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Interestingly, the charge rate across the entire curve sounds like an important metric but in practice it is nearly irrelevant. If you drive an ICE car, you ar
by zaroth 8y ago
Interestingly, the charge rate across the entire curve sounds like an important metric but in practice it is nearly irrelevant.
If you drive an ICE car, you are used to filling your tank. Because once you've gone through the trouble of driving to a gas station and pulling out your credit card and unscrewing the cap, well you might as well top it off, right? Life is different with electric.
You might know, for example, that most Teslas operate day-to-day with their max battery charge limit set around 80% or below (it extends battery life). Charging at night is entirely effortless, so you put the charge into the battery that you'll need for the next day, or like me, you set it to give you 4x your daily commute and totally forget about it. Only before a particularly long road trip do you pop open the app and slide up the charge limit.
For Superchargers, the model is a bit different because this is charging that's happening on-demand while you wait in the car or are off getting a bite or whatever, during your trip. The best measure is to examine the portion of the curve that actual drivers spend actually charging their cars at an actual Supercharger. So here we have it;
"V3 Supercharging will ultimately cut the amount of time customers spend charging by an average of 50%, as modeled on our fleet data."
So this is truly an average of 50% faster, for actual Tesla drivers. ICE-age drivers who love to hate Tesla will insist you have to integrate the charge-rate curve, but as usual they will be entirely missing the point.
Tesla could spend an atrocious amount of time and money improving charging speed from 90 to 100%. That might be how you charge your phone, but it's actually not how Tesla drivers charge their cars (or how the onboard guidance computer will plan to charge your car when it sets the route for you), and would have almost zero benefit for the Fleet. Charging en-route is most efficiently done to boost the battery up to 70-80% and then you get going again.
Supercharger deployment, at least in the USA, is modeled such that there are almost no trips where you would benefit from, or need to, fully charge at a Supercharger, versus making two charging stops which would add up to less time charging, and driving out of your way to the charger, overall.
- clouddrover 8y agoNone of these justifications answer the question I've asked. Read the link I've provided. The Tesla Model 3 can get to 90% state of charge in 40 minutes in ideal conditions. How many minutes will it now take the Model S and Model X to do the same? The amount of time spent at a charger to get decent range matters. Read this article for an example of someone who likes his Tesla Model 3 but is getting frustrated with the amount of time he's spending at chargers: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/mobility/2019/03/05/fun-and-frustration-tesla-model-3-owner/3052876002/ https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/mobility/20...
- greglindahl 8y agoI generally don’t charge to 90% when I supercharge, are you saying I’m doing it wrong? Seriously, the point of supercharging is to do the minimum, not 90%.
- clouddrover 8y agoDo you have any information on the new charge curves of the Model S and Model X? That's the information I'm after.
- greglindahl 8y agoYou are saying a lot more than just that, so it’s no surprise that the answers you’re getting are not what you expect.
- clouddrover 8y agoGood grief.
- zaroth 8y agoPerfect example. This owner added 110 miles of range in 45 minutes, or ~26kWh, which means an average charge rate of 35kW. He charged from approximately 48% to 83%. With V3 he could add the same range in about 15-18 minutes -- that's based on eyeballing the charge rate curve in your other link. The S and X will see similar gains now, because this generation of technology is the same as the TM3. I do not believe that Tesla has published an actual charge percentage vs time curve for this new S/X update, but you can rest assured the many tech blogs which cover Tesla's every move will have one posted as soon as someone can get their hands on one. There will be parts of the curve which are significantly more than 50% higher charge rates (perhaps up to 400% increases at most), and parts which are virtually unchanged (above 90% capacity). In the meantime, you should be confident that when Tesla says "expect to charge 50% faster" that's a real average number based on actual usage data they collect in the field, and sometimes you will beat it, sometimes not, depending on many variables which can impact charge rate. One things that won't be impacting your charge rate on V3 are the Teslas charging next to you. In the article you linked, I would speculate the 35kW average charge rate is due to shared main feeds in V1/V2 Supercharger stations.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]