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Comment by Kalium | Hacker News Reader

The Supercharger stations can charge 50% of the battery in 20 minutes.

Do the superchargers have a detremental effect on the batteries? I would have thought rapid charging would lead to greater wear than a slow steady charge. Anyone know?

A more aggressive charge cycle will affect battery life-cycle, but even the Super-Chargers don't pack enough current for it to be really detrimental.

110v is just woefully inadequate for charging a pack that large.

Not from what I've read. The Tesla battery pack has some sophisticated heat management capabilities that dump the excess heat generated while super charging.

The most damaging things you can do to the batteries is keeping them 100% fully charged or completely discharging them.

Yup, not an issue. When you're charging at 120kW the whole car hums and cooling system is going full-tilt. Pretty incredible to see 400VDC @ 300A go straight into the pack.

If you run the math its only roughly 170 continuous horsepower running thru those power cables, assuming 100% efficiency etc.

If they added another order of magnitude or two to that charge rate, then it would be impressive.

You have to take into account that the electric motor in a tesla is more efficient than a gas motor (3-4x). The reasoning is that a gallon of has has about 33.6kwh in a gallon (see wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_per_gallon_gasoline_equi...). A tesla has 75 or 85 or 90 kwh onboard, so that's at most 3 gallons of gas!

Another way to think of it is that mpg equivalent of evs is around 90-100 mpg. The model S is a huge heavy car, and look how far it can go on 85kwh.

They do yes. You should only use it when traveling and can't charge it overnight.

The superchargers might have an impact on battery life, but in practice they don't seem to have much impact. The reason is that unlike all other electric cars, they heat and cool the battery pack. The reason why leafs do have a demonstrated huge impact for using their dc fast charging (chademo) is because their batteries get really hot when using chademo. The tesla cools the batteries when charging, heating if necessary too, and that's why people don't such much or any impact on range over time, even when using super charging.

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