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> Can you give the approximate route? Philly to Atlanta. To be honest, I thought the Supercharger coverage along the route was excellent. I don't know what th

by mschaef 10y ago

> Can you give the approximate route? Philly to Atlanta. To be honest, I thought the Supercharger coverage along the route was excellent. I don't know what the individual sites are like (ie: would I really want to hang around an hour or two), but the spacing and locations looked really quite good. > If you're not taking breaks, the effect is larger. Yeah... we usually do take breaks. (Without breaks, it's a doable drive, but not easy.) A supercharger station in the middle of a cluster of restaurants would be a good opportunity for cross-sales, etc. > I'm not trying to tell you not to care about this, mind! Understood. To tell the truth, I don't think this specific use case is necessarily a huge deal. Even though it did impact us, it's a low priority event. > As far as battery swapping goes, Tesla did develop this, Interesting. Based on what the article was saying about the battery's interface to the car, it didn't seem like a quickly swappable component. Are the supercharger stations usually staffed with people to assist? I'd thought they were self-service. It may be that the reason they haven't pursued the battery swap idea more aggressively is that it requires more staff at supercharger stations, as well as all the logistics around keeping a stock of pre-charged batteries at all the stations where you can do the swap. One other comment I should make here is that despite what it might seeem I generally am very positive about electric cars. This is true, both as a means of of transport, as well as a way to (potentially) manage the electrical grid's use of solar/wind/etc. power. (Power sources that might not be as continuously reliable as something like a Natgas plant, etc.)

mikeash 10y ago
I tossed that route into evtripplanner.com and got results similar to what you describe. However, it doesn't seem to be planning all that well for some reason, because it's making unnecessary stops that add time, and skipping stops that reduce overall time. In particular, it's adding a stop at Newark, DE when a 100% charge could easily take you straight to Woodbridge, VA (there's no advantage to stopping early for the first stop), it's adding a stop in Atlanta itself (which may be necessary if you can't charge overnight there), and skipping a stop in Richmond which cuts down on total trip time when added. Fixing those up, I get a total trip time of 15:05, which is 3:14 more than what Google Maps shows for driving directly. That's about 27%, so still a bit over what I said. Of course, it'll depend on what you're driving, too! I got those numbers by having it route for a Model S 85 (which is what I have, so that's what it was set to). If I switch it to a P100D and optimize from there, the total trip time is only 13:55. It doesn't have a 100D yet, but that should be even faster, since the non-P versions are a bit more efficient. Which is to say, if you want to make trips like this faster, the bigger battery helps a lot. Applying some human smarts can optimize things. And it's definitely not the "hop in and go" you can do with a gasoline car. It takes some planning. Regarding the locations, they're usually pretty good. Most of them are in commercial areas with places to have a meal, grab a snack, or whatever. Not always, though. The West Palm Beach location sticks out at me as particularly bad, being located at a Tesla service center in a pretty industrial area. I'd try to avoid that one next time I make that trip. This is another area where planning helps. I'm not sure what you're referring to in the article that made it look like the battery wasn't easily swappable. It does talk about doing complicated things to change out the connector, but that's for a hypothetical swap of this new 100 battery into an older car. Tesla apparently changed the connectors at some point, so you'd need to do some work for that. But that wouldn't affect a battery swap station, where you'd presumably have a stock of batteries appropriate for your particular car. You're right that supercharger stations aren't usually staffed. I have heard that some really busy ones sometimes have people helping organize, but that's rare. Mostly there would be no point in having anyone around. I think the goal was to have the battery swap stations be totally automated, but they never actually got to that point. There would definitely be a huge amount of logistics management and capital expenditure compared to supercharger stations either way. Even if it had caught on, I think swap stations would only have been on really busy corridors like LA to SF, or I-95. I think the main issue is just that charging technology is good enough for enough people already, and is improving quickly enough. As you can see from the trip times above, the newer batteries already offer a pretty big improvement there, and hopefully there will be more to come.

by mschaef 10y ago

mikeash 10y ago

I tossed that route into evtripplanner.com and got results similar to what you describe. However, it doesn't seem to be planning all that well for some reason, because it's making unnecessary stops that add time, and skipping stops that reduce overall time. In particular, it's adding a stop at Newark, DE when a 100% charge could easily take you straight to Woodbridge, VA (there's no advantage to stopping early for the first stop), it's adding a stop in Atlanta itself (which may be necessary if you can't charge overnight there), and skipping a stop in Richmond which cuts down on total trip time when added. Fixing those up, I get a total trip time of 15:05, which is 3:14 more than what Google Maps shows for driving directly. That's about 27%, so still a bit over what I said. Of course, it'll depend on what you're driving, too! I got those numbers by having it route for a Model S 85 (which is what I have, so that's what it was set to). If I switch it to a P100D and optimize from there, the total trip time is only 13:55. It doesn't have a 100D yet, but that should be even faster, since the non-P versions are a bit more efficient. Which is to say, if you want to make trips like this faster, the bigger battery helps a lot. Applying some human smarts can optimize things. And it's definitely not the "hop in and go" you can do with a gasoline car. It takes some planning. Regarding the locations, they're usually pretty good. Most of them are in commercial areas with places to have a meal, grab a snack, or whatever. Not always, though. The West Palm Beach location sticks out at me as particularly bad, being located at a Tesla service center in a pretty industrial area. I'd try to avoid that one next time I make that trip. This is another area where planning helps. I'm not sure what you're referring to in the article that made it look like the battery wasn't easily swappable. It does talk about doing complicated things to change out the connector, but that's for a hypothetical swap of this new 100 battery into an older car. Tesla apparently changed the connectors at some point, so you'd need to do some work for that. But that wouldn't affect a battery swap station, where you'd presumably have a stock of batteries appropriate for your particular car. You're right that supercharger stations aren't usually staffed. I have heard that some really busy ones sometimes have people helping organize, but that's rare. Mostly there would be no point in having anyone around. I think the goal was to have the battery swap stations be totally automated, but they never actually got to that point. There would definitely be a huge amount of logistics management and capital expenditure compared to supercharger stations either way. Even if it had caught on, I think swap stations would only have been on really busy corridors like LA to SF, or I-95. I think the main issue is just that charging technology is good enough for enough people already, and is improving quickly enough. As you can see from the trip times above, the newer batteries already offer a pretty big improvement there, and hopefully there will be more to come.