Also it's been clear since the Tesla Semi truck was announced that some major change in charging infrastructure would be necessary. This doesn't seem quite enough for /that/ though, I wonder if another rev is coming.
re: announcement, I'm surprised not much has been said about the flagship cars (S/X). With their current battery architecture (using 18650 batteries), they're not capable of 250kW charge rates. I wonder if they have recently updated them to new 2170 battery packs or if they're going to do that soon.
The difference between 3 minutes and 20 minutes is still enormous. Pretending for a minute that superchargers were as common as petrol stations, that there were never queues and you always started charging immediately. I would still not consider that a reasonable time to spend waiting around so I can finish a journey.
I agree it's a huge improvement, but it doesn't get close to making the gap insignificant
Ubeam.com have made it possible. On a smaller scale though
The release of a proprietary charger is somehow completely overshadowing that news.
It's changed from driving itself around in a ride hailing network to earn you money while you sleep, to now making you always be in the car and pay attention and make corrections, essentially turning all purchasers into unpaid neural network training practitioners.
1: https://ark-invest.com/research/podcast/elon-musk-podcast
It seems a lot of plans are changing.
Elon claiming that in a podcast isn't a promise like this text on the order page.
Musk once again overestimated by a long shot how good and safe autopilot will be. At least it seems he is becoming more responsible or maybe he is forced to by the new board.
Why? data, that's why. You need massive amounts of good quality data to build a solid model that will be 99.9999% accurate. This is one of the leverage Tesla has against Waymo.
You can simulate all you want but nothing beats real world data.
https://electrek.co/2019/03/06/tesla-self-driving-language-w...
Old language:
https://i1.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/201...
New language:
https://i1.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/201...
All mention of the ride hailing service is gone, and now unsupervised driving isn't just dependent on just regulatory approval like they said before but now is instead dependent on it ever "acheiving reliability".
Pretty sure customer data isn't uploaded en masse to train networks at Tesla.
The very first issue of Popular Science magazine I received as a kid had the Tesla when it was still the modified Lotus Elise with the clickbait-y title along the lines of 'Could a sports car powered by laptop batteries be the next generation of cars?'. Kudos to all the teams at Tesla who made this a reality!
Since I can't charge at my apartment, I tend to charge my car in the morning. If it is around freezing temperatures, it will charge at a rate of 0 miles per hour.
When I would use the supercharger on cold mornings, it would charge at 0mph for 10-15 minutes and then slowly increase. The worst I saw was it stayed at a rate of 25mph for over an hour before I finally had to leave. However, using a regular wall socket has consistently given me 4-5mph even in subfreezing temperatures. For comparison, a supercharger on a warm day gives >300mph.
If you can drive for a bit before charging then it charges much faster. That is why I'm excited about the on-route battery warming!
- You can charge at work (at least 6kW aka Level 2)
- You drive less than 35 miles a day and have a 110v outlet where you plan to park it overnight
- You have a nearby mall or similar with a quality level 2 charger, and you don't drive too far every day
In any case I suggest checking out the PlugShare app which has the widest collection of charging stations including estimated kW, ratings, and reviews. Select your car model and it'll automatically filter the supported charging types.
On a side note: I don't recommend relying 100% on superchargers. You can obviously combine any of the above solutions, including supercharging, but superchargers get too crowded if people keep using them as the only source.
He's in Sweden, so it's pretty cold, and he tests a bunch of EV models on a bunch of fast chargers.
It has some of the usual flaws Youtube content does, but he seems a lot more thorough and better informed than most car journalism.
Reminds me of a recent story about the most recent rocket engines from SpaceX. Elon pushed his team for scaling up an efficient design of rockets, which till then was only done with lower powered engines. Elon took a look at the tech, came to a decision that scaling up is a reasonable risk/reward trade-off and demanded his team go ahead with it. His team balked, but made it happen.
I remember the leader of the team specifically thanking Elon, saying that without his push, they would not have done it.
It takes a lot of guts, knowledge and confidence in yourself and your team to make such decisions. edit : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19153953
Other players may create supply, but Elon can create demand. He's in such a unique position, imo.
- closed stores
- no profit
- lied about FSD
- stock down 30%
- long-term investors exit
the tunnel is a joke. we were promised something, but as always with musk, we get something completely different. i'm giving the tunnel deal 3 to 6 months before imploding.
Been seeing highly upvoted doomsday comments since many years about Tesla, like Model 3 was literally supposed to be DoA, it just feels so weird to me.
- human rated space craft to ISS
- massively extend the lead in terms of EV charging networks
But yeah we should really focus on the closes show rooms, that's really whats important ...
My guess is that perhaps very different tunneling technology is required given the geology or something. Or maybe it's just that Elon Musk hates trains and loves cars way too much.
(TBC's boring machines were previously used to bore utility and sewer tunnels.)
So that is about 5 houses. You could buy that service. I hope Tesla would sell you the supercharger for it.
400amp service is usually 2 200 amp panels.
Done with 2/0 cable. It's rarely, if ever, 1 400 amp panel.
1. There is no way you would get "1000amp service" at 250v. It would be a minimum of 480v 3 phase (and not 1000amp). You may even want a lot higher, because as you'll see, getting that many amps is ... very very hard.
2. You can't even buy 1000amp cable gauge anywhere commercially, because it would be insane.
The NEC ampacity table doesn't go anywhere near that high it tops out at 2000kcmil, 665 amp cable.
Due to various factors[1], doubling the cable mils will only get you a hundred or so amps here, so it's probably close to 4500kcmil (i'm too lazy to do the mm^2 math, it's 1.89" conductors) Which doesn't really exist for purchase (if you really needed it, you have the means to make it :P).
To try to also put the size in perspective: 2/0 cable has conductors that are about 3/8" in diameter.
2000kcmil cable, which again, tops out at 665 amps, has conductors 1.6" in diameter (they are often also segmented, so while the bare size may be 1.6" in theory, you don't find that). Generally the insulation size on them is ridiculous as well (because they are usually used for like 10kv+ applications)
[1] Current is related to surface area of conductors, or combined surface areas of all the strands in a conductor. So you'd need to double diameter, at least, to come close.
Cover the roof with solar panels (say 40' x 8' = 10 x 500w panels = 5000 watts of electricity). 8h x 5kw = 40kwh.
If the battery pack was a 1000d, you could move with a full charge once a month for free.
Or you could use it for living too (fridge, range, etc)
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/awzcir/first_p...
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/axy7d2/superch...
Great car for local trips. But at least one of our cars will have to be gas for the foreseeable future.
One-mile-per-minute definitely sounds like something was wrong. Did you try other charging stations? How full was your battery at that point? If you've seen that with multiple stations when you battery was neither nearly empty or nearly full, I'd suggest getting the car serviced as that's not normal behaviour.
Having 16 * 250kW grid connection (4MW) will be super expensive (in terms of connection speed) and slow to provision in many places. It's a similar amount of power as a data centre and power connection is the slowest and hardest part of that, hence why I assumed they had lower grid connections which would be easier to source from local power companies.
They're not retrofitting stations, but all new stations (other than Urban Superchargers, which they will still install in urban locations) will be v3 hardware.
For the cars, accepting the higher charger rate is 100% software in Model 3 (because the cabling and battery already support it). Model S & X will probably need thicker DC cables to the battery to support the 250 kW peak charging rate.
They used a stack of Model S chargers, not inverters! An inverter converts DC to AC. Chargers, of course, go the other way.
The car will most likely just divert the coolant from the motors to the batteries, mostly skipping the radiators. This allows them to preheat the battery without expending any extra energy to do so.
I do no less than eight one-way 1500km trips annually(so that amounts to 12k km during such a period).
I used to do it in one take, but that was over 20h behind the wheel - very dangerous - so now I split them into two legs: one of them 1140km long.
Assuming I started with enough charge for 300km, I would only need to get enough juice for 840km or so - less than 40min overall at this rate which is roughly the amount I spend during my trips on going to the bathroom, eating and leaving the highway for fueling as to not pay the ridiculous on-highway prices.
Delivering lot’s of power is fairly strait forward, designing cars to safely handle that is much harder. Further, as infrastructure that needs to work, the 1MW of power supplying these chargers is the more important upgrade as charging multiple cars was already power limited.
Just for the sake of comparison a slow gas pump (5 gal/min.) fueling an average (25 MPG) ICE car works out to fueling at 7500 MPH.
Interesting fact from Elon: Earth has 5 x more estimated recoverable petroleum reserves than it would take to push us over the brink of global environmental catastrophe.
That being said, Tesla has said from the beginning that they are open to sharing the supercharging network with other car makers as long as they share the cost of building it.
No car company took them up on that offer but it's hardly Tesla's fault.
The deal they offer other car companies may be completely unreasonable, who knows. They would still be correct that they "offered access" though, so it doesn't mean anything.
In Europe, Tesla is already moving to the industry-standard CCS charging system. The EU Model 3 comes with the same CCS charge port as almost all other EVs, and EU superchargers are being retrofitted with CCS cables.
This is a win both for Tesla owners, who can charge at any charger without adapters; and for the charging providers who increase their customer base, encouraging the expansion of their networks.
In North America, the transition would be a bit more painful due to the current plug design. But I think it would be the right move for the long term.
Even if we could charge in 1 minute, ICE fans would argue that they have to charge 3 times more often than with their ICEs at highway speeds and that they have to choose longer routes because of charger coverage. It's only part of the solution to increase charging speeds and fast charger coverage, EV also need 2-3 times the current range (i.e. 200-300 KWh batteries) to convince most people.
So it charges at up to Mach 1.3. Supersonic charging!
The other problem is having enough sheer power available to charge all of the batteries (together or apart) at their maximum safe rate. The new supercharger can apply roughly double the power to the car, which cuts charging time almost in half.
[1] https://electrek.co/2017/07/14/porsche-350-kw-ev-charging-st...
[2] https://electrek.co/2018/12/06/electrify-america-first-350kw...
It's a bit like networks bragging that they have 5G base stations before any 5G phones were created.
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/porsche-bmw-dc-fast-charg...
Volkswagen has already announced three cars based on their 800 volt platform to be released across the next three years:
1. Porsche Taycan in sedan and wagon variants at the end of this year: https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/hybrid-electric/a21239...
2. Audi e-tron GT at the end of 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvNw15W_EK8
3. Porsche Macan probably at the end of 2021: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/porsche-macan-electric-on...
And I'm sure there'll be other 800 volt cars from Volkswagen and other manufacturers in the future.
I gather that European Model 3s will have CCS sockets (a superset of pins of Type 2 Mennekes) so they will be able to charge at other networks' stations.
I can fuel my ICE car at any fueling station. I should be able to charge my electric car at any charging station. Minimizing the number of different charging standards will help achieve that.
Best regards Phillip
1. Sunshine days
2. 2000m above sea level (for photovoltaic efficiency)
3. Many power interruptions and "load shedding" by state owned utility
4. Enough private (and government if they were better managed) money
5. Human capital and good universities
6. Enough physical space
I think there may be more reasons, but these are some of the main ones.
Whatever happened to poetic license?
The coasts, the south, and interstates highways. Most of the US area, where you can go in the USA, is not covered.
