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The analogy has been made "You wouldn't leave your car at a gas pump". But Tesla charging is different, a gas car takes ~4m to fill, not long enough for you to
by linsomniac 10y ago
The analogy has been made "You wouldn't leave your car at a gas pump". But Tesla charging is different, a gas car takes ~4m to fill, not long enough for you to do much else. A Tesla on a road trip takes 20-40 minutes to charge. So long you aren't going to stand there, but not long enough to a sit down meal or walk the half mile from the hotel with the charger to a fast food restaurant and eat, visit a gift shop, etc... To name some examples of what we did on a recent road trip.
With the Tesla, a road trip is a different cadence from gas, where many peoples tendency seems to just get on with it and minimize these fueling interruptions. With the Tesla, we would talk to locals, visit the train museum, go to gift shops, I'd drop them off at historic districts and go charge.
It didn't feel like we were waiting for the car to charge, but that was because we were doing other things. If I now have to go back and move the car because the stalls are 50% full, that changes the road trip a lot.
Something not common knowledge: Superchargers operate in pairs. If there are 4 stalls, only 2 of them at a time will operate at full speed. If you are charging on stall 1A and someone pulls into 1B, they get a much slower charge rate until 1A completes charging.
So a 50% full supercharger is actually "full", but the remaining stalls can be parked at and will start charging full rate as things finish.
Because of this, I was kind of expecting the idle fee to be when the stalls were all full. If there are no stalls left, you are making someone potentially wait while your car sits there idle.
The longer term plan is they hope to make the cars move themselves when charging is done. That would be awesome.