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.
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.
Tesla Semi has multiple packs that can be charged in parallel. The Megacharger will (likely) be 4 Superchargers combined. 1MW should be enough ;)
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.
Yeah, this is closing the gap in a significant way. It's still not "charge on the way to work" fast, but it wouldn't be a painful delay on the way home. More important, it's an improvement. I still switch back and forth between my Model S and an ICE car--I can't remember a time when the gas station experience ever got better.
One of the big benefits of electric in my view is that you can just let it charge overnight in your own garage. There's simply no need to charge on the way to work. (Yeah, this only works if you do have a garage, but that covers a lot of people.)
>There's simply no need to charge on the way to work
Why not simply charge at work?
It makes little sense to charge on route vs at destination; unless your commute is longer than your battery range, but you would probably not have purchased an EV.
Yeah, in many ways that would make more sense. For one thing, the sun is likelier to shine during the day, so PV electricity can go into your car.
Unfortunately, the practical reality is that at home you're likely to have a garage where you can charge (though I'm of course aware that many people don't!) while at work your car is likely to be in a large parking lot without outlets.
The logical conclusion is that we should invest in widespread outlet infrastructure in pretty much all parking lots. We're just not there yet, which is why I phrased my first comment in the way I did.
Body panels made of solar-cells would be nice, combined with charging from stations or at home when there is not enough sun. Is probably not doable with current technology, but maybe some day
Aren't solar-cells on the car like multiple magnitudes less power than regular level 2 chargers?
There was a lot of talk about why Tesla wasn't putting solar panels on the cars when the Model S was still new, and I thought the general consensus was it would need crazy amounts of time in direct sunlight to even make any kind of significant impact on the charge.
I mean just look at this announcement. They are talking about 250kW charge rates at peak for SuperCharging V3, and at those charge rates you'd get 75 miles of range in 5 minutes. A solar panel about the size of the car would put out maybe around 250w (give or take a lot, it's been a few years since i looked into what they can put out). Some extremely inaccurate napkin math would put it at less than a mile per hour of charge while in direct sunlight. It's just not worth it (in my opinion) in almost all cases, and probably won't be for a LONG time.
A regular solar panel is a large flat area that's oriented to maximize solar exposure. Solar cells on a car wouldn't capture nearly as efficiently. You'd be much better off spending the money on traditional PV than on putting cells on cars.
And that is why I did write "Is probably not doable with current technology, but maybe some day". We need to have much more efficient solar-cells to make this work in real life. But is it more unrealistic than getting charged from the road while driving? One step on the way is getting them enough efficient to charge the car while it is parked outside at work
You'd have to make the surface area of the car a thousand times larger than it currently is. Or, if you could make your solar panels 100% efficient, it would only need to be 200 times larger.
But you don't need that much every day. You need to charge the amount you use every day during the time the car is outside during the day, or only part of that. What if you can use the car every day and only have to charge it at a station once a week or month? Then there is even one less reason to use an ICE for those that can't charge at home
If you assume that your car could charge 8 whole hours a day in full sunlight, then you could get away with having your solar panels be just 25 times larger than your car. You still don't want a car that large. Solar panels on an electric car have never made sense, and we're not close enough to the sun for them to ever make sense. Maybe the Mercury colonists can use solar-powered cars. There's more sunlight there, and less gravity and air to slow the cars down, so it might actually work out.
Just charge your car at home, at night, when the electric prices are lowest. Since most people don't drive hundreds of miles every day, people with home chargers (or chargers at their work) won't have to visit a charging station unless they're going on a long trip. That's the only time it makes sense to use rapid charging; the rest of the time the charging can be much slower. If you have a charger at home, you could go years without having to visit a supercharger. A whole category of human activity could one day disappear, and people will wonder how they ever had time to visit a gas station every day of their lives.
You're guaranteed a hassle-free charging spot at home, but elsewhere it's very likely there are fewer charging spots than vehicles wanting to use them, and/or the charging spots and day-long parking places are separate and you have to go move the car once charged.
The difference between 90 seconds to fill up and 3 minutes to fill up is negligible. The appetite for improvement isn't there because the marginal is small.
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
It also depends on where and how you drive, park etc.
To me, the difference between filling up on gas and 20 minutes on a Supercharger not only isn't enormous, but literally doesn't matter. But that's because I charge at home, usually drive only around the city and when I go on a trip where I need to supercharge, it's a few hours between chargers and by that time I need to take a ~20 mins break for coffee anyway.
If I had to use them to charge, yep, 20 mins would be enormous.
My local Shell station recently switched from card readers to an app and QR codes. No thanks. If I'm really desperate I'll fill up there and go inside to pay (maybe 3 times in the past year), otherwise I now go out of my way to fill up elsewhere.
Well in my country, they try to hide electrical lines by burying them. When some works are there and there are air electrical lines, they usually do just that.
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.
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.
I think you're confusing the next incremental step toward FSD with the end state of FSD. Tesla changes its marketing materials and web site copy all the time, but the Master Plan Pt 2 post (which outlines what you're alluding to) remains unchanged. Additionally, just three weeks ago, Elon was on the Ark Invest podcast claiming FSD will be safe enough for a human to sleep at the wheel by end of 2020[1]. I don't think Tesla's FSD plans have changed.
According to the vehicle purchase agreement and Tesla's lawyers, nothing on the order page is binding anyway (and ditto for Elon's claims). I agree they have changed the "promise" they are making to new purchasers on the page you've cited, but I don't see evidence that they are scaling back what they intend to deliver vis a vis FSD.
Honestly, every time I read the "you're turning me into someone working to train your program without paying me!" comment I think about this stuff and I realize no one I know would give a goddamn fuck and expect to be paid in cash. Having the better product is sufficient.
These comments remind me of how much a bubble hacker news is. None of my friends would know what the hell a neural network was, and would laugh out loud if they heard that comment.
Precisely why I said in the past here that it was a big mistake to fit all model 3s with self-driving hardware making the car significantly more expensive in terms of cost to build.
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.
He recently publicly announced that Tesla drivers will be able to fall asleep at the wheel and wake up at the destination by the end of next year. Doesn't sound like a lot changed in his mindset.
Yes, i don't give a rating to this statement, i just say that Musk is not conservative about this topic as op suggested. If you ask me, I don't think that they will be anything close to that by the end of 2020
Given that Tesla is considered one of the poorer self driving options out there, and the other players in the game say 5-10 years, maybe I need to hit up a bookie in Vegas...
>Precisely why I said in the past here that it was a big mistake to fit all model 3s with self-driving hardware making the car significantly more expensive in terms of cost to build.
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.
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".
I bet of they allowed people to opt in, at least a huge minority of Tesla owners would jump through hoops (like login and recaptcha) to contribute data if it advances the science.
> By November 2016, Autopilot had operated actively on hardware version 1 vehicles for 300 million miles (500 million km) and 1.3 billion miles (2 billion km) in shadow mode.[21]
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.
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!
What does this have to do with the memory effect? The memory effect is about never discharging NiCd/NiMH batteries beyond a specific point (hence old recommendations about occasionally fully discharging your battery), it has nothing to do with fast charging.
This is awesome. I'm particularly happy about the on-route battery warming.
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.
Can you speak more to this? Similar situation. Interested in a Tesla but live in an apartment without a station but during winter have well below freezing and sub zero temps. Seems difficult.
I've gotten used to it and do just fine not being able to charge at home. I have chargers at my work but still choose to mostly use the nearby supercharger.
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!
I just read a trip report of a couple that did a 4,600 mile road trip in their Model 3 in cold temps (between 0 and 7 F) and their trick was to always charge at the end of a day so the battery was warm.
Yes, for the cabin. That doesn’t necessarily warm the battery as well, though now it’s supposed to do at least some battery warming on very cold days. From the supercharger announcement, I gather that the temp to accept 250kW is significantly higher than the temp to support typical driving demands.
You can make it work if one of the following is true for you:
- 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.
I have a Model 3 in Brooklyn. Thankfully I have a garage where I can charge. Winter definitely makes it harder to charge and to keep charge. I spend about $1 per day to maintain charge level in winter. It’s about 30 cents in Summer.
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.
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.
Then how come the team does good work? "Firing constantly" sounds exactly like weeding out unproductive members (of course I now nothing about the workers' feelings, though).
No, a lot of very good folks are shed by Elon's companies all the time. He's just not an effective manager, Tesla is in great measure successful despite Elon, not because of him, and his limitations as a manager are becoming more and more of an obstacle. I have first hand knowledge of that.
But he's the one coordinating it all. Which is impressive. It's often difficult to run a single small business let alone a single large project/company. It's quite outstanding to be able to run multiple of them simultaneously.
Totally agree he's not the only person doing great work at his companies. Also really weird to me when people are confident he's not the genius one man band he appears to be, and then immediately point the credit towards another Singular person like Gwynne Shotwell. If we can say it wouldn't be doing great without Gwynne Shotwell, it should also be clear it wouldn't be doing great/even exist without Elon.
You're either shifting the goalposts or are misunderstanding what's being said. No one at all said that Gwynne is "a singular person" who is doing all the work. Instead Gwynne was being used as a counter example to show that Elon isn't the only one working at the company or doing all the organization.
The only issue being discussed was the original assertion that "he's the one coordinating it all", and pointing to a person doing coordinating seems like a great way to prove that wrong.
If we could plot effort vs size of enterprise for the top few roles, I wonder how that looks?
I'm willing to bet the average small enterprise requires a lot more effort on behalf of the owners and managers than any of the C-suite roles at large enterprises.
The small business owner often has to perform many roles themselves, and probably still not be able to afford a cleaner / household help / assistant(s) / tutors / nannies.
he's also a trendsetter. What's with Boeing and Blue Origin getting in on the commercial space race. Also he create the market for electric cars with new players like Rivian and old ones like Volvo, and load others I'm sure. Even some big players like Virgin Group jumped in on the Hyperloop thing, although I dont care about this as much.
Other players may create supply, but Elon can create demand. He's in such a unique position, imo.
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.
About 4 months ago the narrative on HN was that Tesla will go bankrupt right about this time because they'd be unable to repay a loan. Read news recently that they paid it in cash.
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.
And those comments are understandable for a number of reasons. From an outsiders / non-economist's point of view, these things should not be possible. There's also an army of trolls hired by short sellers who would benefit from Tesla's stock losing value - at one point, Tesla was the most shorted stock out there.
I agree; it always makes me put my tinfoil hat on, and wonder how much of this comes from news planted either by competing car companies, or more likely the hedge funds who will profit if Tesla does fail.
I'm surprised I haven't read any talk of, or even speculation about the idea of the Boring Company getting involved with the tunneling required for CA's high-speed rail project (for the Pacheco Pass and Tehachapi Mountains segments).
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 "innovation" was to make smaller tunnels, which is useful for things that can be done in smaller tunnels but is useless for any mass transit activity because they're simply not large enough.
(TBC's boring machines were previously used to bore utility and sewer tunnels.)
I got curious and did the math: US gas pumps do 10 gallons per minute, which give us 0.61 L/s. Density is about 0.7kg/L, energy content is about 46.7 MJ/kg. Multiplying the three we get juuust under 20MJ/s or 20MW or about 80 times more energy than this kind of electric charger
Whoa. That is a lot of efficiency with EVs. But then, that electricity, when coming from a coal powered plant means that the overall "earth to wheels" energy efficiency is somewhere around 30%.
True. But also, this decouples cars from fossil fuel dependency. So switching to something cleaner, like nuclear or wind/solar wouldn't require uprooting cars as a whole.
In the USA, outside of West Virginia, the grid tends to be much more low-carbon — at least biased towards natural gas in most places, but with a fair amount of nuclear even in states that claim not to believe in clean energy.
I need a reminder because I never pay attention to how long it takes. It’s just full every morning. A total paradigm shift from the old way of having to go somewhere to refill your car.
I thought about that right after I posted, and you're right. It's probably that gasoline is more of a familiar experience than 1000 amps flowing into lithium batteries.
People might find it slightly inconvenient when their keys get torn from their pants and watches ripped from their wrists every time they charge their car.
>The power of the Tesla coil lies in a process called electromagnetic induction, i.e., a changing magnetic field creates an electric potential that compels current to flow. Conversely, flowing electric current generates a magnetic field. When electricity flows through a wound up coil of wire, it generates a magnetic field that fills the area around the coil in a particular pattern, shown with lines below: [...]
>Eventually so much charge has accumulated that it breaks down the electrical neutrality of the air in the middle of the spark gap. The circuit closes for a fleeting second and a huge amount of current blasts out of the capacitor and through the coils. This produces a very strong magnetic field in the primary coil.
Which leads us to ask: Fucking magnets: How do they work?
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.
My local utility seems to offer it, though they prefer that you install a transformer. They also offer 3-phase for residential usage. Yes, this is in the USA. From what I can tell, most likely you'd get 480 volts at 500 amps.
There is actually a home not far from me that gets 3-phase. It is hooked up to a commercial-style air conditioning unit (huge house) and has a separate power meter; the home has separate 2-phase service as well.
(I'm going to abuse the hell out of terminology to make this understandable)
I'm sure there are some utilities somewhere that will offer you that :)
480 volt at 500 amps is actually fairly reasonable in terms of cable requirements (it only requires 800 kcmil cable, which, while, i'd never want to buy a ton of it, is not completely bonkers). I would be a little surprised if they offer 500 amps though, because that's a lot more than you'd ever need.
Remember that a 3 phase amp carries a lot more kilowatts than a single phase amp.
In particular, 20 amp 240 single phase = 4800watts
But 20 amp 240 three phase is a factor of sqrt(3) more = 8313 watts
so 500 amp 480v 3 phase would carry 415692.19382 watts, while 500 amp 480v single phase (which nobody uses) would only carry 240000 watts.
So you'd be getting 415kw service out of that, not 240kw service. Which is a lot of power.
Usually i've seen them offer 250kw service (IE not in amps) and let you do the stepdown. This would step down to 300 amp 480v 3 phase.
240v 3 phase in residential areas is also more common (I can get it), but it's only 100-200 amp service at least here, and i pay for power factor, blah blah blah.
make me believe they'd end up with some medium voltage application here (IE take it in as somewhere between 3.3kv and 45kv and do step down themselves)
The Tesla supercharging cables are pretty short, so they can also tolerate the higher losses associated with a thinner cable. They were even experimenting with a liquid cooled cable at one point in order to get thinner conductors and a more flexible cable by allowing to to be less efficient.
Ha! I started to suggest "or they're using small copper and cooling the heck out of it," but that would waste energy so I assumed they wouldn't do it. Wrong, apparently.
Sure, but they are probably buying >1 KV service, which is not, as the comment I responded to claims, a thing any of us would/could buy similar to "house service".
No. Because if there is too much power demand the overload results in some people getting no power. You dont often hear of rolling blackouts or brownouts in North America.
Everyone can use as much power as they have subscribed to whenever they want. Your panel is rated for a certain amount of power and protected by a breaker or fuse if too much is used. Same for the transformer your panel is connected to. Same for the distribution line your transformer is connected to. Same for the transformer it is connected to. And so on.
There is enough capacity in the system to meet the demand. If there wasn't the lights go out due to some overload.
When demand grows more capacity has to be added before the limit is reached. Capacity takes years to build. Utilities have planning departments that decide where they need to add capacity next and how much.
Which would be a problem when everyone gets an electric car and every night the owners will request 20 kW for up to 8 hours (hence sustained, not peak). For a condo that could easily be half a megawatt.
That is an unreasonable number. That is 160 kwh of power which is double the largest model 3 battery. This would require everyone to drive nearly 600 miles a day at highway speed. Roughly nine hours of driving a day at 75miles an hour.
The expectation is that people drive 30ish miles a day. This is about 11kwh. Over 8 hours a night, well within reasonable limits.
I was thinking of 10 kW * 2 cars, but actually even for a single car you need 120 kWh to charge 85 kWh. You're right that it won't happen every night for 8 hours, I was wrong about that.
Problem is that you have to size for the worst case, which may happen only once a year, but it will happen. Everyone coming back after Thanksgiving. Everyone reaching a vacation place on a Sunday evening in the summer. Bam, 20 kW sustained for a few hours.
It takes only a few big condos before you need to bring 400 kV lines downtown...
Although your power requirements are somewhat overblown, this is one reason that companies like EMotorWerks are developing grid-connected EVSE’s (“Chargers”) that can be centrally controlled to manage load. Ultimately, EV’s will be plugged in for the 20+ hours a day that they aren’t being driven, and the grid will use them as a giant variable load to soak up excess solar and wind power and shed load when everyone turns on the A/C on a hot day.
Lots of plugged EV’s are also the perfect pairing to rooftop solar — in Hawaii, they’ve had to stop people from installing panels on their homes because the neighborhood feeder circuits can’t handle the power being generated by all of the homes. Just redirect that power to the EV in the driveway (or your neighbor’s driveway), problem solved!
Yes, although it not really "promised". A 200A residential service isn't a promise you can consume 200A 24/7, it's just the "never exceed" rating. If you need significantly more power than normal residential needs, I'm sure the utility will be happy to talk to you about your requirements.
A moderate distribution substation is probably more like 50 MVA.
A house with a 200A service at 240 V is about 50 kW. You might see a 250 kVA padmount transformer feeding half a dozen big houses but that is not the same thing as a substation.
I have worked at an electricity utility. "Distribution substation" is the term of art for a 250KVA padmount transformer and associated HV and LV switchgear (or even just a 50KVA pole mount transformer). A 50MVA installation is what we would refer to as a Zone substation.
5KVA per residential lot is not an uncommon allocation rule. The network is simply not designed to supply every house 200A simultaneously (the same is true of water services: the maximum flow rate of your connection to the water main cannot be sustained if every house in your neighbourhood tries to consume at that rate).
We must live in different climates. Electric heat is common around here and a house can easily have over 10 kW of heat. An electric range gets a 50A 240V circuit (12 kVA). An electric clothes dryer has a 30A 240V circuit (7.2 kVA). All it would take to exceed 5 kVA per house is for everyone to be cooking christmas dinner on a cold night. Maybe somebody has a shower (electric water heater turns on) and then uses the hair dryer (1.5 kW).
Granted you can probably overload a transformer a fair bit on a cold night. I'll ask next time I'm talking to someone in distribution what their allocation rule is.
I feel like I'm used to seeing a 3 x 33 kVA cans feeding only a few houses (that incidentally had natural gas heat and hot water...)
My house has 200 Amp service. But I never use that much at once. The average US home uses an average of about 1.2KW at any given time [0]. So I was wrong above. It's more like 200 houses.
There's no way you're only getting 20 amps to your house.
A microwave will consume 8-12 amps. A desktop computer is around 3-5 amps. I don't know what my electric stove used when I still had one, but it needed a 40 amp breaker on its own.
The standard home contract in Italy is 3.3kW, at 230V it's less that 15 amps for a resistive load. The meter will allow you to go over the allotted power for some time before disconnecting you though (the amount of time is inversely proportional to how much your going over, and I don't think you can ever go over 4kW).
Heating and stoves are gas based (ovens usually not though); going over the limit is not usual, the only common problem is when using air conditioning in summer which is becoming more widespread, and so are higher power contracts (we're not talking more than 6kW, though).
According to my utility, I consume annually 2660kWh, that is 300W average, much less than the 1.2KW for an American household.
Note that for home contracts the limit (and billing) is on power, not amps, so using inductive or reactive loads will not penalize you.
Here in Spain we're paying a lot for the power allotted to the contract, being around 30 to 40% of the bill.
So, I'm paying around 20€ (before taxes) just for having a 5.75kW contract, and then I have to add my kWh consumption. So reducing your consumption doesn't reflect that much on your bills.
Here it is 2 €/month/kW, my total bill was 40-50 €/month before I had a solar roof installed. I consumed about 400 W on average in a house (with solar the consumption is up by 60 W because of the inverter, but I save 30 to 70% plus I can sell a little surplus).
Italy used to be strange in that there were two electric feeds per house: One for low-power loads and one for high-power loads. Is that system gone now?
That's internal, right now. You don't get two lines from the grid. But you have multiple internal lines, and usually one 10A lines is mostly for the lights, other include more hungry appliances.
You mean there are multiple circuits inside the house? Isn't that totally normal? My small bungalow has 24 circuits on 200 amp service, plus a subpanel feeding the shop and sauna.
Remember there are some Europeans around running 240v ;) Also, at least on the bigger European cities, apartments and flats are more popular than houses, son usually the energy need is lower. And, of course, energy prices!
Here, in Madrid, most of my friends are running 10 to 20 amps. I'm an outlier, running 25amps (5.75 kW) because all my stuff is electric (water heater, cold/hot air conditioning, microwave, glass-ceramic stove...).
My Ryzen 5 desktop is consuming 0.3 to 0.5amps (being 50 to 120watts at 220V), supposing you're using 110volts your desktop computer must be a big gaming rig if it's consuming 350 to 550watts ;)
> supposing you're using 110volts your desktop computer must be a big gaming rig if it's consuming 350 to 550watts ;)
Yup. :-D
Not a BIG rig, but certainly respectable. i9-9900k [0], GeForce GTX 1070 [1], 32 gig of DDR4, 1 TB NVMe, 1 TB SSD, 2 TB HD.
[0] Yes, I know I don't need an i9 for gaming. I don't even need an i7. But I wanted future proofing and bragging rights.
[1] "An i9, but only a GTX 1070?" you might ask. I got the 1070 for free by winning a contest sponsored by MSI. At the time I had an i7-3770k. When I upgraded to the i9 in December, I didn't feel it was worth spending hundreds of dollars for an RTX 2080 (or even 2070) as the performance difference wasn't enough. I'll probably get something from the next gen RTX (3080? 2180? Whatever they call it).
I have a relatively simple GPU with my Rizen, it's ok for my use and GPUs are damn expensive, I understand ;)
BTW, have you metered your consumption? Doing some math on the top of my head, on regular use you "shouldn't" go over 200W and I don't think you should get over 400 in your use peaks. Just out of curiosity because I'm not used to those relatively power hungry GPUs :)
Are you sure your intake fuse is only 20A? Where I live it is normal for each circuit to have 16A, and if you have induction stove at least 20A for it. My intake fuse is only 55A (230V) since I have an old house, but should be upgraded
I checked now and the fuses are 15 A + 15 A, but the utility company disconnects me if I go over about 4 kW (18 A), or over 3.3 kW for more than a few minutes.
My sister-in-law has an induction stove, so she gets 40 A and the stove is connected directly to a separate bigger fuse.
That is really strange. Here, the utility company would be happy to have you buy lots more power.
Are you lacking a meter? Is the utility company unable to read your meter remotely and unwilling to send a truck out to read it? This would explain things, in which case you'd want to charge batteries (for free!) whenever you don't need all the power you have purchased.
Fuses are weird too. Those went out of style 60 years ago.
Maybe you will find this weird: I have a device that lets the utility company cut the power to my water heater. They can remotely activate it if they are having problems. In exchange for having this, I get a discount.
No, they can remotely read it. Italy had one of the first smart grids in fact.
It is just the standard here to only buy 3.3 kW unless you have induction stoves. Having more power available costs a little more, and on top of that you pay for what you consume.
As to "fuse", my mistake as I am not a native speaker. I meant breaker.
I have an i3 now and after my lease is up, I will absolutely either get a Model 3 or Y. There's just no other electric car comparable that will allow you to road-trip without worrying about charger access.
"Data sharing" is pretty vague but assuming you are talking about car data, it's completely decoupled from the VIN or any other identifiers that could ID you, so disabling it is just silly, but yes you can choose to not opt in.
Does "car data" include locations? There's not many people that start from area A (~500m^2 around your home) and go to area Z (~500m^2 around your office) every weekday morning, and back again every weekday evening.
And yep, this applies to anything that offers vague rudimentary location monitoring.
Correct, many folks don’t realize how much can be derived about them from even anonymous data.
Personally not interested in all this auto pilot stuff anyway. Deceleration when approaching an object and rudimentary lane assist are all I’d care for and shouldn’t require machine learning.
It does include location if you stop at a supercharger. They need to know where you were in order to charge you properly. I don't think that's one you could opt-out.
My hope is that your mobile bedroom/living room/office drives around and plugs into shared, communal kitchen/laundry/exercise/living room areas. You do your work during the transit portion and spend your free time enjoying the destinations and other people.
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.
Great car for local trips. But at least one of our cars will have to be gas for the foreseeable future.
Other bathrooms are available. Your Tesla should be able to stop at those; it doesn't only stop at superchargers.
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.
The poster means that they want to "kill two birds with one stone". On long trips, avoiding another stop (especially if kids are involved) is a big deal™.
Cool but my thought was that load sharing between cars was caused by contended grid connection rather than anything in the supercharger itself?
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?
It's a completely new hardware design with the power cabinets now using industrial inverters. The old v2 cabinet used a bunch of Model S inverters. The power posts (the white things with the cables on them) are the same as v2 externally, but not internally.
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.
Don't forget the software aspect that warms the battery prior to you arriving at the supercharger. That provides half of the improvement, according to their bar chart.
It sounds like they will add new stations alongside the old ones in some cases, and replace or upgrade old ones in other cases, but really a mix of both approaches. I'm not speaking from any inside knowledge here; just thinking about what makes the most sense given how the chargers work now and the mixed makeup of the fleet.
I was reading some speculation today about how the preheating might actually be super efficient (i have no way to verify this though).
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.
0 cars currently shipping can handle 350kw charging.
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.
I don’t know if Tesla’s can do 250kw but that car was maxing out at 155kw charging and averaging below that. Which is my point, getting an affordable car well past 250kw charging is going to be difficult.
There are quite a lot 350kw charger boxes, but unfortunately, most of them still have standard CCS-cables, limiting the maximum current to 200A. This means, for most cars they are limited to about 80kW charging speed (400V). It would be cool though, if Tesla quickly rolled out the software updates to the European Model 3s, as they then could use the 350kW chargers for higher charging speeds as soon as the chargers support higher currents.
Yep, in Europe ionity is building a 350kW charging network. The new Porsche Taycan will supposedly support this. So it makes sense Tesla is stepping up their game.
For Teslas, yes. I've found it to be very helpful, as it relates directly to numbers I care about. E.g. 4-5 mph charge rate from a 110v outlet, and I can just multiply by how many hours I'll be parked, to know what I'll get out and if that's enough for me. It also relates to the static-estimated battery capacity readout, which comes full circle to a point where I don't have to worry about kW conversions anymore. But if you want, you can just set it to 'energy' read-out, and you'll get kW, percentages, etc.
For sake of comparison, one gets us on a track toward sustainable energy... the other doesn't.
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.
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.
Business-wise it's clearly a big advantage for Tesla. A superior supercharging network can very well be the thing that makes someone buy Tesla over a competing electric car.
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.
I agree. In the long term, it doesn’t seem sustainable to keep using a proprietary plug design when the rest of the industry is standardising. It will eventually be a disincentive to buy a Tesla if they aren’t compatible with most of the future charging infrastructure. Adapters can be used, but that’s not an elegant or convenient solution.
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.
Welcome to the world of standards, where the standards committee isn't interested in adopting the most common existing technology, despite the technology being offered for free.
Negotiating with other vendors to support a shared standard is S-L-O-W. By maintaining their own standard, Tesla can move at their own speed. Also, at the moment, Tesla has more long range EV’s on the road in the US than all other companies put together, as well as more Tesla supercharging stalls than all other fast charge stations combined.
> Charging is the number 1 thing holding back adoption right now.
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.
Typically, the person charging the car (well, they're paying Tesla, then Tesla pays for the electricity). Very few Tesla owners actually have free supercharging these days.
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?
The problem is that the speed at which you can charge a battery without damaging it is proportional to its capacity. Charging 500 small batteries at the same time would be fine, but in general you’d have to charge them each at 1/500 the speed of the entire pack (in terms of kWh of storage).
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.
The Porsche Taycan already exists and goes on sale at the end of the year. It's designed around an 800 volt architecture that can make use of 350 kW chargers. Porsche is also testing 450 kW chargers for the future:
I know specs are sexy but, you're missing one important detail here. Battery Longevity.
Tesla did not initially do this because they wanted the batteries on their customer's cars to last for a long time. Now that they have the data, they bumped it to 250kW along with the on-route battery warmup.
So far, I have not heard a single detail on how the Porsche Taycan deals with making sure the battery life is being preserved. This could have financial and ecological cost if not handled properly.
The same as it's done in every EV. The individual battery cells are charged in parallel to achieve the high rate of charge and the battery pack temperature is managed to ensure optimal battery performance:
Porsche's been making a particular point of the Taycan's temperature management. The goal is to be able to drive it like a sports car without overheating it. They talk about the Taycan offering "reproducible performance".
Teslas have a history of overheating when you try to drive them like sports cars:
Not sure what you mean. The current European superchargers use a Type 2 Mennekes adapter, but the protocol is proprietary.
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.
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.
I think it's more about trying to catch up to the CCS charging networks which already have 350 kW chargers (Ionity, Electrify America, EVgo, FastNed). It'd be better if Tesla adopted the CCS standard for all their cars. The European version of the Model 3 has a CCS plug so it's already the case that some Teslas have it.
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.
All cars can use the 350 kW chargers to charge at the car's maximum charge rate (whatever that is for the particular car). The Porsche Taycan has an 800 volt battery system and can make full use of a 350 kW charger. The Taycan will be released at the end of this year. Here are Porsche's specs for the Taycan:
Not true. I've been on several long interstate trips in large western states, including very large sparsely populated ones. Coverage was never a problem. There are plenty of superchargers. The network is really impressive... and growing! On my trips I met other people at the superchargers who had similar experiences in the west, the midwest, and the east. Met people driving from Chicago to California for example, and they were doing great. You can pretty much drive anywhere in the US, although you clearly want to choose a route in such a way as to visit chargers when needed.
These cars have ranges of 300-400 miles or more though. Tough to go that distance in a single trip without traveling through a populated area or using an interstate highway.
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? https://twitter.com/ex_Tesla/status/1103515677816631297
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.