Supercharger - "free for life" or "free for the life of Model S"?

[Cattledog]

In the effort to achieve expediency, Tesla has not prioritized the solar canopy on superchargers. In my limited experience of exactly two superchargers in Texas, San Marcos has good solar access while Columbus does not (trees). Somewhere down the line they might prioritize solar access, just like they might prioritize visibility so that beautiful cars charging for free in direct sight from the highway would be a great way to 'spend' an advertising budget. Again, San Marcos and Columbus are not visible, tucked behind buildings and a couple hundred yards off the freeway. Expedient, cheap (free?) land, but not yet prioritized for solar or advertising. Coming, I hope.

 

[andrew kelsey]

I think you are all right. I probably was "overthinking" it. Tesla have also confirmed that it is still the same: "free for life" not just for the life of that model car.

 

[NielsChr]

Model S has unlimited free for the life of Model S SC plan.
I guess the following could be a solution for futra models:

Model E/X could be limited to a e.g. 5 free SC visits per months plan, if more than 5 times are needed per month, they will need to pay for the charge/hwh. - The number could however be 10 or any other number the user wish to pre-pay for when ordering the car - just make the the SC option a "5 times per months SC plan", "10 times per month SC plan" or a "unlimited SC plan" the initial price will ofcouse be different for the different SC plans.

 

[xhawk101]

Any word if model x will have free supercharger use?

 

[ecarfan]

I'm sure the X will have the same SC access system as the S.

 

[Mayhemm]

Hopefully Tesla will run some extrapolation models and determine how many vehicles the current network can support and how much expansion may be necessary (if any) before making a decision.

 

[VolkerP]

I think the supercharger network faces a bright future.

The Gilroy site was expanded last year. Recently, 2 temporary stalls were added to the Hawthorne site, with Cottonwood's calculation showing that a 33% increase in the number of stalls is good for a 60% increase in throughput, when modeling for part time usage and probability of a queue forming.

So there is a big benefit to earn for adding only little resources. Tesla will do as they see fit, and site owners are content to allow. When supercharger sites reach a reasonable number of stalls, say 12, next expansion will see more locations in between, or one location per direction of travel like the stations in Darien, CT.

More powerful superchargers (150kW) will charge more vehicles in the same amount of time, when two vehicles share a supercharger, i.e. in times of high usage of a supercharger site.

We will see deployment of local battery storage to more supercharger sites. This ameliorates the need to expand the grid connection and/or transformer: A peak demand lasting 1-2 hours a day will be buffered away. Solar canopies might help here too but battery storage appears more efficient to me. And we haven't seen new canopies except in China.

In all, lots of screws to turn for Tesla to fine-adjust the supercharging user experience.

 

[WarpedOne]

And one fullcharge still costs only a few bucks at most, occasionally even less then one dollar. Payment infrastructure would easily cost the same amount of money (if not even more) making the whole thing less simple and less useful.

If Tesla Motors finds out they are paying to much for electricity, they can simply up the cost of one time payment from 2 to say 3k USD.
1000 USD pays for *lots* of kWh.