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As a petrolhead who has never even seen a Supercharger station: what exactly is broken? What is there to break? Physical damage to the cable / connector?
by core-questions 6y ago
As a petrolhead who has never even seen a Supercharger station: what exactly is broken? What is there to break? Physical damage to the cable / connector?
- GloriousKoji 6y agoMany things can break: the internet connection, the internal computer, the main power wire to the car connector, something inside the connector, something with the charger circuity like a bad contactor. Then there's the obvious stuff like physical damage from vandalization or someone driving into it.
- worik 6y agoWHat a story for the twenty-first century! It is energy transfer: "Many things can break: the internet connection..." what does the Internet connevction have to do with it? (To be clear, that is a rhetorical question. I know why and how those systems are fundamentally broken - almost by design!)
- ryandrake 6y agoHaving never used or even seen a super charger, I have no idea why one would need a friggen internet connection. Don’t you just plug them in and swipe your card like a gas station?
- fastball 6y agoYou don't think gas stations have an internet connection?
- ryandrake 6y agoI don’t think they require one to function. Gas stations, including ones where you pay at the pump, functioned fine without Internet before the Internet.
- fredophile 6y agoI don't recall any pay at the pump gas stations pre internet.
- fastball 6y agoHow exactly does a pay-at-the-pump gas station function without internet?
- jdeibele 6y agoYou go inside and pay cash to the clerk who authorizes $20 of gas on pump #5. I'm in Oregon where we (mostly) legally can't pump our own gas. There may be pumps that are like vending machines: they take cards or cash. There are exceptions, like if you're in the rural areas (counties under 40,000 residents). They also changed it for a while during the early part of COVID. I notice that the pumps still run the commercials on the pumps here. Probably cheaper to just build one model of pump even though Oregon and New Jersey but it would drive me crazy if I was pumping gas for a living.
- fastball 6y ago> How exactly does a pay-at-the-pump gas station function without internet? I realize that there are gas stations where you can't pay at the pump, but that's not the claim I was responding to in the PC. Regardless, if you are using your credit card to pay for your gas (which I am certain you can do in Oregon gas stations), the gas station is utilizing internet in order to give you gas.
- kube-system 6y agoOkay, then replace “internet” with “dial-up private network”.
- Dylan16807 6y agoThey used to require a phone line. Now they don't, because an internet connection replaced it, with similar reliability.
- 6y ago
- skolos 6y agoTo be able to swipe your card you also need internet connection. Very rare, but I did have experience at a gas station when I couldn't fill up, because the internet connection was down.
- modeless 6y agoYou just plug in, no card. The car identifies itself. It needs an internet connection to report the usage so it can be charged to the correct account. Gas stations obviously need a network connection of some kind too for card swipes to work. Otherwise you'd have to fall back to cash or manually writing down card numbers (is that even allowed anymore?) Almost all Superchargers are unmanned so no cash.
- blt 6y agoThey could store the transactions in local memory until the connection is restored.
- kube-system 6y agoHow do you know the account is valid, able to be charged, etc?
- kwhitefoot 6y agoThere are only half million Teslas so you can just distribute the VIN numbers of all of them with a single bit flag saying whether they are eligible for free charging and another bit saying that they have an account in good order. Twenty bytes per car should do it, say 10 MB of storage to hold enough information to say which cars are allowed to charge even if the network is down. Mind you in three years of owning and driving (70k km) my Model S I have never encountered a Supercharger station that was entirely out of order, just a few heavily used ones that have one or two stalls often not working.
- blt 6y agoSend invoices to identifiable users, which go to collections if unpaid. Eat the cost for unidentifiable users. As long as you can fix any connection problem within a few days, the maximum value lost is limited by physics. People used to pay for stuff with checks all the time. It's similar to that.
- theshrike79 6y agoWould they store all of the valid credit card numbers in the world in local memory too? =)
- kortilla 6y agoWhat do you think happens when you swipe your card at a gas pump. That authorization is going out over the Internet or a phone line.
- worik 6y agoI pay cash