> To put the affordability of Supercharging into perspective, customers will pay about $15 for a road trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles, about $120 from Los Angeles to New York, about €60 from Paris to Rome, and about ¥400 from Beijing to Shanghai.
No, see LCOE. (which can be calculated with or without accounting for externalities)
Not surprisingly all current technology is relatively competitive with the others. If it wasn't the case, we would have a clear winner and there would be nothing interesting to discuss!
Solar and wind power can be cheaper than coal (by spot price) in certain limited areas at certain times of the day. The problem is that solar and wind are incapable of providing reliable base load capacity. Once you add energy storage (batteries, molten salt, pumped hydroelectric, etc) to provide power when it's dark with no wind blowing the costs go way up.
Not inherently, but renewables generally have high cap-ex but low op-ex. Therefore highly depends on your entry price (this year's solar panels are cheaper than last year's).
And in other US states and points in time, gas is cheaper. For example, in December in Greenville, SC gas was $1.90 a gallon which would make gas in a prius cheaper than the Tesla supercharger.
EDIT: From Tesla's blog post "What’s important is that in every region, Supercharging will remain simple, seamless and always significantly cheaper than gasoline."
Looks like Tesla will be pricing the electricity differently in different states as well. I wonder if the changes in their electricity prices based on the region will be enough to offset currently low gas prices.
A Prius is surprisingly large inside. EPA cargo volume for the rear with seats up (5 passengers) is about the same as the Model S. The frunk adds an additional 5 cubic feet.
However, the Saudis will soon raise the price of fuel to exorbitant levels (again), while electricity prices will remain stably regulated by each state's power commission.
However, the Saudis will soon raise the price of fuel to exorbitant levels
They don't have that much control. The US would increase fracking / shale ops and bring the cost of oil back down. We have incredibly massive oil reserves here in the US that any sort of Saudi nonsense will have limited effect.
Saudis have gotten themselves into a world of pain over the past few years attempting to play their stupid games with oil prices, so much so that they are about to take Saudi Aramco public to get a desperately-needed cash infusion. Our fracking/shale ops are also hurting though in this race to the bottom.
I keep forgetting how stupidly cheap petrol is in the States. Their given example of Paris->Rome route is probably 1/2 cost of the diesel cost in the most efficient of diesel cars, which makes Tesla look very cheap to run on such a long route.
What was the deal before this? Just free electricity?
This seems like a pretty fair and obvious way to move forward: the electricity isn't free, and it doesn't seem like they are attempting to turn a profit off of the electricity cost like a Gas station does. It curtails the externalities of Uber/Taxis freeloading off of infrastructure that has ongoing costs to maintain but provides a good value for buyers for a few longer distance trips.
(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.
By no means 'free': there was a $2000 Supercharger access fee included in the purchase price of the S85, or $2500 to enable it after purchase for the S60.
Not available for the S40 variant which wasn't permitted to use the Superchargers.
I am not seeing it. Buying a new S today https://www.tesla.com/models/design offers the following premium options: autopilot - $5k, full self driving - $3k, premium package - $3.5k, smart air suspension - $2.5k, subzero - $1k, hi-fi sound - $2.5k, rear-facing seats - $4k, high-amperage onboard charger - $1.5k.
It seems that once the S70 was released it was removed as an optional line-item across the range and was bundled into the final price. However owners of suitable non-S40 vehicles from before that point can still enable access for a fee ( they have the hardware already installed, it's a database flag change ).
"If your vehicle is eligible, the Supercharging upgrade option will be visible in the Available Upgrades section."
The S40 has the hardware for Supercharging but is excluded by policy.
I'm only aware of this because a friend in the UK has been trying to work-out what's applicable in this market and Tesla's constant changes to the policy makes that difficult.
I'm kind of surprised that they're so adamant that the pricing should be hWk based. It seems to me that time-based pricing would have made sense - Superchargers are a limited resource, so a time-based approach would have encouraged people to only charge for as long as they needed it. Above 80% a Tesla charges much slower, so it uses much less electricity, but it still takes up a stall.
It would have also dovetailed nicely with the per-minute fee they will be charging Tesla owners for leaving their vehicles plugged in after they're done charging at busy Superchargers.
The charging rate is very low when there are many Teslas charging at a station so sometimes it could take 3-4x longer than usual when at a busy location. I'd expect to be charged the same amount in those cases.
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!)
To be fair, "very low" is like 220 mi/hr compared to standard 360 mi/hr based on my experience.
They do have a disclaimer on charging rate: "Charging from 10% to 80% is quick and typically provides ample range to travel between most Superchargers. Charging from 80% to 100% doubles the charge time because the car must reduce current to top off cells. Actual charge times may vary."
Not sure why this isn't possible. I learned this the hard way last time I spent 8 hours driving to LA from the bay area during the holiday season. If I was in a hurry on holiday to get to socal I'd much prefer driving a regular car with gas. The capacity at each charging station is visible from the map though.
You can opt out of them storing data about you. Even if you are the only car at a supercharger, it slows down the rate as your battery fills to protect it. It charges as max power (120kwh) when your battery is pretty low. However, the net effect is vastly faster than all other battery charging systems. Leafs lose range quickly if you charge them with chademo a lot, because they never cool the battery down to keep it from overheating during charging.
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?
I think that behavior is built-in to the way most people value their own time. There is no way I'd feel like I was gaining something by my vehicle charging slower - even if I effectively pay a lower per-hour cost.
They should stop fighting market mechanisms and do dynamic pricing. It's obviously the way it should be done. Price should change upon the cost of the underlying electricity and there should be surge pricing once queues form to discourage overcharging during peak usage.
Elon is normally so smart I don't understand why he's fighting the math based approach here.
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.
People also like being able to get an uber when they really need one instead of relying on cabs that never show up on Friday nights. The cost of electricity to completely fill up a Telsa is between $5 and $20 depending on time of day and where exactly you are in North America. With 1-3x surge pricing call it $5 to $60. If you're filling up half a tank (say from 25% to 75%, the fast charging window) that's going to cost you $2.50 to $30, and usually around $10. This isn't even worth thinking about it for current Tesla owners.
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.
That's true for petrol engines, though. The price fluctuates, though not generally wildly, and I know -for example- that it will cost me $25-$30 to fill up my car.
I imagine the fluctuations of the electrical grid are no different and likely more stable. It would make sense to charge more during the day when there's a higher load on the grid anyways, and considering the price of Teslas, I am confident the owners can afford it.
The incentive to not charge above 80% is that it is harder on the battery, and those things are expensive. So that's a good incentive to charge in the sweet spot. Though my delivery guy said there was someone doing deliberate 100% charges trying to get his pack degraded to the point where Tesla would replace it, but he's been unable to get it to degrade the extra percent or two to 6%, so maybe it is harder than they make it out to be.
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.
I've always wondered if Tesla tracks the use of the Superchargers to the vehicle mileage. As an example, if I setup a bunch of bit-coin miners in the trunk, tapped into the vehicle battery and continually visited a supercharger to power the rig would Tesla know something was up?
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?
>It would succeed no better than showing up with a barrel at a burger shop and start filling it from the free ketchup dispenser.
Not to mention the mechanics of converting the ketchup in the barrel to usable energy would be inefficient and convoluted at best. Better to find some other way to power one's Bitcoin mining rig. :)
Though, you could likely dodge any criminal charges by way of insanity in that scenario!
You would be tying up a $100,000 depreciating asset to mine bitcoin for a few weeks or months until you are discovered. You could make more money by not buying the car.
> As an example, if I setup a bunch of bit-coin miners in the trunk
It costs about ten bucks to fully recharge a Tesla and about one hour of time. You might break even if you earn minimum wage? But then, how did you afford a Tesla to begin with?
Even if we assume you use your time productively while charging ... it all seems a bit silly for ten bucks?
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.
Actually it's not, because it's a hypothetical question being used to illustrate an idea. Instead of looking at the idea being illustrated, you are getting tripped up on the details of the particular hypothetical, that could easily be swapped out without changing the point they serve to illustrate. In this case, the question is whether Tesla would notice or care about unusual patterns of energy use.
A real answer that didn't miss the point would be along the lines of "Yes, here's a news article showing that Tesla has algorithms that check energy consumption against mileage, or against a set of expected patterns." Another real answer would be "No, they don't. Here's a comment thread where Telsa users have talked about their experience with charging stations where they didn't run into such limitations." A point-missing answer would be "hey, bitcoin mining isn't that profitable!"
Myth is that all you need is free electricity to get rich on Bitcoin. Reality is that a decent miner has about a 9 month break-even, after about 2 1/2 years will be worthless, and you will have made 25% or so on your original investment. That's with free electricity.
Still waiting to hear on how they're going to solve charging for those of us without garages. They're not going to want all of us to do all our charging at the stations...
Street parking may be a problem until they have plugs on things like meters.
In some places it's already common to have plugs close to parking, it's for a block-heater used on extreme winter days. Adapting these for electric cars is probably not hard.
Startup idea: electricity delivery trucks making house-calls, or a fleet of workers driving cars to charging facilities and back while their owners sleep.
What I am worried about is, all the work done to make affordable electric car will go in vain if gas prices reduce due to the adoption of electric vehicle and hence ultimately no effect on co2 emission.
All the gasoline in the ground will eventually be burned by people regardless of price. It's a question of how quickly. If not by first world countries then by third world countries. As far as I know the CO2 stays there once it is there and accumulates, so does it really matter how fast it's burned?
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.
As demand for gas (oil) goes down, or even as projected future demand goes down, it will make less sense to invest in extraction, which should counteract that drop in price at least to some extent. Also eventually filling stations will become less common. I could see some downward pressure on fuel prices, but I expect other effects will outweigh it, and adoption of electric vehicles will accelerate.
I suspect that electric vehicles are just a much better product, and will end up dominant regardless as long as the technical challenges keep being solved.
Electric vehicles will ultimately become more convenient and will win on that basis alone. Electric car designs can be more flexible, and performance will continue to increase above and beyond the already ludicrous levels in some Tesla models.
When you think about gasoline engines they're terribly inconvenient. They need a lot of maintenance. They have tons of finicky moving parts. They need gasoline, which is only sold at select retailers, and the price of gasoline changes constantly, often spiking higher without warning.
It's only because this enormous infrastructure has built up around gasoline-powered cars that any of that is bearable. Can you imagine gasoline-powered cars trying to make inroads in a world that was historically all-electric? It'd be absurd. Somehow electric cars are gaining market share even when going against tradition, so it seems inevitable they'll hit some tipping point and gasoline will be considered the exotic, difficult to obtain fuel.
When people can charge their car overnight for free with a wind-turbine, or on the weekend with a solar roof they'll have little reason to prefer gasoline powered cars.
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.
Sure. There's also loads of people (millions and millions) that live in rural and suburban US and and Canada that could very easily install a charger in their garage or driveway. Don't ~~show~~ throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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.
Charcoal powered cars were initially more common than those powered by gasoline as well.
Energy density was the initial driver behind the push to gasoline, but if they'd had lithium-ion technology in 1880 the world would be radically different.
Electric powertrains won't take over all uses, but they'll take over enough that the remainder is mostly an anachronism. As batteries are produced at higher capacity and lower cost, as alternative energy becomes more pervasive, the whole thing tips steeply to electric.
For example, even for a cottage application with a boat electric might be better since you can charge it yourself vs. having to truck in marine fuel. With the right battery technology and solar panel system you'd save thousands. It's merely a decade or two away.
>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.
I'm glad the superchargers will no longer be free for new Tesla owners. I wish they would charge existing Tesla owners for the power as well.
I went to charge my Model X at the Whole Foods in Menlo Park on Friday night, because mine was broken. I waited for over 40 minutes for other people using the chargers to leave.
I'd much rather pay a market rate for the power from Tesla and have the units open when I need them, than take the chance of waiting for hours because people are clogging the spots to get free power.
>I waited for over 40 minutes for other people using the chargers to leave.
And yet "free Supercharging for life!" was advertised as a major advantage for owning a Tesla.
I agree, this is the most realistic option. If waits are long with 0.5% market share, how bad would it be with their expected 500,000 cars on the road over the next couple years?
They gave up on the idea of automated battery swap stations, right? It's a shame; I thought they were a great idea, but perhaps there's good reasons why they can't work in reality.
I don't know if they gave up on it, or if it's simply not ready for primetime and/or the market isn't currently open to the idea of battery sharing.
Once marketshare increases, car sharing increases, etc., and people become more accustomed to sharing property (and charging becomes the norm for everyone), the convenience of a 3 minute battery swap will likely win over - and Tesla will be ready to roll out their tech.
Realistically, it seems likely that there just wasn't enough demand among existing Tesla owners for that use case. If/When Tesla gets more market share, that could very well change. My understanding is that they are still engineering all their chassis to support the fast swap technology, so they haven't entirely trashed the idea.
No, that charging station was purposefully built and run to make it extremely inconvenient in order to discourage use. It was just built to obtain a tax incentive.
I'm sure the tax credits play into the decision to build the station, but its position was intended to allow people to swap batteries for the trip from SoCal to SF, which otherwise requires a fair amount of time at a charger. For that it's pretty perfect, it's just that Tesla users apparently don't find it worth using. I do think that's pretty clear and useful data, and it's clearly informed their current efforts (i.e. no new battery stations).
One big reason is people want their original battery back after swapping. We have all been trained that we are taking care of our batteries on phones or AA at home. The tesla should take care of batteries and they are basically swappable without issue. But this isn't how anyone thinks of their battery.
Did you read the articles? Even if it's in the world's most convenient location, this can be outweighed by high prices, slow (non-automated) swapping, and large inconveniences from forcing people to schedule ahead.
> They must make an appointment in advance to get their pack swapped, and they will pay a fee said to be roughly equivalent to the cost of a full tank of gasoline--perhaps $50?
> And the swapping process isn't fully automated, unlike the one supposedly presented by Musk 21 months ago.
> The company never released details on how that system worked, or answered questions on how the battery's liquid-cooling system could be disconnected and reconnected, and any lost coolant replaced, within a 90-second swap.
> But the slow pace of the single swap station differs markedly from the fast-growing Supercharger network, where any Tesla owner can drive up, charge for 20 to 40 minutes, and drive away with a battery recharged to about 80 percent of capacity.
So maybe you save 20 minutes on net, but it costs $50 and you have to sign up a week in advance. Why would anyone use it?
I did read your articles, and didn't find them particularly compelling. Technology failures happen all the time, the fact that Tesla wasn't successful at rolling out battery swap but was successful with superchargers seems pretty unplanned, given the engineering time spent on the system and the constraints this all put on the chassis.
They essentially designed and built an industrial robot, R&D costs for which easily range into 8 digits.
This looks like a failed good faith effort to me. They thought they had something (as did much of the rest of the car industry), turned out they were wrong and they're cutting their losses.
Neither I nor the article is arguing that Tesla's entire battery swap program was just a scheme to get tax incentives. It likely was good faith, and there may have been good reasons for Tesla to end the program.
The point is that that particular swap station was not in good faith, and therefore it's (predictable) non-use gives you no additional data about the public's demand for swapping. (You may, of course, infer something from the fact that Tesla doesn't think it's viable.)
It has to do with the way the incentive structure is set up: there is tax credit of order $1,000 per vehicle if the vehicle has battery swap capabilities, which necessitates "available" infrastructure. If Tesla invested huge in battery swap tech and then decided it wasn't going to work, they still have massive incentives to open up a single, highly inconvenient swap station in order to recoup part of their investment through the tax incentive.
That particular swap station was a great one if you expected lines at the superchargers between LA and SF, which is one of the most-used routes and has a charger that's halfway. As a Tesla driver that travels that route, I'd happily pay $50 or $80 to know that I would have more reliable timing on the day before Thanksgiving. However, I usually return up 101 to do some wine tasting.
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.
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but even if it becomes a paid service, you might still have to wait for other paying customers to leave? Unless right now there is a problem of people taking their sweet (inconsiderate) time in the parking spot since they are not getting charged?
If that is the case, some HN posters had an interesting theory: once some customers start paying, they might feel entitled to stay at a charging station even longer (which would not fix your issue of waiting forever to access it).
As another commenter pointed out, gas fuel times are so short that you typically don't wander off far. Additionally, there are some safety concerns around leaving the fuel hose attached when you're not there.
This will be a great social experiment...even more so when there are 500k Model 3s around, competing with the Model S/X crowd for the same superchargers.
Paying $10 for an extra 20 mins to finish their coffee may be worth it to someone in a $100k Model S, less likely for a $40k Model 3...
Maybe Tesla should consider the following: All the time passed the point your battery is charged is deducted from you next charging session.
For example: Your battery charges in 30 minutes, but you stay at the station for an hour (30 minutes of charging + 30 minutes of idling). Next time you go to a charging station you get penalized for a certain amount of time (percentage of you idle time). Of course, this will probably never happen, but it would get the point across!
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.
The analogy has been made "You wouldn't leave your car at a gas pump". But Tesla charging is different, a gas car takes ~4m to fill, not long enough for you to do much else. A Tesla on a road trip takes 20-40 minutes to charge. So long you aren't going to stand there, but not long enough to a sit down meal or walk the half mile from the hotel with the charger to a fast food restaurant and eat, visit a gift shop, etc... To name some examples of what we did on a recent road trip.
With the Tesla, a road trip is a different cadence from gas, where many peoples tendency seems to just get on with it and minimize these fueling interruptions. With the Tesla, we would talk to locals, visit the train museum, go to gift shops, I'd drop them off at historic districts and go charge.
It didn't feel like we were waiting for the car to charge, but that was because we were doing other things. If I now have to go back and move the car because the stalls are 50% full, that changes the road trip a lot.
Something not common knowledge: Superchargers operate in pairs. If there are 4 stalls, only 2 of them at a time will operate at full speed. If you are charging on stall 1A and someone pulls into 1B, they get a much slower charge rate until 1A completes charging.
So a 50% full supercharger is actually "full", but the remaining stalls can be parked at and will start charging full rate as things finish.
Because of this, I was kind of expecting the idle fee to be when the stalls were all full. If there are no stalls left, you are making someone potentially wait while your car sits there idle.
The longer term plan is they hope to make the cars move themselves when charging is done. That would be awesome.
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