
100 Supercharger Stations - ph0rque
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/100-supercharger-stations
======
lerouxb
I don't live in America and haven't seen a Tesla charging station, so maybe
some of these obvious ideas are already happening, but:

* You'll have at least 20 minutes of waiting for your car to charge, during which time Tesla could be selling you snacks and/or fast food. Filling stations in most countries already follow that proven business model.

* These charging stations have solar panels on the roof, so they presumably already have the necessary inverters and whatever other infrastructure to pump electricity back to the grid. Tesla could make some deals to put panels up on nearby buildings who could save on capital costs by just piggybacking off Tesla. They could become a power utility company over time.

* Teslas are quite expensive, so Tesla owners (and therefore drivers) are generally affluent, which are the kind of customers local businesses would want to attract. So having a charging station nearby could be something malls might even pay for or want to subsidise. Similarly the land around a supercharger station in what is otherwise "the middle of nowhere" could become significantly more valuable, so if Tesla purchases extra cheap land around stations placed along interstate highways they could stand to make quite a bit of money selling that to property developers afterwards.

I guess what I'm saying is if Tesla plays their cards right, then Tesla cars
could be like giving away razor handles for cheap.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Variations on your second point are definitely in the plans. The Tesla
charging stations are being put up in conjunction with Solar City, a solar
panel leasing company, which was founded by Elon Musk's cousins.

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jws
_Cumulative total energy delivered to date: 4.9 million kWh_

That works out to about $250,000, or about $10 per Tesla Model S sold to date.
Early days and all, but it looks like about $100† tacked on to the selling
price of the car covers lifetime supercharger network power use. Capital
expenditures to build them probably dwarf their electric bills.

␄

† To the limits of Fermi Estimation

~~~
fancyketchup
I suspect the energy cost is a little higher than that because a commercial
electricity customer (like Tesla) will often be subject to 'demand charges,'
which are assessed based on the highest power used in a billing period. Since
the point of a supercharger is to deliver a lot of power, the demand charge
may be quite high.

I still agree with your conclusion though... Capital still dwarfs energy, even
if they pay several times what you estimated.

~~~
Mvandenbergh
I doubt that any individual super-charger station is a large enough load to be
charged for their peak usage. It's a big load but nothing like a smelter or
even a small factory.

~~~
alexkiritz
Definitely more power than a small factory. A six station supercharger could
be pulling 500 kW.

Up until 2012, demand charges from Souther California Edison kicked in at 20
kW at a rate of $17 per kW. One of the first 50 kW quick-chargers in LA county
was shut down for months after the owner realized that operating it would tack
on an extra $1000 to his monthly bill.

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clamprecht
Wow, I had no idea their network was already this good:

> The network is already robust enough to support long-distance drives on the
> most popular routes across America, wherever it be a cross country trip from
> Los Angeles to New York, an East Coast jaunt from Rhode Island to the
> southern tip of Florida, or an epic 12,000-mile journey to every corner of
> the United States.

I'm not sure if I've just been out of the loop, or if they aren't doing a good
enough job pimping their supercharger network. This removes one of the
perceived problems with electric cars - long road trips. Does anyone here have
real world experience doing a long road trip with a Tesla S, using the
supercharger network?

~~~
brc
You would think they would be convincing magazine editors to doing a long-form
'we drove a tesla across the US' type article. I'd be very interested in
reading something like that - what its really like to string together a long
trip using supercharger stations.

~~~
ams6110
Any objective magazine would pair it with a gas or diesel car and do a "Top
Gear" style race, and compare and contrast the tradeoffs.

~~~
brc
Well, from a purely 'distance covering' point of view, clearly a liquid fuel
car would win because of faster refueling, higher range and speed limits.

I was more thinking of a road trip article, where the travel itself is the
focus of the article. Is the car comfortable on long trips? Are the
superchargers always easy to find? What sort of characters and people do you
meet at supercharger stations? Did the forced longer stops make the journey
better or worse?

It's a big difference to 'who got there faster'. That would be a foregone
conclusion.

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cpprototypes
Tesla is interesting, but there may be an upcoming battle between EV and fuel
cells since it seems Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai are supporting fuel cells
instead of EV. But Tesla is not alone (Nissan, BMW) so this may be a battle
that will split the industry. A big part of this fight will be infrastructure.
Currently, gas powered cars have these advantages:

\- Fast refuel time (Only a few minutes to fill a tank)

\- Ubiquitous (Gas stations everywhere)

\- Standardized (Gas station nozzle works in any car)

EV is currently very weak in these areas. Recharge time is orders of magnitude
longer than filling a gas tank. The common expected use case is to charge at
home overnight, but this excludes a huge fraction of the population (anyone
living in an apartment/condo). Apartment owners have little incentive to
install chargers. And there's a standardization problem. Nissan Leafs cannot
charge at Superchargers. There's a lot of fragmentation in this field.

The fuel cell cars are avoiding these issues and they may take a lot of the
market that EV currently doesn't serve well. Hydrogen stations are often
publicly funded and not tied to a specific auto manufacturer. Refuel time is
similar to gas stations. And they are slowly building more and more hydrogen
stations (in California). It seems California is being used as a test market
for fuel cell cars. If it succeeds, then there could be a strong nationwide
push. To someone living in an apartment/condo, fuel cell cars have a lot of
advantages.

Many assume that the EV is the successor to the ICE vehicle. But that may not
be true.

~~~
Patrick_Devine
The petrochemical industry would absolutely love for hydrogen fuel cells to
become viable instead of EVs because they already have a massive amount of
infrastructure and the easiest/cheapest way of getting hydrogen is to capture
it from hydrocarbons.

Musk is right though, steam reforming hydrocarbons to generate hydrogen
doesn't make any sense, nor does electrolysis. Using that amount of energy to
generate a fuel so that you can fill up at the pump quickly is just plain
nuts. We're better off using higher voltages, better batteries and super
capacitors.

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gojomo
I notice the 100th station is in New Jersey, one of the two states that bans
self-serve gas stations. I'm hoping Tesla owners don't have to ask an on-duty
attendant to plug-in their vehicles there.

~~~
cjg_
Technically it is not a gas station. What does the law say?

~~~
smackfu
[http://lwd.dol.state.nj.us/labor/lsse/laws/Retail_Gasoline_A...](http://lwd.dol.state.nj.us/labor/lsse/laws/Retail_Gasoline_Act_and_Regs.html#19613)

If you scroll up, you can see the definitions of terms. It's just gasoline and
doesn't even apply to diesel.

So, no, it wouldn't apply to Tesla.

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gtaylor
Here's a map of the stations, if anyone is interested:
[http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger](http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger)

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
So within ~20 months it'll be possible to drive almost anywhere in the USA in
a Tesla S, and back to a Supercharger charging station? That's pretty
impressive! As demand for vehicle based electricity use increases the demand
for new electricity generation capacity will increase. All this in a
protracted economic depression. Interesting times.

~~~
tonylemesmer
Thank heavens its possible to charge at places other than these stations
otherwise it would be pretty annoying to have to drive a couple hundred miles
to recharge. But this is great for long journeys.

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sengstrom
I wonder if using the supercharger deteriorates the battery more than a more
gentle charge (I am warned about this for fast charging my Leaf). Find it
interesting that they ask that question on the supercharger FAQ but don't
answer it:

"How often can I Supercharge? Is it bad for my battery? Supercharging does not
alter the new vehicle warranty. Customers are free to use the network as much
as they like."

~~~
dangrossman
I am not a battery scientist, but from everything I've read, using the
supercharger should have no effect on battery life long-term. So long as it's
kept within certain charge and temperature ranges, the only thing that counts
down the lifetime of the battery cells are actual charge cycles, which you can
pretty conveniently measure in miles of normal driving use (expected up to 30%
loss after 100K miles, and the 5+ year old Roadsters actually averaged just
15% loss after 100K miles with older battery tech). The supercharger doesn't
do anything that would reduce that life expectancy; it communicates with the
battery about its health and charging speed begins to slow progressively after
about 50%.

~~~
warble
Not really true, there's many variables including how 'full' you charge the
battery, how much you discharge it, what the charge and run temps are, it's
not a simple equation.

For example, if you don't charge and discharge the battery fully, you can get
many many times more cycles out of them.

Charging quickly does release more heat, which can reduce the lifecycle of the
battery, but there are workarounds to minimize this.

I am not an expert at battery chemistries, but I work with EV charging systems
quite a bit.

~~~
dangrossman
What part is "not really true"? Despite only writing three sentences, I
touched on every factor you just mentioned. The Tesla charger and battery
system keep the battery within the safe charge and temperature ranges at all
times, even when supercharging. It has active heating and cooling, even when
the car is turned off, and will neither fully discharge nor fully charge the
battery pack even if left unattended. There's nothing inherently damaging
about temporarily charging faster AFAIK as long as you control for all those
variables, which Tesla's tech does.

~~~
greeneggs
It must damage the battery somehow. If it didn't, Tesla would have said so in
the FAQ, instead of trying to sidestep the question.

~~~
warble
Truth is, the type of use these batteries get isn't well understood yet. No
one really knows the long term effects, we can make educated guesses but until
a lot of them are in the field with average use cases for years, we won't see
much of the nuance.

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njloof
So I can't buy a Tesla in New Jersey, but now I can charge one there.

~~~
krschultz
My coworker lives in NJ and owns a Tesla, seems to have no problem getting
service or anything. I believe he ordered it from the website directly.

~~~
shiftpgdn
He likely 'took delivery' in another state and then transferred the
title/registration into NJ. At least this is how it is done in Texas where
Tesla sales are also banned.

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mkz
When's the hyperloop coming?

