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SuperCharger Use Map

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A year ago, the Hawthorne Tesla Design Center had a wonderful display on the wall of the lobby. (The is the site of the Superchargers) This display rolled through the top 10 busiest Supercharger sites around the world, even showing which slots were occupied. No surprise that the information is available to Tesla, but I would sure like to have it so I can see it in my car when headed to a Supercharger site...especially if the display also showed how long before each vehicle is charged. Would anyone else like to see this information on their touch panel?
 

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I agree that this information would be invaluable to make decisions, including but not limited to decision about where/when to stop at superchargers. However, what would the cons be? Certainly this would take some resources to code up and share. There are likely other features in the car that are being prioritized over doing something like this.
 
A year ago, the Hawthorne Tesla Design Center had a wonderful display on the wall of the lobby. (The is the site of the Superchargers) This display rolled through the top 10 busiest Supercharger sites around the world, even showing which slots were occupied. No surprise that the information is available to Tesla, but I would sure like to have it so I can see it in my car when headed to a Supercharger site...especially if the display also showed how long before each vehicle is charged. Would anyone else like to see this information on their touch panel?

The thing that bothers me when this discussion comes up (and keeps coming up, and keeps coming up) is that, let's get real, folks, people often charge their cars for only about a half hour. Or sometimes less. You make your decision to use a supercharger maybe 100 miles away (or there is no decision to make because that's the only available supercharger on your route), and rest assured, things WILL change by the time you get there. Ya think?

This little app (wall sized app) does not tell you the current charge of the car, whether or not the owner is in the car, or what charge the owner wants to be at (which may depend on how good the book is that he's reading). Some superchargers sit a long distance from another, and people going from one to another will want full charge, maybe 2 hours. Or maybe the owner is headed home, we don't know, and only needs 10 minutes.

So this whole idea is not very useful. Driving to the next supercharger and waiting a few minutes is what usually happens. Except on WEEKENDS. If you insist on doing long distance drives on the superchargers' busiest times, you very probably will end up waiting, and knowing that there may or may not be a slot left by the time you get there won't make any difference.

I have driven thousands of long distance miles, and I have had to wait only once. It was on a Saturday afternoon. Imagine!

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Absolutely... would be incredibly valuable to someone who drives a long distance route and has multiple choices as to which supercharger to route to...

As I said, I'm not so sure there is any advantage. This from only about ninety some thousand miles of driving and Supercharging my Model S.
 
The thing that bothers me when this discussion comes up (and keeps coming up, and keeps coming up) is that, let's get real, folks, people often charge their cars for only about a half hour. Or sometimes less. You make your decision to use a supercharger maybe 100 miles away (or there is no decision to make because that's the only available supercharger on your route), and rest assured, things WILL change by the time you get there. Ya think?

This little app (wall sized app) does not tell you the current charge of the car, whether or not the owner is in the car, or what charge the owner wants to be at (which may depend on how good the book is that he's reading). Some superchargers sit a long distance from another, and people going from one to another will want full charge, maybe 2 hours. Or maybe the owner is headed home, we don't know, and only needs 10 minutes.

So this whole idea is not very useful. Driving to the next supercharger and waiting a few minutes is what usually happens. Except on WEEKENDS. If you insist on doing long distance drives on the superchargers' busiest times, you very probably will end up waiting, and knowing that there may or may not be a slot left by the time you get there won't make any difference.

I have driven thousands of long distance miles, and I have had to wait only once. It was on a Saturday afternoon. Imagine!

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As I said, I'm not so sure there is any advantage. This from only about ninety some thousand miles of driving and Supercharging my Model S.

Ya, but....
Knowing that an upcoming SC site has 20% occupancy (at that moment) versus 100% gives a pretty good indication of what to expect. Would be nice to know, even if there was nothing you could do about it.
 
The thing that bothers me when this discussion comes up (and keeps coming up, and keeps coming up) is that, let's get real, folks, people often charge their cars for only about a half hour. Or sometimes less. You make your decision to use a supercharger maybe 100 miles away (or there is no decision to make because that's the only available supercharger on your route), and rest assured, things WILL change by the time you get there. Ya think?

This little app (wall sized app) does not tell you the current charge of the car, whether or not the owner is in the car, or what charge the owner wants to be at (which may depend on how good the book is that he's reading). Some superchargers sit a long distance from another, and people going from one to another will want full charge, maybe 2 hours. Or maybe the owner is headed home, we don't know, and only needs 10 minutes.

So this whole idea is not very useful. Driving to the next supercharger and waiting a few minutes is what usually happens. Except on WEEKENDS. If you insist on doing long distance drives on the superchargers' busiest times, you very probably will end up waiting, and knowing that there may or may not be a slot left by the time you get there won't make any difference.

I have driven thousands of long distance miles, and I have had to wait only once. It was on a Saturday afternoon. Imagine!

- - - Updated - - -



As I said, I'm not so sure there is any advantage. This from only about ninety some thousand miles of driving and Supercharging my Model S.
Well it shouldn't be very hard to put an average hourly use tab on there as well. That would be what is really helpful for planning trips.
 
...This little app (wall sized app) does not tell you the current charge of the car, whether or not the owner is in the car, or what charge the owner wants to be at (which may depend on how good the book is that he's reading). Some superchargers sit a long distance from another, and people going from one to another will want full charge, maybe 2 hours. Or maybe the owner is headed home, we don't know, and only needs 10 minutes.

While all of the above is true and to the point, I wanted to address some of the more technical aspects. Tesla knows all of this information:

- Current state of charge
- If someone is in the driver's seat
- What the target charge level is

They even know what the likely estimated time of completion assuming it would be a range. Best case is no one else is paired and worst case is that someone is plugged in next door the whole time. So they know an ideal shortest and longest charge time. Tesla even knows how many people are traveling along that route and even which ones have put the SC site in as a way point.

All of this is academic if as @roblab also points out if you don't have a choice to skip that SC site.

Until Tesla centralizes travel plans and actually takes ETA, speed, temperature, wind into account. Once you have a route in mind you really have few choices.
 
To have a computer program be reliable for Supercharger accessibility and charging options would be a colossal problem to solve. (They still haven't gotten the trip planner so it is even 50% accurate.) We humans are notoriously unpredictable in our behaviors. Plans change as circumstances change. People travel with small children. People are spontaneous (Hey, I am hungry--everyone want an early dinner?) A 20-minute stop could turn into a 40-minute stop because something comes up, or vice versa.

Regardless of what does or does not occur, we (at least I) are not going to be tethered to some computer program to notify the mothership that my stay is going to be extended or shortened. Or whether I have decided to take an alternate route at the last minute.

Moreover, when I travel from Fresno to the Palm Springs area, I don't really select my route until I leave. I can go through Mojave and charge there. Then, I will decide whether to do a range charge to reach my destination or charge to 80% and then stop in Cabazon for 15 minutes. Instead, I could go to Ft. Tejon and then decide whether to charge at Rancho Cucamonga or Cabazon. Or, I could opt to charge 20 minutes at Ft. Tejon and then charge to 90% at Burbank in order to reach the Palm Springs area without further charging.

I do not think that anyone of us wants to be assigned a route or to be forced to file a route plan including revisions. To my knowledge there is no software in the world that can predict which way I will navigate my car as I am driving south on 99 north of Bakersfield. Will he turn east on highway 58, or will he continue south on highway 99?

What I think would be an easier and more practical solution would be to have the red pins on the navigation screen reflect contemporaneous use. Increase the size slightly and then have some way to indicate that usage is low, medium or high (or whatever labels seem appropriate.) Maybe change the colors to green (low); yellow (medium); orange (high); red (continuous usage for >30 minutes, implying a wait.)

While this approach would be academic for driving Interstate 80 across Nevada, it might have some practicality for en route planning if, for example I can see that Ft. Tejon has been congested, I can always go to Palm Springs via Mojave and avoid a potential wait or a shared stall and, most importantly free up that space for someone else.
 
I do not think that anyone of us wants to be assigned a route or to be forced to file a route plan including revisions. To my knowledge there is no software in the world that can predict which way I will navigate my car as I am driving south on 99 north of Bakersfield. Will he turn east on highway 58, or will he continue south on highway 99?

I agree with everything you said.

What I think would be an easier and more practical solution would be to have the red pins on the navigation screen reflect contemporaneous use. Increase the size slightly and then have some way to indicate that usage is low, medium or high (or whatever labels seem appropriate.) Maybe change the colors to green (low); yellow (medium); orange (high); red (continuous usage for >30 minutes, implying a wait.)

While this approach would be academic for driving Interstate 80 across Nevada, it might have some practicality for en route planning if, for example I can see that Ft. Tejon has been congested, I can always go to Palm Springs via Mojave and avoid a potential wait or a shared stall and, most importantly free up that space for someone else.

That's precisely my thought. Either give the humans the raw data so they can decipher these trends themselves, or present some slightly cooked data, but I'd rather get both. I'd also like to know prior hour, prior day at this and upcoming hour, prior week at this and upcoming hour, etc.. Also, it's not that hard to de-noise even the most impulsive of us; if you put an AI on our travels, they'll quickly make a probability profile and be able to give best-guess chances that one SC is less busy than another for your needs and time windows. It could display raw data, historical data, and AI predicted data. It could get some gates to stop privacy violations, and then just let the number machines churn. Even if you swear by using the AI predicted paths every time, and occasionally get led down a busy path when another path was not busy because of AI errors, it will even out to mostly being helpful for everyone, evening out the usage across most the available charge points. But even a non-AI system would give some utility in some cases.
 
Ok...OK...I started this thread, so I see many others have put more thought into this than me. Net-Net: I would like to see some kind of indication on my display that says how busy is the Supercharger to which I am headed. Red pins would be good. Here in Southern California, we have quite a few Supercharging options, so such an indicator would be useful.

I have also read that Tesla is working with utilities to make home charging free. The really good benefit of such a move would be to keep "locals" from using the Superchargers instead of charging at home.
 
And while we're at it, it should say how many of the stalls are ICE-d or "iced" (blocked by bad snow plowing).

If you're finding any SC stalls blocked by bad snow plowing you should definitely report that to Tesla, so that they can let the property owner know. I expect the property owner is paying quite a bit to have the area plowed correctly, and it probably won't take much to have that situation rectified. But the only way it will happen is with communication. Even if you managed to charge, think about the next person coming along in a couple of weeks, if the snow storm had been bigger that time, or if the snow had just piled up more.

I strongly urge anyone who sees any signs of plowing snow in such a way that it could block a Supercharger stall to report it to Tesla immediately.