Thoughts on Superchargers After a 2300 mile trip

[Pruitt]

I just finished a round trip from Casper WY to Tucson AZ. Total distance was 2,290 miles in my 2016 S90D. I had problems at three different Superchargers. I thought I'd list them here, along with some thoughts about each one.

First problem:

First leg of the trip was from Casper to Rawlins, WY. Destination was set for the Craig CO supercharger. When I was just a few miles short of Rawlins, a message popped up on my screen saying the Rawlins supercharger was down! Navigation wanted me to drive all the way back to the supercharger in Casper, then head down a lot of that same road again, this time taking the cutoff to Medicine Bow and Laramie. Getting back to Casper was dicey, to say nothing of wasting about six hours' travel time. I called roadside assistance and selected option 3 - charging and superchaargers. Got someone in about two minutes. He tried to help, but he said "Wow, there's nothing anywhere near you!" He suggested I try to make Laramie (navigator said 2% left when I arrived there), and even told me there was 3-4% of the battery usable after it reached zero. I asked if he could tell what happened, and he said it looked like "a breaker tripped." He also said it would probably require a tech visit to reactivate the supercharger.
I got onto my Plugshare app and found a J1772 charger at the Rawlins Dodge dealer. Since Craig was only about a negative 7% without recharging at Rawlins, I opted to go that route. I plugged in for about 90 minutes (during which time I walked to a restaurant for breakfast), then discovered that the supercharger was back up! I went over to it and finished charging.

THOUGHTS:

1. In many areas, even with a newer vehicle the loss of a supercharger will leave people stranded. It should take more than "a" breaker tripping to disable an entire site (losing power delivery to the site is a different issue). The architecture of the charging sites needs revised to eliminate this single-point failure (SPF). "A" breaker will take down all the superchargers being fed through it, but if these breakers only fed half the chargers at the site then such a failure would cut the available pedestals by half, but it wouldn't leave people SOL. Maybe newer locations don't have this SPF; Rawlins are older 150kW units.
2. Maybe, along with maintaining the supercharger and destination charger databases, Tesla could also access lists of non-Tesla chargers and provide that information to customers left high and dry when one of the their system components fails. RV Parks (which generally have NEMA 1450 plugs), J1772 charging sites, maybe even Electrify America and other charging locations.

Second problem:
On the way back home I stopped at Santa Fe to charge up. All but two stalls were in use. I pulled into one of them, plugged the cable into the car, and got the blue ring. And waited. After five minutes the car still was not charging. It displayed the message "No power available." I moved to the other open spot and plugged in - it worked. This was Saturday afternoon. I tried to call Roadside assistance again, to let them know the one pedestal was not supplying power (though it apparently did talk to the car). After sitting on hold for someone for over 20 minutes, I hung up.

THOUGHTS:

Answer the phone within a reasonable period of time! 20+ minutes is NOT reasonable! The problem could have been a lot worse than just one dead pedestal. If the call center is swamped at times, PUT ON MORE STAFF!​

​

Third problem:
In Alamosa CO on the way home I plugged in and the charger would not lock into the port. I kept getting the orange ring and a message on my phone. I moved to another pedestal and charged without a problem. I didn't even bother to try to call Tesla this time.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

I have never had so many charging problems on one trip before. Each and every one was a problem with a supercharger, not my vehicle. I don't know if this is typical for road trips these days or not, but if it's at all common then Tesla needs to devote more maintenance and support resources to their existing supercharger locations. I had more problems this trip than in all my other trips up and down the east coast, across country several times, and around the western US combined! I hope this was just a confluence of unlikely events, but it could be a bit of a harbinger of future long-distance travel using the Tesla charging network if it's not just a fluke.​

​

Anybody else have any thoughts, or perhaps similar chains of experiences?

 

[Samurai51]

I've done three 1,000+ mile round-trips in my 2023 MYLR, and the only negative I've had was at the Baton Rouge Airport Blvd SC. The first stall I tried would not charge and then I had to fight with it to get it to unlatch from the vehicle. Moved a few stalls over and everything was fine.

Also, Bastrop TX. I've never had a problem with a stall, but I have had to wait. 12 stalls was definitely an under-build for this one. They should at least double it.

 

[threeputts]

Sounds like some bad luck for you on that trip. There are some states where SC coverage is still sparse so I always carry a CCS adapter, Wyoming is one (also the Dakotas, Montana). I've also encountered a non-functional pedestal on occasion, but it's pretty rare especially compared to CCS chargers.

 

[Steel_Cobb]

You don't need to let Tesla know about supercharger status - they know, They monitor that and will automatically schedule service whenever they do their service rounds, I've encountered a bad charger in Evanston and it took a few weeks to fix but they did get to it.

I always carry my J1772 adapter and thankfully only had to use it a few places, If there's nothing Tesla around, I use Plugshare but charger status and location can be very inaccurate.

 

[Earl]

Tesla could also access lists of non-Tesla chargers and provide that information to customers left high and dry when one of the their system components fails. RV Parks (which generally have NEMA 1450 plugs), J1772 charging sites, maybe even Electrify America and other charging locations.

I don't believe that Tesla wants to refer folks to flaky 3rd party charging stations over which they have no control.
If you do get stranded due to a Tesla charging station being down, they will most likely send a tow truck to get you to one that works. They don't want to incur this obligation for the other companies.
Plugshare is an independent source which works about as good as one can hope for at this point in the proliferation of EV chargers.
I've drive well over 200,000 Tesla miles including many 5,000+ mile trips. I did run into a similar problem in Albuquerque once when the whole part of town around the Supercharger (there was only 1 in town back then) was out of power. They rerouted me to Santa Fe which was going to be tight on charge and not the right direction for our trip. By the time we arrived, the power was restored but the station was still down. Luckily, the gate was unlocked and, somehow, the breaker, while thrown, somehow got reset so we, and some other poor guy who had just purchased a Plaid S, were able to charge. Note that the nearby EA CCS station was also down.
I've had a few times when I switched to another station to charge faster and run into a few bad stations, however, it sounds like a particularly bad-luck trip that is not at all typical.

 

[cpa]

I have encountered odd situations at Supercharger locations over the past ten years as well. There have been a few locations where the power supply for some reason is spotty which required trying another stall. In addition, there have been places where the latch does not fully engage in my charge port resulting in the dreaded orange ring. I think this has been at newer installations; perhaps those plugs need a little bit of use before they can seat into all charge ports in all cars.

Most recently, at Gallup, New Mexico, stall 2B was dead when I plugged in. (This was on a day when everyone and his cousin were chasing after the recent solar eclipse. Gallup was full with several of us waiting.) I offered it up to the next person in line, and he did not get any power, either. Yet, there was no indication in the app or on the touchscreen that this stall was kaput. When I moved to the companion stall, 2A (these were the original V2 stalls) the rate never climbed above 58kW.

Later that same day, we were planning to stay the night in Santa Rosa at the motel that hosted the Superchargers. Arrival percentage was projected to be about 11-12%. Lo and behold when we were about 15 miles away, we receive a pop-up message suggesting that we navigate to a "less busy Supercharger." Since we could charge there once the crowds dissipated, this was no big deal. But the fact that this message pops up on Interstate 40 with Albuquerque some 90 miles west; Tucumcari about 70 miles east; Santa Fe or Las Vegas 75-80 miles north seems ridiculous at best and inane at worst.

I do not dispute that Tesla knows that there are stalls that are out of commission or that locations have reduced power or are temporarily down. I have been to a SC where the tech was performing routine maintenance. He cordoned off the stalls that had no power. He overrode the information from his computer to reflect that stalls 1ABCD were out of service. I do wonder, however, just how timely and accurately the Mother Ship knows about defective stalls. I wonder it Tesla knows, for example, if a station has had the cable severed by vandals or if there is a temporary power outage that lasts for half an hour before being restored.

Based upon this thread and my personal experiences, Tesla relies mostly (if not exclusively) on software for their Supercharger information and the way it is disseminated to us drivers. What might work in a denser environment may not be a satisfactory solution in more remote settings. Like a lot of Tesla-created software, it takes several iterations before it begins to function as needed to service almost every possible permutation that these notices were designed to mitigate.

 

[WARP 10]

I have encountered odd situations at Supercharger locations over the past ten years as well. There have been a few locations where the power supply for some reason is spotty which required trying another stall. In addition, there have been places where the latch does not fully engage in my charge port resulting in the dreaded orange ring. I think this has been at newer installations; perhaps those plugs need a little bit of use before they can seat into all charge ports in all cars.

Most recently, at Gallup, New Mexico, stall 2B was dead when I plugged in. (This was on a day when everyone and his cousin were chasing after the recent solar eclipse. Gallup was full with several of us waiting.) I offered it up to the next person in line, and he did not get any power, either. Yet, there was no indication in the app or on the touchscreen that this stall was kaput. When I moved to the companion stall, 2A (these were the original V2 stalls) the rate never climbed above 58kW.

Later that same day, we were planning to stay the night in Santa Rosa at the motel that hosted the Superchargers. Arrival percentage was projected to be about 11-12%. Lo and behold when we were about 15 miles away, we receive a pop-up message suggesting that we navigate to a "less busy Supercharger." Since we could charge there once the crowds dissipated, this was no big deal. But the fact that this message pops up on Interstate 40 with Albuquerque some 90 miles west; Tucumcari about 70 miles east; Santa Fe or Las Vegas 75-80 miles north seems ridiculous at best and inane at worst.

I do not dispute that Tesla knows that there are stalls that are out of commission or that locations have reduced power or are temporarily down. I have been to a SC where the tech was performing routine maintenance. He cordoned off the stalls that had no power. He overrode the information from his computer to reflect that stalls 1ABCD were out of service. I do wonder, however, just how timely and accurately the Mother Ship knows about defective stalls. I wonder it Tesla knows, for example, if a station has had the cable severed by vandals or if there is a temporary power outage that lasts for half an hour before being restored.

Based upon this thread and my personal experiences, Tesla relies mostly (if not exclusively) on software for their Supercharger information and the way it is disseminated to us drivers. What might work in a denser environment may not be a satisfactory solution in more remote settings. Like a lot of Tesla-created software, it takes several iterations before it begins to function as needed to service almost every possible permutation that these notices were designed to mitigate.

Our experience with 7+ years of roadtrips is similar. Just got back to San Diego from a trip to Dallas for the eclipse. We've driven to Atlanta and back twice, Seattle twice, Jackson Hole 3 times, Park City 3 or 4 times and numerous trips to the bay area, all with no real problems. This was the first time we ever had to wait at any location and just for a short time in Deming, NM. Most sites were much busier than we had ever seen in the past. We were at the Tucson east charger on Saturday, Apr. 6 when the Willcox charger was down (there's a thread in the supercharger discussion about this), and the line was 6+ cars long by the time we left. Our 2016 model S75 now only has 218 miles on a full charge, so getting to Deming without a charge at Willcox was going to be iffy (just over 200). Stopped in Willcox, 3 cars were charging, pulled into a stall and got nothing. The tech was in the car next to me on his laptop and told me to try again. He had just brought the site back up. The site was (partially) down for 24 hours or so, partly due to the technician having to drive there from Wickenburg, a distance of 175 miles. He told us the most frequent problem is people not pulling into the stall far enough and then tugging and disconnecting the cable happening more frequently with the increased usage.

Other than that excitement, all other problems have been as others have mentioned; periodically, individual stalls down, etc. I'm hoping continued expansion will keep ahead of demand but, so far, so good.

 

[MP3Mike]

THOUGHTS:
Answer the phone within a reasonable period of time! 20+ minutes is NOT reasonable! The problem could have been a lot worse than just one dead pedestal. If the call center is swamped at times, PUT ON MORE STAFF!

You don't need to call them for these type of reports. In general, they auto-detect the issues. But you can let them know by putting a note in the charger rating survey they make available in the app.

In other cases, they can't auto detect it right away. I recently had a Supercharger cable that I couldn't easily plug into my car because one of the alignment pins was loose and blocked plugging in unless you held the cable in just the right orientation while plugging in. They can only detect that after a period of time of nobody using the stall, but if someone plugged in like I did by holding it just right that would prevent them from identifying the problem. I left a note in the app rating the charging session about it with details on the stall number, and the next time I was there, a week later, the cable had been repaired or replaced.

 

[jgleigh]

I always carry my J1772 adapter and thankfully only had to use it a few places, If there's nothing Tesla around, I use Plugshare but charger status and location can be very inaccurate.

PlugShare is very handy and I also use Chargeway. Chargeway allows very fine filtering on plug types and output levels so you can customize the map view to what you're looking for.

Tucson, AZ to Los Angeles, CA had a similar lack of chargers six years ago. If a given charger was down or full you were out of luck. Now they've filled in all the gaps so there's a lot more options and you can skip a charger and go to the next one. Quartzsite, AZ used to have eight V2 Superchargers. We hit it on one holiday weekend and had to wait for about an hour. And of course charging was slow since all the V2 stalls are shared. Now there are over 100 V3 stalls and another eight V3 stalls about 20 miles further west.

Looks like most of those cities in WY also have some CCS chargers, but not sure if you can use those in an older Model S.

 

[DblOSmith]

Sounds like bad luck. I've been on multiple 3000+ mile roadtrips across the country and never had those problems. Never had to wait. Had some dicey navigation and arrival estimates, but not those problems.

 

[Midnightsun]

Carrying a CCS adapter is like carrying a spare tire. I have them in both our Teslas along with J1772 adapters. That being said, I have yet to use the CCS however one must consider there are more CCS stations than superchargers at this point in time. Kinda like saying one can only fill up at Exxon.

 

[DblOSmith]

... one must consider there are more CCS stations than superchargers at this point in time.

Is that true? I don't know if that's true. In either case, I only used CCS about 3 times, and only one of those were a necessity.

 

[Midnightsun]

Is that true?

This should answer the question.

 

[DblOSmith]

This should answer the question.

Sure did. Thanks. CCS has more stations. NACS has more stalls. Although this may have changed in the past year since this article was published.

CCS: 2 stalls per station on average
NACS: 11 stalls per station on average

 

[ewoodrick]

I just finished a round trip from Casper WY to Tucson AZ. Total distance was 2,290 miles in my 2016 S90D. I had problems at three different Superchargers. I thought I'd list them here, along with some thoughts about each one.

First problem:

First leg of the trip was from Casper to Rawlins, WY. Destination was set for the Craig CO supercharger. When I was just a few miles short of Rawlins, a message popped up on my screen saying the Rawlins supercharger was down! Navigation wanted me to drive all the way back to the supercharger in Casper, then head down a lot of that same road again, this time taking the cutoff to Medicine Bow and Laramie. Getting back to Casper was dicey, to say nothing of wasting about six hours' travel time. I called roadside assistance and selected option 3 - charging and superchaargers. Got someone in about two minutes. He tried to help, but he said "Wow, there's nothing anywhere near you!" He suggested I try to make Laramie (navigator said 2% left when I arrived there), and even told me there was 3-4% of the battery usable after it reached zero. I asked if he could tell what happened, and he said it looked like "a breaker tripped." He also said it would probably require a tech visit to reactivate the supercharger.
I got onto my Plugshare app and found a J1772 charger at the Rawlins Dodge dealer. Since Craig was only about a negative 7% without recharging at Rawlins, I opted to go that route. I plugged in for about 90 minutes (during which time I walked to a restaurant for breakfast), then discovered that the supercharger was back up! I went over to it and finished charging.

THOUGHTS:

1. In many areas, even with a newer vehicle the loss of a supercharger will leave people stranded. It should take more than "a" breaker tripping to disable an entire site (losing power delivery to the site is a different issue). The architecture of the charging sites needs revised to eliminate this single-point failure (SPF). "A" breaker will take down all the superchargers being fed through it, but if these breakers only fed half the chargers at the site then such a failure would cut the available pedestals by half, but it wouldn't leave people SOL. Maybe newer locations don't have this SPF; Rawlins are older 150kW units.
2. Maybe, along with maintaining the supercharger and destination charger databases, Tesla could also access lists of non-Tesla chargers and provide that information to customers left high and dry when one of the their system components fails. RV Parks (which generally have NEMA 1450 plugs), J1772 charging sites, maybe even Electrify America and other charging locations.

Second problem:
On the way back home I stopped at Santa Fe to charge up. All but two stalls were in use. I pulled into one of them, plugged the cable into the car, and got the blue ring. And waited. After five minutes the car still was not charging. It displayed the message "No power available." I moved to the other open spot and plugged in - it worked. This was Saturday afternoon. I tried to call Roadside assistance again, to let them know the one pedestal was not supplying power (though it apparently did talk to the car). After sitting on hold for someone for over 20 minutes, I hung up.

THOUGHTS:

Answer the phone within a reasonable period of time! 20+ minutes is NOT reasonable! The problem could have been a lot worse than just one dead pedestal. If the call center is swamped at times, PUT ON MORE STAFF!​

​

Third problem:
In Alamosa CO on the way home I plugged in and the charger would not lock into the port. I kept getting the orange ring and a message on my phone. I moved to another pedestal and charged without a problem. I didn't even bother to try to call Tesla this time.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

I have never had so many charging problems on one trip before. Each and every one was a problem with a supercharger, not my vehicle. I don't know if this is typical for road trips these days or not, but if it's at all common then Tesla needs to devote more maintenance and support resources to their existing supercharger locations. I had more problems this trip than in all my other trips up and down the east coast, across country several times, and around the western US combined! I hope this was just a confluence of unlikely events, but it could be a bit of a harbinger of future long-distance travel using the Tesla charging network if it's not just a fluke.​

​

Anybody else have any thoughts, or perhaps similar chains of experiences?

I missed the part where you gave the system some credit for proactively notifying you that a Supercharger went down. I've had this happen to me one in the past, it didn't go down while I was on that segment, but it did let me know that I would have to stop at other areas.
The "breaker" could have maybe been a major power outage. But it is a rare occurrence, really rare. It could have maybe been sabotage or someone running into the Supercharger transformers.

Pedestals down are too common. That's one of the reasons why Tesla installs a large number of pedestals at a site, especially compared to many of the other charging organizations that install 1, maybe 2 pedestals at a site.
You'll often see a charging cord laying on the charger, that's an indication that people use to suggest that the pedestal may be having issues.

But, congratulations, you made it through one of the largest voids in charging in the US. And the segment that you were first on, wasn't even a covered Interstate segment!

 

[azred]

I wouldn’t think of taking my 12/2016 S 75 on a long trip even if mostly on Interstate highways. It supposedly still has about 220 of the original 249 mile range but as most of us know those range figures are way too optimistic. I realize the OP’s 2016 90 should have more range than my car but probably not a lot more.

My 2023 LR Y indicates it has about 315 mile range and though it too has overly optimistic estimates I wouldn’t hesitate to take it on Wyoming roads as long as back country destinations weren’t involved. But I wouldn’t run the battery down very low between charges.

While those of us living in large urban areas don’t worry about range, I wouldn’t own a Tesla if I lived in most of Wyoming. Tesla originally said Superchargers would mostly be for long distance travel but totally changed their tune when it became obvious sales were dependent on peppering urban areas to accommodate the many owners without garages. Great change of direction for the urban apartment dwellers but not so great for those people living in the “empty” states.

 

[ewoodrick]

I wouldn’t think of taking my 12/2016 S 75 on a long trip even if mostly on Interstate highways. It supposedly still has about 220 of the original 249 mile range but as most of us know those range figures are way too optimistic. I realize the OP’s 2016 90 should have more range than my car but probably not a lot more.

My 2023 LR Y indicates it has about 315 mile range and though it too has overly optimistic estimates I wouldn’t hesitate to take it on Wyoming roads as long as back country destinations weren’t involved. But I wouldn’t run the battery down very low between charges.

While those of us lucky enough to live in large urban areas don’t worry about range, I wouldn’t own a Tesla if I lived in most of Wyoming. Tesla originally said Superchargers would be for long distance travel but changed their tune when it became obvious sales were dependent on peppering urban areas to accommodate the many owners without garages. Great change of direction for the urban apartment dwellers but not so great for those people living in the “empty” states.

It indicates 315 miles when driving at EPA standards. For real life range, look at the Energy graphs, it gives estimations based on your last X minutes of driving. It's usually really close.

 

[WARP 10]

It indicates 315 miles when driving at EPA standards. For real life range, look at the Energy graphs, it gives estimations based on your last X minutes of driving. It's usually really close.

I wouldn’t think of taking my 12/2016 S 75 on a long trip even if mostly on Interstate highways. It supposedly still has about 220 of the original 249 mile range but as most of us know those range figures are way too optimistic. I realize the OP’s 2016 90 should have more range than my car but probably not a lot more.

My 2023 LR Y indicates it has about 315 mile range and though it too has overly optimistic estimates I wouldn’t hesitate to take it on Wyoming roads as long as back country destinations weren’t involved. But I wouldn’t run the battery down very low between charges.

While those of us living in large urban areas don’t worry about range, I wouldn’t own a Tesla if I lived in most of Wyoming. Tesla originally said Superchargers would mostly be for long distance travel but totally changed their tune when it became obvious sales were dependent on peppering urban areas to accommodate the many owners without garages. Great change of direction for the urban apartment dwellers but not so great for those people living in the “empty” states.

We have the same 2016 s75 and have taken it on at least 8 trips of 1500m or more, including two to Atlanta in 2017 and 2018 before the SC network was as built out as it is now. Never had a problem. Granted, those two trips were a little longer than they would be today. That would be because the I-10 route is possible, now that Tucson to Dallas has been filled in and we wouldn't have to take the longer I-40 route.

 

[Pruitt]

I wouldn’t think of taking my 12/2016 S 75 on a long trip even if mostly on Interstate highways. It supposedly still has about 220 of the original 249 mile range but as most of us know those range figures are way too optimistic. I realize the OP’s 2016 90 should have more range than my car but probably not a lot more.

My 2023 LR Y indicates it has about 315 mile range and though it too has overly optimistic estimates I wouldn’t hesitate to take it on Wyoming roads as long as back country destinations weren’t involved. But I wouldn’t run the battery down very low between charges.

While those of us living in large urban areas don’t worry about range, I wouldn’t own a Tesla if I lived in most of Wyoming. Tesla originally said Superchargers would mostly be for long distance travel but totally changed their tune when it became obvious sales were dependent on peppering urban areas to accommodate the many owners without garages. Great change of direction for the urban apartment dwellers but not so great for those people living in the “empty” states.

99% range shows as 262 miles. At 84 on the interstate (speed limit is 80) that's outrageously optimistic, but at 60 on US and state highways it's only about 10% less, depending on wind (and in Wyoming it's always windy!). Slowing down more will get me to actual range meeting estimated range (as we all know).

There are places I won't take the Tesla, like from Casper to Greybull (or anywhere else in the Big Horn Basin, or to Cody and in general the northwestern part of the state, because that would mean spending a lot of time at Level 2 chargers.

Interesting note: Lusk, WY, out in the middle of nowhere, has a supercharger because it was on the first east-west supercharger route completed across the country. I wonder what some of those first folks who tried that thought as they were routed there...