Tesla Model S owner here. By choosing spots and times strategically I've gotten nearly 400MPH charging at the existing stations and the difference it makes to convenience is amazing. Super looking forward to 1000MPH! At that rate I can likely make it to Squamish BC, from Seattle, and back, with only one ~20 minute charge in between. That's still about 4x or 5x for the time I would spend filling an ICE car, but getting to around 20 minutes - instead of an hour - feels like an important threshold. I can chill out or catch up on e-mail or something for 20 minutes without feeling the need to go walk, or check out the weird strip mall or Jack in the Box that the charging station I use was planted beside.<p>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.
The much bigger news is they completely walked back FSD (full self-driving) into something that you have to monitor at all times by changing the description on their website.<p>The release of a proprietary charger is somehow completely overshadowing that news.<p>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.
By how much would using the supercharging feature reduce the overall lifetime of the batteries? Lithium cells aren't immune to the memory effect, which would only be shortened with the high heat associated with pushing a significant amount of power through the car.<p>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!
This is awesome. I'm particularly happy about the on-route battery warming.<p>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.
The amount Elon has delivered so far this year alone at Tesla and SpaceX is tremendous then you see a headline where he landed a 50+ million tunneling deal on the side because why not. Staggering.
For those interested, some technical details have been posted in this reddit thread:<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/awzcir/first_public_tesla_v30_supercharger_station_goes/ehqnqq5/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/awzcir/first_p...</a><p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/axy7d2/supercharger_v3_preevent_megathread/ehxrugh/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/axy7d2/superch...</a>
I'll not take another road trip in my Tesla after dealing with the complete lack of bathrooms between San Jose and Davis -- including at Tesla Livermore which 1. shouldn't really have been closed at that hour and 2. should leave their bathrooms open after they close and 3. there's no excuse for not providing bathrooms at every supercharger station. Oh yeah, and we only put on about a mile a minute despite the charger being 120kW-capable.<p>Great car for local trips. But at least one of our cars will have to be gas for the foreseeable future.
Cool but my thought was that load sharing between cars was caused by contended grid connection rather than anything in the supercharger itself?<p>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.
The main info is missing in this PR release though. Is this a hardware upgrade or a software update? Looks like a hw upgrade, if so are they upgrading all their charging stations? Or did they already do it? How long is the upgrade going to take and how much will it cost?
Is MPH a standard way to measure EV charging speeds?<p>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.
Fantastic tech. However, why do they insist on doing it in a closed proprietary way? Teslas growth is coupled to general EV growth. They can't possibly be arrogant enough to believe they will be the sole supplier of EVs if they win can they? Charging is the number 1 thing holding back adoption right now.
Really impressive numbers. Excited to see what the future holds for Tesla models. I have a gut feeling that it will succeed and pass other major auto manufacturers
Possibly stupid question. Instead of charging 1 battery slowly, why can't we charge 50 little batteries in parallel and connect them all back together after?
Porsche has had 350KW charging since 2017.[1] A 350KW charging station went into Livermore last year.[2] Tesla is only at 250KW.<p>[1] <a href="https://electrek.co/2017/07/14/porsche-350-kw-ev-charging-station/" rel="nofollow">https://electrek.co/2017/07/14/porsche-350-kw-ev-charging-st...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://electrek.co/2018/12/06/electrify-america-first-350kw-charger-california/" rel="nofollow">https://electrek.co/2018/12/06/electrify-america-first-350kw...</a>
This really speaks to the brilliance of Musk and Tesla. Any other company would be happy selling Model 3s and working hard to provide incentives to sell more. Tesla identities that the bottleneck for all these cars is the charging network and simultaneously works on improving that. Really impressed with the way they think.
> more than 99% of the U.S. population is covered by the network<p>The coasts, the south, and interstates highways. Most of the US area, where you can go in the USA, is not covered.
If this isn't just another Tesla vaporware product it will be interesting to see what happens when they start dumping 145kW through charging infrastructure rated for 132kW. Can you smell the disruption? <a href="https://twitter.com/ex_Tesla/status/1103515677816631297" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ex_Tesla/status/1103515677816631297</a>