I spent the weekend in Reno, NV -- as it turns out with about 30,000 bikers all up there for the Street Vibrations festival... Headed up in the ol P85D.
The outbound route was to leave San Mateo Friday morning, stop in Tiburon for a passenger pickup and head east on 37 around the bay to I-80, stopping at the Roseville Galleria for a quick lunch and supercharge. I noticed about 20 minutes before we arrived, the car NAV re-routed me to Rocklin, but I figured somehow it was messed up, so ignored it and re-routed for Roseville. As it turns out, the car was smarter than me, because when we got to the Galleria Supercharger, it was completely full. I waited for 10 minutes, but with 4 hungry guys and no idea when one was going to leave, I figured we were better off just to go to Rocklin and take our chances there. Rocklin had 2 free slots open fortunately, so wasn't catastrophic, though fewer eating options.
I destination charged at the Eldorado Resort in Reno, and despite a pair of Tesla HPWCs as well as another couple generic chargers, I appeared to be the only EV in the whole place all weekend.
On the way back, we drove straight to Vacaville SuperCharger and got the last spot before 2 more Tesla's pulled up to wait.
So... to my point:
First of all, I understand that Northern California is a unique place when it comes to Teslas and is probably a few years ahead of everywhere else in terms of adoption, but I also see it as a sort of 'canary in the coal mine' capacity test for Supercharging infrastructure.
Some observations:
* Roseville Galleria is on a temporary lease and Rocklin as is would clearly not be able to handle the *existing* area load itself without significant expansion (i.e. doubling).
* Vacaville was more than maxed out on a random Sunday afternoon in late September
* Tesla shows no existing site or new location expansion plans on the radar along the I-80 corridor
* There's currently and probably will not be an ability to stop or significantly curtail locals from charging
* There are only ~50k Tesla's in California, increasing at a clip of about 2000 additional Model S/Xs each month going forward (assuming 50k cars produced this year, 50% sold in CA and divided by 12)
Net-net, my anecdotal back of the envelope calculation says the current Supercharger situation looks to be unsustainable (i.e. Supercharging becomes a major hassle and serious customer satisfaction issue for Tesla) by next spring. Model 3? Yikes. Something significant is going to have to happen ahead of any Model 3 launch (like Tesla signs an unprecedented deal to put a pair of stalls at every Chevron station or something). One way or another, something's gotta happen or we're going to have a group of pretty angry Tesla owners by next summer.
The outbound route was to leave San Mateo Friday morning, stop in Tiburon for a passenger pickup and head east on 37 around the bay to I-80, stopping at the Roseville Galleria for a quick lunch and supercharge. I noticed about 20 minutes before we arrived, the car NAV re-routed me to Rocklin, but I figured somehow it was messed up, so ignored it and re-routed for Roseville. As it turns out, the car was smarter than me, because when we got to the Galleria Supercharger, it was completely full. I waited for 10 minutes, but with 4 hungry guys and no idea when one was going to leave, I figured we were better off just to go to Rocklin and take our chances there. Rocklin had 2 free slots open fortunately, so wasn't catastrophic, though fewer eating options.
I destination charged at the Eldorado Resort in Reno, and despite a pair of Tesla HPWCs as well as another couple generic chargers, I appeared to be the only EV in the whole place all weekend.
On the way back, we drove straight to Vacaville SuperCharger and got the last spot before 2 more Tesla's pulled up to wait.
So... to my point:
First of all, I understand that Northern California is a unique place when it comes to Teslas and is probably a few years ahead of everywhere else in terms of adoption, but I also see it as a sort of 'canary in the coal mine' capacity test for Supercharging infrastructure.
Some observations:
* Roseville Galleria is on a temporary lease and Rocklin as is would clearly not be able to handle the *existing* area load itself without significant expansion (i.e. doubling).
* Vacaville was more than maxed out on a random Sunday afternoon in late September
* Tesla shows no existing site or new location expansion plans on the radar along the I-80 corridor
* There's currently and probably will not be an ability to stop or significantly curtail locals from charging
* There are only ~50k Tesla's in California, increasing at a clip of about 2000 additional Model S/Xs each month going forward (assuming 50k cars produced this year, 50% sold in CA and divided by 12)
Net-net, my anecdotal back of the envelope calculation says the current Supercharger situation looks to be unsustainable (i.e. Supercharging becomes a major hassle and serious customer satisfaction issue for Tesla) by next spring. Model 3? Yikes. Something significant is going to have to happen ahead of any Model 3 launch (like Tesla signs an unprecedented deal to put a pair of stalls at every Chevron station or something). One way or another, something's gotta happen or we're going to have a group of pretty angry Tesla owners by next summer.
