I would never choose Shoreline if McKinley was unavailable. My next choice would be Bernardo. I would probably even choose Bernardo over McKinley in the first place unless I was going to pick up something on Murphy St.
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Supercharger - Sunnyvale, CA - W. McKinley Ave (LIVE 12 Mar 2018, 12 V2 stalls)
- Thread starter jreinert
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- California Supercharging USA
+1. Bernardo is a V3 supercharger, so even if everything were working perfectly at the McKinley supercharger, you'd still see a higher charge rate on any car at Bernardo unless you're on a 90D or smaller Model S or X and charge at 3 A.M. when you can get a pair to yourself on the V2s.
Despite claiming to support 150 kW charging, I have never seen anything over about 115 kW or so on either of those chargers (maybe 120 at McKinley?), even when alone on a pair at an extremely low SoC. This is on a car that routinely gets > 150 kW on V3 superchargers (at least in cooler weather).
But the biggest problem is that the McKinley and Shoreline superchargers are both high-use V2 superchargers, and the V2 charger hardware is extremely unreliable (high failure rate) when used continuously. When they fail, they don't (usually) fail completely, but rather, individual chargers in each bank fail, resulting in lower charge rates.
At Shoreline, on any given day, back when I still used it, I would rarely get better than 96 kW or so even when alone on a pair on my 100D, and would occasionally see as low as 36 kW when alone on a pair, because so many of the chargers in a given bank were dead. It got so bad that I was starting to worry that something was wrong with my battery until one day I charged in Gilroy and saw that my car was fine.
And this starts happening pretty quickly after they build one. At McKinley, things started breaking by the time it was just a few months old. At Los Gatos, things were badly broken by the time it was a year old. The V2 superchargers in the Bay Area need to be replaced en masse at this point, IMO.
It's too bad Tesla doesn't take advantage of the Target downtime to gut the McKinley supercharger and replace it with a V3 supercharger. With 10 chargers, it's a perfect fit for a V3 upgrade. They could pull heavier wiring (it's all in conduit), change out the pedestals, change out the chargers, upgrade the battery boxes, and upgrade the transformer in place pretty quickly, and then we'd have another reliable charger. I'd expect that to take less than a week, not counting the months it takes for PG&E to bring in a second transformer, but they could configure the two V3 banks to cap their input to act like a V2 charger in the interim, and then upgrade the service later.
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