Tesla details how it’ll charge new owners to use Superchargers

Well I mean, presumably as they sell more cars and their market share goes up, they'd also continue to build more and more superchargers.

It's still free if you bought yours. They will keep this lifetime free thing going if you buy before January 15th. Only 2 more days! Mine is free forever. They just keep adding cool stuff making me wanting to buy a new one.

> Unless right now there is a problem of people taking their sweet (inconsiderate) time in the parking spot since they are not getting charged?

Per r/teslamotors that seems to be the bigger issue. Once a vehicle is charged people don't move it promptly because they have no incentive to do so.

To solve that problem Tesla recently introduced a Supercharger idle fee https://www.tesla.com/blog/improving-supercharger-availabili...

I get the sense that the charging stations are being used by people who would charge at home, but instead drive to Menlo Park to save the $10-$20 in electricity. I could be wrong, though.

Curious they don't catch more coverage on this fact as it seems to directly contradict the narrative of a "super-charger". What prevents them from being able to charge all ports at full power?

This seems like another notch on the long list of hidden caveats with a Tesla. Other examples being constant surveillance/telemetry and the thermal battery throttling (0-60 in 2.xx seconds but good luck maintaining that!)

Why would you expect to pay the same? The resource is in higher demand. California has peak demand pricing for electricity to homes, why would this be any different?

People like predictable pricing. You sign a lease rather than renting month to month so your housing can't double in price just because. If it can cost between $0.50 and $500 to "fill up" your Tesla, that would SUBSTANTIALLY alter the way owning a Tesla is perceived.

Most people really hate this kind of pricing. It would combine badly with "range uncertainty" for people who've not yet bought one: not only do you not know how far you can go, you don't know how much you'll have to pay for it either.

To eliminate this, in many cars "100% battery" isn't really 100%, so that users can't accidentally "mis-charge" in a way that deliberately degrades the pack.

For example, a Chevy Volt has a 16.5kWh battery, but a "100% full" Volt charge only uses 10.4kWh of that.

Doubtful it would be theft of service since I'd assume you are entitled to use the power available from your car for accessories. This leaves us with maybe a terms of service violation?

But if you were buying the car anyway...

I think question isn't whether or not mining bitcoins would be productive. I think that was just by way of illustrating a hypothetical question about whether Tesla would notice or care about unusual patterns of energy use.

Is electricity generation using renewable sources inherently cheaper than coal, hydro and nuclear?

For reference using a Prius ~52 mpg combined (advertised) and current gas price in SF, for the drive from SF to LA:

383 / 52 * $2.61 = $19.22

Or a Honda Civic:

383 / 34 * $2.61 = $29.40

(Assuming their definition is one way not roundtrip.)

(The other reply answering this seems to have been deleted)

It used to be unlimited supercharging. The assumption was that people would primarily charge at home, and use the supercharger only for long distance travelling.

It seems that in practice far too many people were using the supercharger as the only place to charge their vehicle, with a fair number of people using it for commercial purposes.

The Tesla Taxis at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam were apparently all using the supercharger facility, rather than setting up their own charging infrastructure.

Also, it wasn't, technically, 'free' - a supercharger fee was charged either on purchase of the car or afterwards.

> What was the deal before this? Just free electricity?

Yes.

Maybe replace some of the meters on the streets with paid chargers (meter + charger fee going to municipality).

Co2 sinks include:

1.- equilibriation with oceans (10 year timescale increases system capacity by order of magnitude - but harmful to marine life)

2. - hydrocarbon/peat formation (not really a major process in an icehouse climate and quite slow anyway)

3. - marine carbonate formation (100 year timescale, potentially very large sink, can be negatively affected by process 1)

4.- silicate weathering (1000 year timescale infinite capacity).

So rate of release is very important. If CO2 release too fast ocean acidification from 1 prevents 3 and 3 and 4 don't have time to act.

I think this is a fair question, and deserves an answer instead of being downvoted.

1. There's no gasoline in the ground, but various forms of oil. Sounds like a nitpick, but is actually crucial, because getting usable fuel from tar sands and fracking are dirty and expensive operations -- especially once the externalities of environmental damage is accounted for. With current trends in wind and solar, it is quite likely that at some point, extracting fuel from tar sands and fracking will simply no longer be competitive. (You may argue that things like planes are unlikely to ever go electric; but it's likely we'll at some point have scalable fuel generation from electricity.)

2. CO2 doesn't necessarily stay in the atmosphere. First of all, there are natural processes that take CO2 out of the atmosphere and store the carbon in the ground/the oceans. That's how oil and coal formed in the first place. Of course, those natural processes are slower than we'd like. That's why carbon sequestration is a seriously discussed thing, i.e. filter CO2 out of the atmosphere industrially, and/or speed up the natural processes (like growing forests). Creating an economic incentive for this is a big part of the idea of carbon emissions trading.

In the end, it's viable to have a neutral economy in terms of CO2. We really need that anyway in the long term because oil is finite. If we get there faster, we'll get there without having gotten all oil out of the ground.

Oil is a wonderful product that is a key ingredient to many industries. It is used in manufacturing so many things -plastics, organic chemistry ingredients and even fertilizer; e.g. your shampoo bottle needed oil to make both the shampoo and the bottle itself.

At the moment, oil is so extremely cheap that we simply burn most of it. However, once we switch to other means of energy, we'll likely want to use all that oil in different ways with don't involve burning it and the CO2 stays in the products made from that oil (even if it means getting buried in a dump after some time).

There are balancing processes which remove CO2 from the atmosphere, so if we could stretch out the oil extraction over a couple of centuries we'd be in a much better position.

There's loads of people who live in places which conceivably won't have the ability to charge electric cars, ever. Terraced houses in the UK - you have to park on the street, and the spaces are not marked - sometimes you can fit 30 cars on one side, sometimes 40, depending on how and what people park. Sometimes you park in front of your own front door, sometimes you have to park in a parallel street because maybe the neighbour has visitors and there's no more room. How do we solve that? Have 40 charging points on each side of every residential street in the UK? Not only would that be ugly as a sin, but also hideously expensive.

If they made an electric with AWD/4WD that was sort of SUV boxy (you know, to put stuff in it) that was 4-5 inches higher off the ground than a typical sedan and sold for around $30k USD it would handle 90% of my needs.

Electric cars were initially more common than those powered by gasoline. Gasoline has very high energy density and they aren't really that fiddly: It is fairly common for an IC vehicle to rack up 200k miles with no service but consumables.

Unless electric cars ramp to crazy levels overnight, they will have the effect of keeping fuel prices low.

Demand for oil is (mostly) inelastic, with small surges in supply and demand responsible for large swings in price. As electric comes online, it will reduce those surges. When it gets more common, demand will shrink, lowering prices even further. I don't see electric powertrains taking over all the varied use cases for vehicles for a long time.

They might be more convenient, for journeys up to the battery's range, but they're also much more expensive upfront.

>When people can charge their car overnight for free with a wind-turbine

When the HOA/planning commission determines that wind turbines are not eyesores, and property speculators decide to install more than a small handful of chargers in the garages under the apartment buildings they own...

It's going to be a long climb. I'd guess that in the immediate term, we'll see a Luxe-like service to come get your car in the middle of the night, charge it, and put it back. This should be substantially more expensive than the amortized cost of a charger in your garage, so renters will eventually start demanding chargers, and over a few decades things will change.