The analogy has been made "You wouldn't leave your car at a gas pump". But Tesla charging is different, a gas car takes ~4m to fill, not long enough for you to do much else. A Tesla on a road trip takes 20-40 minutes to charge. So long you aren't going to stand there, but not long enough to a sit down meal or walk the half mile from the hotel with the charger to a fast food restaurant and eat, visit a gift shop, etc... To name some examples of what we did on a recent road trip.<p>With the Tesla, a road trip is a different cadence from gas, where many peoples tendency seems to just get on with it and minimize these fueling interruptions. With the Tesla, we would talk to locals, visit the train museum, go to gift shops, I'd drop them off at historic districts and go charge.<p>It didn't feel like we were waiting for the car to charge, but that was because we were doing other things. If I now have to go back and move the car because the stalls are 50% full, that changes the road trip a lot.<p>Something not common knowledge: Superchargers operate in pairs. If there are 4 stalls, only 2 of them at a time will operate at full speed. If you are charging on stall 1A and someone pulls into 1B, they get a much slower charge rate until 1A completes charging.<p>So a 50% full supercharger is actually "full", but the remaining stalls can be parked at and will start charging full rate as things finish.<p>Because of this, I was kind of expecting the idle fee to be when the stalls were all full. If there are no stalls left, you are making someone potentially wait while your car sits there idle.<p>The longer term plan is they hope to make the cars move themselves when charging is done. That would be awesome.
I'm glad the superchargers will no longer be free for new Tesla owners. I wish they would charge existing Tesla owners for the power as well.<p>I went to charge my Model X at the Whole Foods in Menlo Park on Friday night, because mine was broken. I waited for over 40 minutes for other people using the chargers to leave.<p>I'd much rather pay a market rate for the power from Tesla and have the units open when I need them, than take the chance of waiting for hours because people are clogging the spots to get free power.
I'm kind of surprised that they're so adamant that the pricing should be hWk based. It seems to me that time-based pricing would have made sense - Superchargers are a limited resource, so a time-based approach would have encouraged people to only charge for as long as they needed it. Above 80% a Tesla charges much slower, so it uses much less electricity, but it still takes up a stall.<p>It would have also dovetailed nicely with the per-minute fee they will be charging Tesla owners for leaving their vehicles plugged in after they're done charging at busy Superchargers.
I've always wondered if Tesla tracks the use of the Superchargers to the vehicle mileage. As an example, if I setup a bunch of bit-coin miners in the trunk, tapped into the vehicle battery and continually visited a supercharger to power the rig would Tesla know something was up?
Tesla Blog Post: <a href="https://www.tesla.com/blog/building-supercharger-network-future" rel="nofollow">https://www.tesla.com/blog/building-supercharger-network-fut...</a>
Still waiting to hear on how they're going to solve charging for those of us without garages. They're not going to want all of us to do all our charging at the stations...
Anyone knows what it is that makes the short Paris - Rome trip (1,400 km) cost $64, whereas the New York - LA (4,500 km) costs only $120?<p>Is it because of taxes, or is electricity just more expensive in France/Italy even without taxes? Or is Tesla just charging Europeans more?
What I am worried about is, all the work done to make affordable electric car will go in vain if gas prices reduce due to the adoption of electric vehicle and hence ultimately no effect on co2 emission.
"or whether or not yours is the only Tesla at the charging station”<p>Why? To discourage using nearly-filled Supercharging stations? It does seem pretty unfair.