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Comment by potatochup | Hacker News Reader

Access to the supercharging network.

My perception of Tesla’s supercharging network is that it was a huge edge 5 years ago, or even 2, but not so much anymore.

Yeah, it may still be the densest, but generic chargers are popping up everywhere. If I’m deciding on which brand to go with today, the charging network doesn’t even make the list of considerations. In 2017 it may have been near the top of that list.

Couple that with Tesla’s stale designs and continuous decontenting and I don’t see a Model 3 as all that compelling.

Anecdata: I regularly stop at a UK motorway services (Hopwood Park, M42) where there are 16 superchargers (and have been for several years) and even on the busiest days there’s always been a couple free.

Meanwhile over at the “public” “fast” chargers (4 of them) there’s regular contention, to the point of heated verbal disagreements between drivers one busy day this summer.

(I thankfully drive a Prius which can make the entire 250 mile trip on half a tank of petrol.)

Tesla have their own contention problems here and there, but I consider the supercharger network a definite competitive advantage over other EVs.

Not correct it’s still a huge advantage

My wife and I did a trip from Houston to San Diego in a non-Tesla EV, and from what I could tell, along the freeways (I-10 and I-8) there were roughly as many Superchargers as the high speed Electrify America chargers we used. Superchargers do seem to outnumber EA in major cities, however.

It's also important to consider number of stalls v.s. number of locations. The biggest Electrify America location on I-5 between SF and LA has 10 stalls. The biggest Tesla supercharger location has over 100.

As far as I know, the largest Supercharger in California only has 98 stalls (Harris Ranch + Coalinga, which are technically two stations but collocated in the same parking lot).

The next largest are:

* Kettleman City (again technically two stations, this time across the street) with 95

* Tejon Ranch (again two stations about 1000 ft distant) with 80.

Quartzsite (sic) AZ with 36 is scheduled to have, in the future, 124 stalls when expansion is complete

True. The largest I saw was in Tempe, in an outlet mall (16 stalls I think). That said, the locations along the freeway (often tiny towns) in such a trip are more relevant. Typically these were 4-6 stall locations in places like gas stations and WalMarts.

Interestingly enough, the largest Supercharger in the Houston area only has 16 stalls.

I've seen exactly one supercharger station in the last three years, and it's attached to the tesla dealer a good 30 miles away. There's a generic charger on my office building, a different generic charger a mile from my house, then a couple more in between.

Unless they've changed things, you need an adapter to use the generic chargers with a tesla. I'd rather just buy a car meant to work with the infrastructure available to me

The "generic" charger at your work is probably J1772? Teslas come with an adapter for that plug. The benefit of the supercharger network is mainly for DC fast charging (which J1772 can't provide) on road trips. You aren't getting 250Kw from your office building.

isn't there any adapters for other manufacturers?

No but the new super chargers going in next year will have a built in ccs adapter in the US. In Europe they all currently use the European version of ccs

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