends in January and saw only a couple of other Teslas at both stops.) They they added Manteca, and now another south of that on I-5. Going to Yosemite 4 years ago from here was a tough thing to plan. Now it's one stop at Manteca. Same with Tahoe -- there now are 5 or 6 Superchargers along the way and more up there in Truckee. How about Mammoth from SoCal? Virtually impossible even just 3 years ago. Now, no problem at all.
We did a road trip in January where we didn't wait once at Superchargers except for at Buena Park the night before I returned, and that was only because we chose to stay in a hotel that didn't have any kind of charger, which is becoming rarer and rarer these days.
Point is -- having done maybe 20 road trips with our cars to/from SoCal in the past 4 years, it is SO much easier now than it was then. We are going on another road trip to La Jolla and SD next month, and will take advantage of the Supercharger down there if we need to but worst case will use a destination charger at our hotel overnight. Four years ago there was no Supercharger down in SD and was pretty difficult to find any hotels that had chargers, and when they did they were L2 with maybe 30 amp max. It was virtually impossible to road trip down there without getting a full charge at Hawthorne, which was never easy.
Does that mean Tesla doesn't need to build any more Superchargers? Of course not. But with any sense of the history, one cannot be impressed with how far we've come in just a few short years. And when there were embarrassing waits like at Tejon two years ago over the holidays, Tesla moved quickly on that to open up Bakersfield and Buttowillow and waits at Tejon disappeared overnight.
And on maintenance, not sure what data you're looking at. I've seen some stalls down from time to time when we've traveled, but when I've returned to those stations, like in Gilroy, Harris Ranch, and Buena Park, those stalls were fixed. People complained about delays in renovating and expanding Harris Ranch or problems with some of the stalls, and Tesla responded. When we stopped at HR twice in January, every single stall was operational. Same with my trip up to Vancouver, B.C. in February. I didn't encounter a single Supercharger location where a stall was down, or at least none that I saw. That was pretty impressive if you ask me.
I don't see Tesla jeopardizing its business model by dragging its feet to roll out more Superchargers when the demand warrants it. So when the Model 3 does start rolling out in numbers, I would expect Tesla to ramp up Superchargers. But I doubt they will invest in building them just so people can get their free charge in their neighborhood because they want to save a few dollars by not charging at home. I see this all the time in Mountain View and Dublin, two of the busiest Superchargers in the US. People just want free stuff, and some people would rather save a few dollars by going to the Supercharger than charging at home and spending time with friends or family. But the congestion at those two has never, ever affected our long distance road trips.
