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Overloaded superchargers

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I was coming home last Sunday night, and tried to charge at the Tejon Supercharger. ALL chargers were full and one Tesla was waiting. When I got in, you can see that I was charging at an embarassing 49 miles/hour.....46 A and 361V....see picture!

This changes the lifestyle choice of owning a Tesla and trying to use it for long distance travel....not a great choice trying to get home after the weekend. If anyone from TESLA monitors this, I hope they note that adding underpowered capacity in the number of stalls to a site doesn't help if you slow the charging rate down. Then the stalls all stay full and we get stranded.....
 

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Please read up a bit on how the supercharging process works at full occupancy.
(You basically share one charger with two cars, where the one arriving first gets a max of 90 kW, leaving a lot less for number two to arrive.)
 
Please read up a bit on how the supercharging process works at full occupancy.
(You basically share one charger with two cars, where the one arriving first gets a max of 90 kW, leaving a lot less for number two to arrive.)


***
If you can figure out which car was charging first on a pair you can tap the SC handle of that car and take priority over them so you will get more than 30kW and they will be limited to 30kW
which they will be limited to after 30-40 min regardless
***

this is very useful and I have never seen or heard this from anyone else
 
Friday afternoon at about 4pm, Hawthorne was full (all 8 bays). Saturday afternoon at about 4pm, San Juan Capistrano was filled up by me arriving, and another Model S we saw on the freeway, who took a sub-optimal route, had to wait. In both cases the waits were short, but a Tesla employee at Hawthorne mentioned that 4 out of 8 of them there were down for a while earlier in the week!
 
I was coming home last Sunday night, and tried to charge at the Tejon Supercharger. ALL chargers were full and one Tesla was waiting. When I got in, you can see that I was charging at an embarassing 49 miles/hour.....46 A and 361V....see picture!.

Probably just bad timing if a car in a paired stall had started charging immediatley before you did. That's not likely to happen often. Did the rate increase as the paired car who was there before you was getting full?
 
I have read up on how the supercharging process works at full capacity. I was NOT aware that it would be so slow that it might take several hours to charge. Seeing EVERY stall occupied and only being able to charge at the rate of a home wall charger was more than a little depressing.....This WILL change my future trip/travel plans going forward.
 
Probably just bad timing if a car in a paired stall had started charging immediatley before you did. That's not likely to happen often. Did the rate increase as the paired car who was there before you was getting full?

Headlines from last week "Tesla Ready to Pump Out 100000 Cars Per Year by 2015". At that rate, do you think we'll see the first EV fist fight at a Tesla SuperCharger before 2015?

SuperCharging doesn't scale... they knew it wouldn't from the beginning.


Hopefully next months headline will be "First Super Swapping Station opens in..."
 
It never increased....I was in that stall for maybe 15 minutes.....got less than 9 miles of charge for that.....but when the Tesla car charging at the left end of the supercharging station left, I immediately took that end spot and was eventually able to get up to 90 miles per hour of charge.
I just got enough to make it home and left.
 
***
If you can figure out which car was charging first on a pair you can tap the SC handle of that car and take priority over them so you will get more than 30kW and they will be limited to 30kW
which they will be limited to after 30-40 min regardless
***

this is very useful and I have never seen or heard this from anyone else
Probably because it's a jerk maneuver that some of us would never do, and wouldn't want to advertise.
 
I was coming home last Sunday night, and tried to charge at the Tejon Supercharger. ALL chargers were full and one Tesla was waiting. When I got in, you can see that I was charging at an embarassing 49 miles/hour.....46 A and 361V....see picture!

Yep, the reliability at Tejon is awful. One time they were at reduced electrical capacity even though there were only two of us charging. I have also had the charging session stop prematurely on two separate occasions.
 
I have read up on how the supercharging process works at full capacity. I was NOT aware that it would be so slow that it might take several hours to charge. Seeing EVERY stall occupied and only being able to charge at the rate of a home wall charger was more than a little depressing.....This WILL change my future trip/travel plans going forward.
Then that charging station was broken and you should report it to Tesla. It should never take several hours to charge.
 
Probably just bad timing if a car in a paired stall had started charging immediately before you did. That's not likely to happen often.

It depends on location. The closest SC to me is at the mothership in Fremont. It only has 8 stalls and I have never seen it less than 6/8 full. I have never gotten anywhere near the advertised rate of charge.

- - - Updated - - -

And that's precisely the appropriate action that one should take when a Supercharger site is full, isn't it?

Indeed, that is the courteous thing to do. But the whole point of this thread is that the actual SC experience is a lot less wonderful than the advertised experience. SuperCharging is marketed as a plentiful, free-for-life thing that will fill the tank in 30 minutes. The free part is certainly true. Plentiful is not true today, and if anything will become less true over time: they are ramping up vehicle production a lot faster than SC deployments. And if a 30 minute charge is only possible when the SC is half-occupied, they shouldn't claim 30 minutes. That's like estimating your daily commute as the fastest time you've ever done it, off hours, in zero traffic.

Don't get me wrong. Tesla is not just making a new car, they are making a new economy, with new infrastructure and new paradigms. I give them 11 out of 10 for execution. But sometimes they talk like it's 15 out of 10, and it makes me wonder whether they're really aware of the gaps in the ownership experience.
 
I was coming home last Sunday night, and tried to charge at the Tejon Supercharger. ALL chargers were full and one Tesla was waiting. When I got in, you can see that I was charging at an embarassing 49 miles/hour.....46 A and 361V....see picture!

This changes the lifestyle choice of owning a Tesla and trying to use it for long distance travel....not a great choice trying to get home after the weekend. If anyone from TESLA monitors this, I hope they note that adding underpowered capacity in the number of stalls to a site doesn't help if you slow the charging rate down. Then the stalls all stay full and we get stranded.....

When doing a road trip, planning is paramount. This is no different than in an ICE. Trying to drive on Friday afternoon, or Sunday afternoon will always be a problem. I know traveling to/from Tahoe you never drive during those times as it is virtually gridlock on the interstate, charging not even considered. But with planning, I've never had an issue and I've traveled virtually all of the Supercharger routes in the west. Avoiding Friday's and Sunday's is the ticket, especially in the summer months.
 
SuperCharging is marketed as a plentiful, free-for-life thing that will fill the tank in 30 minutes. The free part is certainly true. Plentiful is not true today, and if anything will become less true over time: they are ramping up vehicle production a lot faster than SC deployments. And if a 30 minute charge is only possible when the SC is half-occupied, they shouldn't claim 30 minutes.

No one has ever claimed supercharging will "fill the tank" in 30 minutes. Tesla claims 50% charge in "as little as" 20 min. and 80% charge in 40 minutes. What some people don't realize is those percentages are the end charge state, not adding 50% or 80% of charge to wherever they're starting from. In other words those rates are from starting near empty and would usually be sufficient to get you to the next supercharger, or to home where the bulk of your charging should occur. If people would learn to get out of the gas station "fill 'er up" mode, it would free up lots of supercharger spots earlier and cut down on wait times.

In fact the web page on supercharging recommends against trying to "fill the tank":
Charging the final 20% takes approximately the same amount of time as the first 80% due to a necessary decrease in charging current to help top-off cells.

As most charging is done overnight at home, ramping up production faster than supercharger deployment does not mean supercharger access will become less plentiful. There are outliers like Silicon Valley where the demand may never be satisfied, but many supercharger sites have tremendous capacity for growth in usage. I used the superchargers at Columbus and Huntsville TX this weekend-- once I was the only car charging and the other time there was one car that left while I was there. I've charged at Waco several times this year and there were never more than 3 cars charging out of 8 stalls, which left while I was there. There is lots of excess capacity in the network with the exception of the few known bottlenecks.
 
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