7 ms·

Tesla's next-generation Superchargers should be much faster

59 points by electic 10y ago

amluto 10y ago
I wonder what the Tesla charging contacts are rated for. Assuming they keep the straight-to-battery model, 350kW is around 1000A. I think Tesla chose the best available contact for its size (I forget the brand name), but 1000A is a lot for that size contact. They may have to devise a way to actively cool it. I doubt that they want to start supercharging at higher voltage. A DC-DC converter at that scale will be fairly large. I suppose they could add some contactors internal to the battery pack to change the cell wiring to double the voltage and halve the current for charging purposes.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  Higher-powered Tesla superchargers already have an active cooling system in the cable.
- neon_electro 10y ago
  I don't claim to be an expert, but it appears that Tesla has experimented with liquid cooling Supercharger stations before: https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-ends-its-thin-liquid-cooled-supercharger-wire-experiment-in-mountain-view-but-the-tech-lives-on/ https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-ends-its-thin-liquid-co... In the above case, they used liquid cooling to make the charging cable diameter smaller, but perhaps the technology can be used to make the regular Supercharger cable capable of handling more power.
  - amluto 10y ago
    Cooling the cable might be easier: you can make a hollow braided copper tube, insulate and seal around it, and run liquid through it. But you can't run liquid through the contacts unless the car has plumbing for it, and I doubt it does.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
magaman69 10y ago
Tesla's PR team is getting a lot better at writing these articles.
- babyrainbow 10y ago
  >Tesla's PR team.. You mean HN?
  - SEJeff 10y ago
    No reddit's r/TeslaMotors
jawbone3 10y ago
Is it just bulk that makes the batteries non replaceable? Putting in charged ones are after all the simplest way to speed up charging if the replacement is relatively simple, and a well proven solution for other battery powered devices.
- zwily 10y ago
  They are replaceable in minutes: http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/teslas-battery-swap-is-dead/ http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/teslas-battery-swap-is-dead/ They're focusing instead on fast charging.
  - dexterdog 10y ago
    This sounds like a program that was designed to fail so they could say that they tried. I don't see a ~400mi charge from zero ever happening in the sub-10 minute range. A swap is the only way to do that without a major technological breakthrough. Swaps have their own logistical problems, but swapping battery packs is the best solution for cars, phones and anything that needs a battery that can be easily swapped.
    - phil21 10y ago
      I think it's also too new in battery tech for this to happen. Batteries need to become more like a commodity everyone thinks is interchangeable before this becomes truly viable. If I own my car (and battery) I probably take pretty good care of it. Who is to say I'm swapping with a battery that has been poorly cared for? This anxiety alone (justified or not) means a lot of owners won't currently do this. Tesla "tried" to solve this - but if I have to plan ahead for when I want to do a swap it's again a hugely useless service. The entire reason battery swaps would exist, is to make charging an afterthought non-issue. Basically I can see once electric cars get to be the majority and battery tech drives prices down this happening more - probably starts out more like a battery service/extended warranty plan where you pay a monthly fee for a certain guaranteed performance. Then this company will develop the repair/service infrastructure to be positioned to take advantage of any standardized battery swap tech for their customers. It's fun to think about the new markets here, but right now battery packs are more like pets than cattle.
pulse7 10y ago
What cable thickness is needed to charge a Tesla in 5 minutes?
abelsson 10y ago
For reference, gas contains about 33kWh of energy per gallon, and if we assume you pump 20 gallons in 5 minutes when you fill up your car you have an effective energy transfer rate of about 8 MW at your gas pump. Even if we give an electric vehicle a 3x efficiency ratio, we still need about 2.5 MW to be equivalent to the old petroleum infrastructure.
- ebbv 10y ago
  The thing to keep in mind when thinking about EVs is that while they may be slower to fill up at stations where you have to stand there like the Tesla super charger stations, this is a small minority of the charging most EV owners do. Most of the time my LEAF gets charged at home in my garage. We only use public chargers a handful of times per year. When we do, it's stations in parking garages or public parking lots. Which means we plug it in and walk away. We don't have to stand there with it while it charges. If it takes a couple hours that's fine. People focus on how fast they can recharge their EVs while they are standing there waiting for them because they are used to having to go somewhere to refuel their gasoline powered car. One of the great things about owning an EV is you recharge at home.
  - pbz 10y ago
    Except that Tesla is now charging $0.40/minute of leaving the car plugged in after a full charge is reached. They do this precisely to prevent people from "abandoning" their car while others wait in line.
    - ebbv 10y ago
      That's because Tesla's supercharger system is designed to work more like the refueling system people are familiar with and comfortable with; pull up, plug in, wait for it to finish and then drive away. One of the beauties of EVs is not having to use that style of system. The superchargers are nice but most of the time you won't use one unless you're regularly driving over 200 miles a day.
      - 10y ago
hwillis 10y ago
Assuming he's not being sarcastic, it could be power aimed at semi trucks. That would probably be sub-megawatt for regular charging, and 1-2 for supercharging. It's gonna be a lot more important to have a well-developed charging network for trucks since they are working vehicles: nobody is gonna buy a truck and then sit around and wait for it to become profitable to drive. Maybe we'll see some extra-large charging spaces opening up soon... https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/4u0yci/why_i_was_wrong_about_electric_tractor_trucks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/4u0yci/why_i_w...
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Trucks stay stopped a lot of time for loading and unloading. Most could easily have an 1 hour charging without any issues. Superfast chargers would be great for self-driving trucks making long distance trips. But then, train corridors probably beat those on every way. For vehicles where somebody is inside, I don't really see the point of 5 minutes charging. People need to rest and eat, and nobody does that in 5 minutes. Plentiful slower chargers would be a much better selling proposition.
  - hwillis 10y ago
    I did some analysis and think batteries will be somewhere 1-1.5 MWh for tractor trailers. 3 MW would still take 20-30 minutes to charge that. The middle ground isn't very useful as delays on deliveries lose a lot of money. Even an hour long delay cuts into profits. Unless you can charge at .5-1 MW, its not any more useful than just charging overnight.
- stuckagain 10y ago
  Long haul truck fleets will be much more suited for swaps than recharges.
  - yessql 10y ago
    It would probably be easiest to swap the cargo onto a charged tractor. Since there is no driver, you just have an automated station that swaps the tractors and the cargo goes on its way. Swapping a giant long haul battery would be very cumbersome. I agree though that swapping and slower charging would make more sense than trying to charge at some multimegawatt level to reduce the cargo transit time.
vegabook 10y ago
Even 4-5 minutes is still an eternity if you're in a queue behind 10 cars during the holiday rush, and have to 'fill up' twice to get to your destination. What would be a 20 minute wait for gas becomes an hour, for something that doesn't even give you the same range.
- wklauss 10y ago
  It's unlikely that you'll hit those wait times due to other cars at the same supercharger, I think. Not all trips require a visit to a supercharger and unlike ICE, owners of electrical recharge daily at their homes. It could happen for some popular routes, but it will be a minor nuisance and easily fixed with more supercharging stations on the routes that are more congested.
  - makecheck 10y ago
    The real problem with shared ports is that cars still occupy stations when they’re done charging, and they are not even required to “plug in” while using the convenient parking spots. You need a way to force a car to start charging while parked in special spots, and force it to leave when done (the Tesla actually could move itself out of the way automatically, if only there weren’t a charging cable attached).
    - delive 10y ago
      It would be a nice enhancement for drivers to have their cars move to non-charging spots after they finish charging. However, Tesla introduced fees just recently: https://www.tesla.com/support/supercharger-idle-fee https://www.tesla.com/support/supercharger-idle-fee. Also, after Dec 31, supercharging won't be unlimited for newly bought Teslas.
- the8472 10y ago
  How often does that happen per year?
  - deleted 10y ago
emp_zealoth 10y ago
Whoa, lets take off our socks and count there, mr ad-hominem There is ~56 weeks in a year, so with that kind of use you get 10 years worth of deep cycles (600) The light ones were shown already to have basically no impact. Meanwhile, in real world people have harsher climates that will screw with the batteries even further - where I live summer goes to 35-40C and winter can go as low as -20-25C Also, current "normal" electrical grid is not capable of charging dozens of cars at the same time, even with slow charging Any medium business can have 50 or more cars parked and I higly doubt they will go to the trouble of upgrading their power connection by an order of magnitude -> which means no one working there will even consider an electric car Sure, I'd love to have an electric car to do my daily commute (total of 10 miles), but since those are so riddiculously expensive, unsuitable for my climate and depreciate riddiculously quick it's kind of a moot point
- dang 10y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13264454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13264454 and marked it off-topic.
  - mSparks 10y ago
    please take your life somewhere else.

59 points by electic 10y ago

I wonder what the Tesla charging contacts are rated for. Assuming they keep the straight-to-battery model, 350kW is around 1000A. I think Tesla chose the best available contact for its size (I forget the brand name), but 1000A is a lot for that size contact. They may have to devise a way to actively cool it. I doubt that they want to start supercharging at higher voltage. A DC-DC converter at that scale will be fairly large. I suppose they could add some contactors internal to the battery pack to change the cell wiring to double the voltage and halve the current for charging purposes.

greglindahl 10y ago
Higher-powered Tesla superchargers already have an active cooling system in the cable.
neon_electro 10y ago
I don't claim to be an expert, but it appears that Tesla has experimented with liquid cooling Supercharger stations before: https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-ends-its-thin-liquid-cooled-supercharger-wire-experiment-in-mountain-view-but-the-tech-lives-on/ https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-ends-its-thin-liquid-co... In the above case, they used liquid cooling to make the charging cable diameter smaller, but perhaps the technology can be used to make the regular Supercharger cable capable of handling more power.
- amluto 10y ago
  Cooling the cable might be easier: you can make a hollow braided copper tube, insulate and seal around it, and run liquid through it. But you can't run liquid through the contacts unless the car has plumbing for it, and I doubt it does.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

magaman69 10y ago

Tesla's PR team is getting a lot better at writing these articles.

babyrainbow 10y ago
>Tesla's PR team.. You mean HN?
- SEJeff 10y ago
  No reddit's r/TeslaMotors

jawbone3 10y ago

Is it just bulk that makes the batteries non replaceable? Putting in charged ones are after all the simplest way to speed up charging if the replacement is relatively simple, and a well proven solution for other battery powered devices.

zwily 10y ago
They are replaceable in minutes: http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/teslas-battery-swap-is-dead/ http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/teslas-battery-swap-is-dead/ They're focusing instead on fast charging.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  This sounds like a program that was designed to fail so they could say that they tried. I don't see a ~400mi charge from zero ever happening in the sub-10 minute range. A swap is the only way to do that without a major technological breakthrough. Swaps have their own logistical problems, but swapping battery packs is the best solution for cars, phones and anything that needs a battery that can be easily swapped.
  - phil21 10y ago
    I think it's also too new in battery tech for this to happen. Batteries need to become more like a commodity everyone thinks is interchangeable before this becomes truly viable. If I own my car (and battery) I probably take pretty good care of it. Who is to say I'm swapping with a battery that has been poorly cared for? This anxiety alone (justified or not) means a lot of owners won't currently do this. Tesla "tried" to solve this - but if I have to plan ahead for when I want to do a swap it's again a hugely useless service. The entire reason battery swaps would exist, is to make charging an afterthought non-issue. Basically I can see once electric cars get to be the majority and battery tech drives prices down this happening more - probably starts out more like a battery service/extended warranty plan where you pay a monthly fee for a certain guaranteed performance. Then this company will develop the repair/service infrastructure to be positioned to take advantage of any standardized battery swap tech for their customers. It's fun to think about the new markets here, but right now battery packs are more like pets than cattle.

pulse7 10y ago

What cable thickness is needed to charge a Tesla in 5 minutes?

abelsson 10y ago

For reference, gas contains about 33kWh of energy per gallon, and if we assume you pump 20 gallons in 5 minutes when you fill up your car you have an effective energy transfer rate of about 8 MW at your gas pump. Even if we give an electric vehicle a 3x efficiency ratio, we still need about 2.5 MW to be equivalent to the old petroleum infrastructure.

ebbv 10y ago
The thing to keep in mind when thinking about EVs is that while they may be slower to fill up at stations where you have to stand there like the Tesla super charger stations, this is a small minority of the charging most EV owners do. Most of the time my LEAF gets charged at home in my garage. We only use public chargers a handful of times per year. When we do, it's stations in parking garages or public parking lots. Which means we plug it in and walk away. We don't have to stand there with it while it charges. If it takes a couple hours that's fine. People focus on how fast they can recharge their EVs while they are standing there waiting for them because they are used to having to go somewhere to refuel their gasoline powered car. One of the great things about owning an EV is you recharge at home.
- pbz 10y ago
  Except that Tesla is now charging $0.40/minute of leaving the car plugged in after a full charge is reached. They do this precisely to prevent people from "abandoning" their car while others wait in line.
  - ebbv 10y ago
    That's because Tesla's supercharger system is designed to work more like the refueling system people are familiar with and comfortable with; pull up, plug in, wait for it to finish and then drive away. One of the beauties of EVs is not having to use that style of system. The superchargers are nice but most of the time you won't use one unless you're regularly driving over 200 miles a day.
    - 10y ago

hwillis 10y ago

Assuming he's not being sarcastic, it could be power aimed at semi trucks. That would probably be sub-megawatt for regular charging, and 1-2 for supercharging. It's gonna be a lot more important to have a well-developed charging network for trucks since they are working vehicles: nobody is gonna buy a truck and then sit around and wait for it to become profitable to drive. Maybe we'll see some extra-large charging spaces opening up soon... https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/4u0yci/why_i_was_wrong_about_electric_tractor_trucks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/4u0yci/why_i_w...

marcosdumay 10y ago
Trucks stay stopped a lot of time for loading and unloading. Most could easily have an 1 hour charging without any issues. Superfast chargers would be great for self-driving trucks making long distance trips. But then, train corridors probably beat those on every way. For vehicles where somebody is inside, I don't really see the point of 5 minutes charging. People need to rest and eat, and nobody does that in 5 minutes. Plentiful slower chargers would be a much better selling proposition.
- hwillis 10y ago
  I did some analysis and think batteries will be somewhere 1-1.5 MWh for tractor trailers. 3 MW would still take 20-30 minutes to charge that. The middle ground isn't very useful as delays on deliveries lose a lot of money. Even an hour long delay cuts into profits. Unless you can charge at .5-1 MW, its not any more useful than just charging overnight.
stuckagain 10y ago
Long haul truck fleets will be much more suited for swaps than recharges.
- yessql 10y ago
  It would probably be easiest to swap the cargo onto a charged tractor. Since there is no driver, you just have an automated station that swaps the tractors and the cargo goes on its way. Swapping a giant long haul battery would be very cumbersome. I agree though that swapping and slower charging would make more sense than trying to charge at some multimegawatt level to reduce the cargo transit time.

vegabook 10y ago

Even 4-5 minutes is still an eternity if you're in a queue behind 10 cars during the holiday rush, and have to 'fill up' twice to get to your destination. What would be a 20 minute wait for gas becomes an hour, for something that doesn't even give you the same range.

wklauss 10y ago
It's unlikely that you'll hit those wait times due to other cars at the same supercharger, I think. Not all trips require a visit to a supercharger and unlike ICE, owners of electrical recharge daily at their homes. It could happen for some popular routes, but it will be a minor nuisance and easily fixed with more supercharging stations on the routes that are more congested.
- makecheck 10y ago
  The real problem with shared ports is that cars still occupy stations when they’re done charging, and they are not even required to “plug in” while using the convenient parking spots. You need a way to force a car to start charging while parked in special spots, and force it to leave when done (the Tesla actually could move itself out of the way automatically, if only there weren’t a charging cable attached).
  - delive 10y ago
    It would be a nice enhancement for drivers to have their cars move to non-charging spots after they finish charging. However, Tesla introduced fees just recently: https://www.tesla.com/support/supercharger-idle-fee https://www.tesla.com/support/supercharger-idle-fee. Also, after Dec 31, supercharging won't be unlimited for newly bought Teslas.
the8472 10y ago
How often does that happen per year?
- deleted 10y ago

emp_zealoth 10y ago

Whoa, lets take off our socks and count there, mr ad-hominem There is ~56 weeks in a year, so with that kind of use you get 10 years worth of deep cycles (600) The light ones were shown already to have basically no impact. Meanwhile, in real world people have harsher climates that will screw with the batteries even further - where I live summer goes to 35-40C and winter can go as low as -20-25C Also, current "normal" electrical grid is not capable of charging dozens of cars at the same time, even with slow charging Any medium business can have 50 or more cars parked and I higly doubt they will go to the trouble of upgrading their power connection by an order of magnitude -> which means no one working there will even consider an electric car Sure, I'd love to have an electric car to do my daily commute (total of 10 miles), but since those are so riddiculously expensive, unsuitable for my climate and depreciate riddiculously quick it's kind of a moot point

dang 10y ago
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13264454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13264454 and marked it off-topic.
- mSparks 10y ago
  please take your life somewhere else.