Tesla – Introducing V3 Supercharging
tesla.com
tesla.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
You don't want a "car" that big.
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.
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
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.
Ubeam.com have made it possible. On a smaller scale though
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The article has this Youtube video embedded, which shows the overhead contact lines:
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.
It'd make sense, as both have had massive price drops recently, and haven't had a battery upgrade in two years.
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.
https://electrek.co/2019/03/06/tesla-self-driving-language-w...
Old language:
https://i1.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/201...
New language:
https://i1.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/201...
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".
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.
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.
1: https://ark-invest.com/research/podcast/elon-musk-podcast
It seems a lot of plans are changing.
Elon claiming that in a podcast isn't a promise like this text on the order page.
Pretty sure customer data isn't uploaded en masse to train networks at Tesla.
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!
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.
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!
- 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.
He's in Sweden, so it's pretty cold, and he tests a bunch of EV models on a bunch of fast chargers.
It has some of the usual flaws Youtube content does, but he seems a lot more thorough and better informed than most car journalism.
Plenty of people does not mind working for him.
See this survey
https://insideevs.com/tesla-spacex-employees-confident-elon-...
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.
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.
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.
It takes a lot of guts, knowledge and confidence in yourself and your team to make such decisions. edit : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19153953
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 boring machines were previously used to bore utility and sewer tunnels.)
- closed stores
- no profit
- lied about FSD
- stock down 30%
- long-term investors exit
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.
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.
- human rated space craft to ISS
- massively extend the lead in terms of EV charging networks
But yeah we should really focus on the closes show rooms, that's really whats important ...
- tesla doesn’t build spacecraft. that’s spacex.
- the tesla ev charging network is expanding. but can i charge another ev at one of their stations?
all the things that i mentioned are signs that the company isn’t doing well.
also, toyota.
Other players may create supply, but Elon can create demand. He's in such a unique position, imo.
https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2014/01/29/how_tes...
>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?
So that is about 5 houses. You could buy that service. I hope Tesla would sell you the supercharger for it.
The expectation is that people drive 30ish miles a day. This is about 11kwh. Over 8 hours a night, well within reasonable limits.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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).
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 sister-in-law has an induction stove, so she gets 40 A and the stove is connected directly to a separate bigger fuse.
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.
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.
In my language a breaker is called an automatic fuse, so easy mistake to make
I don't have an electric hob but electric heater + dishwasher + oven certainly triggers the breaker.
My house was built in 1950's. Used to have two 20amp fuses. One for the lights and one for the outlets.
In the US houses typically have 100-200 amp service now.
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.
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.
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.
Is that the same on Italy ?
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 ;)
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).
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 :)
You're comparing average with peak usage. Doesn't really make any sense.
400amp service is usually 2 200 amp panels.
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.
Staring at things like http://bpu.org/electric-service-rates-commercial/
(and similar pages on other utilities)
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)
In fact, it is becoming standard in high-power chargers, with the new 175-350kW CCS units also using liquid cooling.
Somebody is buying this service. It's probably delivered more in line with your reasoning here.
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 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.
Or kW with a power factor of 1, but that is (almost) never the case
And yep, this applies to anything that offers vague rudimentary location monitoring.
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.
Not sure why that would be true. Perhaps it can help them a tiny bit, but not worth my privacy.
Anonymized data isn't really anonymous
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170803/14480037916/once-...
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2185458/microsoft-resea...
https://www.wired.com/2007/12/why-anonymous-data-sometimes-i...
https://dataprivacylab.org/projects/identifiability/paper1.p...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90278465/sorry-your-data-can-sti...
Cover the roof with solar panels (say 40' x 8' = 10 x 500w panels = 5000 watts of electricity). 8h x 5kw = 40kwh.
If the battery pack was a 1000d, you could move with a full charge once a month for free.
Or you could use it for living too (fridge, range, etc)
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/awzcir/first_p...
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/axy7d2/superch...
Great car for local trips. But at least one of our cars will have to be gas for the foreseeable future.
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.
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.
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.
They used a stack of Model S chargers, not inverters! An inverter converts DC to AC. Chargers, of course, go the other way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which is pretty absurd since they are already getting the tech without spending resources on R&D. Yet, they want more control.
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.
So it charges at up to Mach 1.3. Supersonic charging!
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.
[1] https://electrek.co/2017/07/14/porsche-350-kw-ev-charging-st...
[2] https://electrek.co/2018/12/06/electrify-america-first-350kw...
It's a bit like networks bragging that they have 5G base stations before any 5G phones were created.
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/porsche-bmw-dc-fast-charg...
Volkswagen has already announced three cars based on their 800 volt platform to be released across the next three years:
1. Porsche Taycan in sedan and wagon variants at the end of this year: https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/hybrid-electric/a21239...
2. Audi e-tron GT at the end of 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvNw15W_EK8
3. Porsche Macan probably at the end of 2021: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/porsche-macan-electric-on...
And I'm sure there'll be other 800 volt cars from Volkswagen and other manufacturers in the future.
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.
https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/products/porsche-taycan-miss...
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:
http://www.thedrive.com/news/5207/this-video-reminds-us-that...
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.
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.
https://fastned.nl/en/blog/post/fastned-onthult-nieuwe-gener...
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:
https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/products/porsche-taycan-miss...
Best regards Phillip
Whatever happened to poetic license?
1. Sunshine days
2. 2000m above sea level (for photovoltaic efficiency)
3. Many power interruptions and "load shedding" by state owned utility
4. Enough private (and government if they were better managed) money
5. Human capital and good universities
6. Enough physical space
I think there may be more reasons, but these are some of the main ones.
The coasts, the south, and interstates highways. Most of the US area, where you can go in the USA, is not covered.