Tesla Breaks Ground on Supercharger Station with Diner and Drive-In Theater | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Breaks Ground on Supercharger Station with Diner and Drive-In Theater

autoevolution.com

22 pointsgeox18 comments

Nothing particular about Tesla, but I wish the American mighty industry would jump on this "gold rush" and build out so many extensive "charge-in outlets" all around the country. Make a chain of diners, fast food places, quick shopping outlets, massage centers and what not. Wouldnt it be a business's wet dream to have customers that "need" to spend 15 - 45 mins at their shop while their car charges?! Particularly those that have enough money to buy an electric car in the first place.

What differentiates a "charge-in outlet" from a strip mall with a parking lot full of chargers?

A charge usually takes 20-30 minutes. You get a five minute grace period, then you start getting hit with $1/min idle fees. That’s barely enough time to get from the far reaches of the parking lot to a store and back.

Bringing the food closer to the charging station fixes that. No idea about the drive-in, though.

(Of course it also brings with it the risk of a spot getting ICE’d, which is why charging stations are so far out in the first place. Dunno how they plan to avoid that.)

>A charge usually takes 20-30 minutes. You get a five minute grace period, then you start getting hit with $1/min idle fees. That’s barely enough time to get from the far reaches of the parking lot to a store and back.

Forgive my ignorance, but are you telling me that you get charged $60/hour to park in a spot that has an EV charger in it if your car is done charging? And people are okay with doing that? How accurate is the "time left to charge" indicated? Can you monitor charge/est. time remaining on your phone?

> charged $60/hour to park in a spot that has an EV charger in it if your car is done charging?

Only if the station is full. Even then you won't necessarily get charged. I've gone over the grace period a couple of times, no fee. The actual grace period seems to longer than stated.

> How accurate is the "time left to charge" indicated?

When you first plug in, it's accurate to within 5 minutes. Once the charge has been going for a few minutes, it's accurate to within a minute or so.

> Can you monitor charge/est. time remaining on your phone?

Yes. The app sends a notification when you're ~5 minutes done charging. You can adjust the cutoff point from your phone, so if you want a few more minutes to eat just drag the slider to 80% instead of 70% (or whatever) to buy some extra time.

> Make a chain of diners, fast food places, quick shopping outlets, massage centers and what not.

Commercial Real Estate is already doing that.

Commercial real estate owners are installing charge-in outlets in strip malls that already offer the above, while getting federal and state subsidizes.

The fast-food drive-in chain Sonic is really dropping the ball on this.

They're positioned perfectly for this model as the whole point of going to Sonic is to sit in your car while you order your food, wait for it to be delivered to your car, then eat in your car.

I've heard that charging is not profitable. But then again, i've also heard that gas stations make more money from the convenience store attached than gasoline. Someone tell me if either of that is true

Charging can be unprofitable in areas without built demand.

Most fueling station profits come from convenience sales, especially so for the corporate stores who price their fuel the same (or lower) than all surrounding exactly for this purpose.

Charging “standards” have changed many times in the past 5-10 years. There are indications that NACS might finally be the stable, long-term choice, but that is not 100% obvious or guaranteed even now. That makes it challenging for anybody to do commercial development planning which needs to account for at least 20 years of functioning after buildout.

The connectors are electrically similar and can be swapped.

That really wasn’t clear from ten years ago to now. There has been a lot of disagreement on liquid cable cooling, AC vs. DC, voltages and the total amount of power that will be required, etc. Things seem to finally be settling down now though.

Except if Tesla gets smart and creates on option for Battery SWAP tech like NIO has, then you can be in and out in 5-10 minutes like you can all over China and Europe.

They tried that years ago and built prototypes for their Model S. The problem with swappable batteries is that you end up with reduced range because you can’t design the car with batteries crammed into every nook and cranny available.

Musk announced in 2016 that Tesla cars would drive themselves as early as 2018. He then made similar predictions almost every year, including recently.

Trust me, it's not that Musk overpromises. It's more like Musk is way ahead with his predictions.

That's some high quality reality distortion. Does this site always try so hard to smooth over elon musk's past lies?

Trust me, it's not that they're insincere. It's more like they don't know what "overpromises" means.

“Look boss, it’s not that my project is running three months behind schedule, it’s just that I was way ahead with my predictions.”

If you believe it, it isn't fraud.

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