Hacker News Reader

Comment by vvanders | Hacker News Reader

One thing that always seems missing from these comparison articles is the Supercharger network.

It makes such a huge difference, I just don't see how CCS catches up(not to mention that there's no long term planning around it).

View on HN

There are no Superchargers near me, or anywhere near my route to family on the holidays. Tesla's network outside of California is so sparse as to be useless for much of the country. Here's the map of Tesla's 613 supercharging stations (right) versus 27000 public non-Tesla chargers (left):

http://i.imgur.com/Ktg8h3W.png

So the fact that Tesla has no good answer to remote charging for most of the US hasn't stopped it from selling cars outside of California. You're more likely to have a non-Tesla quick charger on any given route than a Supercharger, and if you own a non-Tesla EV/hybrid, you'll probably be able to use it "out of the box", where a Tesla will need a $450 plug adapter. If I want to drive west, I won't run into a Tesla Supercharger for about 250 miles -- outside the Model 3's range -- but I'll pass 9 quick chargers from other operators on the way.

Long-term to reach millions of EV unit sales a year, car makers -might- need a better answer to charging away from home, if other technology and social changes don't obviate the need. In those coming years, Blink/Chargepoint/etc have lots of time to continue expanding their networks -- including adding more quick chargers, more plug types, and more reliability -- and can likely do it faster than Tesla or any other single company can on their own.

Those chargers top out at 45kw thought(real world, I have the CHAdeMO adapter). Superchargers are 120kW which makes a huge difference when you have more than 100mi of range.

Both CHAdeMO and SAE Combo can do 100kW+. They're installed at lower amps because the only customers plugging in are Leafs and hybrids that don't need that capacity yet, not because the standards don't allow higher power. The supply will come to meet the demand when it actually shows up. A 45kW charger that exists on your route is better than a Supercharger that doesn't, too.

Yup, they can do that, but there's not a single one installed in the US and I doubt there will be when the Bolt is released.

Also now you've got a bunch of chargers installed and you don't know which ones are 45kW, 60kW and 100kW. With Superchargers you know that you'll have 120kW chargers at each location.

No argument that Supercharger=120kW is easier, but why wouldn't people mapping other charging stations record the available power?

(at which point you can easily make a 100kW map or whatever)

People don't list 45kw vs 60kw today on plugshare(or the system cab act up as what happened with a lot of Nissan units that were "rated" for 60 but couldn't handle it).

Sure, not every data collection is going to do the sensible thing. OpenStreetMap has a proposal to document the exact sockets that are available:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dcharging_st...

An app that shows charging stations while highlighting the ones that will be fastest is a really obvious thing to provide, especially while the stations are a bit sparse. So I would expect it to get easier to find stations as we go forward, not harder.

(I agree that Supercharger=fast charging is an advantage, I just don't think it is really a big deal)

"Tesla's network outside of California is so sparse as to be useless for most people."

This statement is exaggerated beyond all connection to reality. Yes, there are holes, but coverage outside of California is still quite good for the most part. If you live in or need to travel to Arkansas or West Texas or North Dakota then you're going to have trouble, but the vast majority of the population is covered at this point.

Non-Tesla chargers vastly outnumber Tesla chargers, but the speed just isn't adequate. Most of them are far too slow for long trips. The fast DC chargers that are out there are just barely adequate. You'll top out at maybe 150MPH of charging, while Tesla's can hit 360MPH.

I'm really not exaggerating. Look at that Supercharger map again. Put a pinpoint on it randomly, and imagine this is where you live. Put another pinpoint 120 miles away, and imagine this is where you have family in the next city over. 99% of the time, there will be no Supercharger anywhere near the line between you and your destination. That's the kind of trip people actually make and have range anxiety about -- visiting the grandparents for Christmas -- not the road trip to the other side of the country where you can plan on driving the wrong way for 70 miles to get onto the nearest Tesla-covered route. It's these trips that the Supercharger network is pretty useless for, because it only exists in this weird east-west-north-south grid with entire states empty in the middle of half the lines it draws. Chargers aren't like cell phone stations; they don't provide "coverage" to some radius, they're single points of utility.

That thought experiment isn't very useful, because people aren't randomly distributed across the continent. Much of the plains and rockies are empty of people.[1]

1. https://johnstonarchitects.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/pop_l...

This may be true, but this is also exactly the kind of country you might want to drive through on your way from your home to a destination.

Tesla has supercharger stations on the major freeways through unpopulated areas. And they're building more. This is effectively a non-problem. Affordability is a much bigger bottleneck for them.

Look at the Supercharger map and compare it with this map:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/US_popul...

Approximately thirds of the US population lives east of the Mississippi. In that region, the holes in the Supercharger network are around western Tennessee, West Virginia, northern Pennsylvania, and northern Maine, all lightly populated with the exception of Memphis.

I don't understand your hypothetical. Why would the Supercharger network be relevant at all to a 120 mile trip? Superchargers are for making trips beyond the range of a single charge, not for trips to the next city over which you can easily make on one charge.

120 to get back home makes it a 240 mile trip.

Plug in while you're there, buy the bigger battery option, or go out to dinner somewhere that has an L2 charger.

The grandparents aren't going to have an EVSE for you, there is no larger battery that can do the trip^, and Christmas is not getting moved to a restaurant to accommodate your car. Nobody, not even Tesla, has a good answer to the EV range issue if you don't happen to have a quick charger on your route, and you often won't. That just means Supercharger network versus no Supercharger network probably won't be the thing that keeps people from buying a Bolt, just like it's not keeping them from buying a Tesla. That's the discussion I jumped in on.

^ There's a range calculator on the Model S webpage. If you drop the temperature and turn on the heater, even the 90 kWh battery doesn't have 240 miles range.

Even a 120V outlet will do the job. A 240V outlet (for example, if grandma has an electric dryer) will be even better. If your response to that suggestion is "The grandparents aren't going to have an EVSE for you" then I don't think you understand this stuff.

A 120V outlet trickle charging 3-4 miles per hour in the winter isn't going to get you home. The 240V outlet isn't going to help either, because people aren't going to jump through hoops to justify a car that doesn't make the drives they need to make. If there's no charger network where they live, and they need that range, then they're not going to replace their car with the EV. If it's there, then Tesla's stations probably aren't the only ones available, because Tesla's network is relatively small, so it's not a huge problem for Chevy.

Yes, you can come up with a trip where this doesn't work. If you're going 120 miles and there isn't a Supercharger on the way and it's cold as hell outside and there's no easily accessible 240V outlet and you're not staying long enough for 120V to get the job done and you're not going out during your visit then, yes, you're going to have trouble.

But we were talking about "most people," not "a tiny tiny proportion of the population that just happens to have the worst case scenario."

If I purchase a vehicle, I'm likely to want it to work for every trip I want to take. It needs to work when I visit my brother in Oklahoma in the winter, and my friend's LAN party in Louisiana in the summer, and my in-laws in Oregon in the fall, and when I pick friends up from the airport (a 45-mile round trip) a few times a year, and on days when I have a bunch of scattered errands all across town.

If a car sucks for even one of those trips, I'm going to be hesitant to buy it, and if there are two or three circumstances where it would suck, I'm crossing it off of my list. If I can come up with one trip where I'm going to need to sit there for two hours waiting for my car to charge, then the supercharger network, while not being actually useless on the whole, is not particularly convenient for me and therefore not really a strong selling point.

You sound like some of my neighbors who drive great big huge pickup trucks because they need something that can carry a full sheet of plywood, which they do once or twice a year. They spend thousands in extra gasoline and depreciation to save $50 in delivery charges.

If I have to put up with slow charging (and therefore perhaps take an extra vacation day), or have to rent a car or fly, for 2-3 trips, that's thousands of dollars every year, not a $50 delivery charge. If I have to seriously inconvenience my grandparents every time I go to visit them, that generates a lot of stress and potentially puts them at risk (grandpa is turning 95 this year; he doesn't travel well.)

But I can buy a plug-in hybrid like the Chevy Volt for a couple grand less than the cheap Tesla (counting the same tax incentives), and it works for every trip. With the gas generator, it has a range of over 300 miles, and can refill about 280-290 miles of range at an ordinary gas station in 5 minutes. So I can spend a similar amount of money for a much more convenient experience by going with a hybrid and ignoring the superchargers entirely.

Point being, the argument that the supercharger network covers "almost everyone" is flawed. There are a lot of people for whom it still misses at least some of their trips, where other types of EVs perform better, and missing some trips is far more relevant than you seem to give it credit for.

Again, it's not like spending $thousands to avoid the occasional $50 delivery charge for plywood. It's spending basically the same amount on a different type of technology to avoid the occasional flight, car rental, or extra stress on the grandparents. The supercharger network will need to be much more dense before it gets to the point of being a major factor in Tesla's favor.

I totally agree. It has to work for everything you want, not just almost everything.

That's exactly why the Supercharger network is such a big deal. Its existence moves a huge segment of the population from "almost everything" to "everything."

Yes, there's still a group of people where it doesn't do that. I totally accept that. But the person I'm replying to thinks that the Supercharger network doesn't matter outside of California because it's "so sparse as to be useless for most people." Which is far, far from the truth.

I think you're very wrong about the size of group of people that the Supercharger network doesn't move from "almost everything" to "everything".

The network matters, but it's only a strong selling point for those it moves from "almost" to "everything", and I think that's actually a fairly small segment of the population.

The vast majority of the population lives in areas with good Supercharger coverage, and uses major interstates for their long trips, which is where Superchargers are mostly located. I would contend that a majority of the US population's trips would fit within it as the network stands today. Again, just look at the population map of the US and the map of superchargers. It lines up pretty well.

I live in a major metro area and use major interstates for most of my long trips. But the network is still a long way from where it would need to be to support all of my trips.

Here's an example that I've actually done twice in the last two years: Denver, CO to Austin, TX. That's about a 900 mile trip, and a long but tolerable day -- from Denver south to Raton, NM and then southeast through Amarillo, south to Lubbock, and then southeast again. To stay on the supercharger network I'd have to go all the way over to Oklahoma City (on either I-40 or I-70 to I-35), adding 150+ miles to the trip, not to mention longer and more frequent stops that would likely necessitate adding an extra half-day of travel time each way.

My brother lives in Chicago. His trips to Indianapolis would be covered, but not his trips to Denver.

Dallas-Fort Worth is a huge population center, with great supercharger coverage leaving north or south, but not east or west. If you're heading to Atlanta, Memphis, or St. Louis the supercharger network is going to be really inconvenient.

And while the majority of the US population does live in major cities connected by interstates, the majority of the US population has at least one close friend or family member they'd like to visit, who isn't connected by one of the supercharger-served routes. If you made graphs not just of population centers, but of close personal connections, your "graph of graphs" would have quite a few connections that aren't covered by the network. (While truck traffic and passenger traffic are not identical, figure 2.8 of https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/otps/bottlenecks/chap2.cfm suggests quite a few heavily-trafficked routes that aren't covered by the supercharger network.)

It's not my intent to be overly negative. I'm just being realistic, presenting the analysis I did myself about 6 months ago after my old car got wrecked in a hit-and-run. The majority of the time, I'd be happy with a Tesla and the supercharger network, but a couple times a year it would be a massive inconvenience. This is an area where the difference between 95% and 100% is huge. Tesla/superchargers are getting there, but it'll be several years before the infrastructure is in place for a pure electric plugin with a 200 mile range becomes a truly viable vehicle for the majority of people.

"the majority of the US population has at least one close friend or family member they'd like to visit, who isn't connected by one of the supercharger-served routes."

What's the basis for this statement? I mean, sure, if you live in a poorly covered area like Texas, or in an area that has good coverage but is near the edge like Chicago, you're likely to have places to go that aren't covered. But that's not where most people live.

Freight and car traffic are so different that I really see no point in even bringing up that map.

Note that I'm not in any way disbelieving your personal situation. If you live in Dallas and you ever go anywhere that isn't north or south then clearly the network is not suitable for you. I'm not trying to argue otherwise. I'm just arguing that most of the country isn't like Texas.

> "What's the basis for this statement?"

I know people who live all over the country. I see their vacation photos on facebook. And even those who live in pretty well-served areas (like NYC or Boston) don't make 100% of their out-of-town trips along the covered interstates -- sometimes they go visit a cousin in Cleveland, and NYC to Cleveland via I-80 isn't covered by the network. Even NYC to Buffalo is questionably covered.

> "that's not where most people live"

The Metro Statistical Areas of NYC, LA, DC, Philly, Miami, and Boston account for about 56 million people combined. Dallas, Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta are poorly covered and account for 29m. Of the next 10 MSAs on the list (populations in the 3m-4m range), 5 of them are pretty well covered in all directions and 5 have significant gaps. If you account for the whole top 50 MSAs, I only see another 6 that are well-covered along all major travel routes -- bringing the total population in those well-covered areas to around 85m. The US population is around 320m total.

My contention is that the majority of the US population lives in areas that are not well covered, and that even those who live in well-covered areas will on average have at least one trip they'd like to take that isn't served by the network.

Now, don't get me wrong here. I'm not saying the network "sucks" or is "useless" like a previous poster. I'm saying that it's not yet built out to the point where it's suitable for the majority of the population for 100% of trips. It's suitable for the majority of the population for 80-90% of trips, maybe, but not 100%. Those who live in well-covered cities and make all of their trips on well-covered routes are actually in a distinct minority, perhaps one that is well represented on Hacker News, but a minority nonetheless. Which means there will be some market penetration by the Model 3, and other pure-electric vehicles with a ~200 mile range and the ability to recharge quickly, but we're still several years away from the transition from "this is a good solution for some people" to "this is a good solution for almost everyone". Right now, plug-in hybrids are a viable solution for a much larger slice of the population.

I can't think of many homes where the 240V is easily accessible.

"I'm sorry Jane, would you mind terribly unhooking the clothes dryer and pulling it away from the wall so I can charge up my car while we visit."

And what's the big deal with that? Oh dear, unplugging an appliance.

Compare to: "I'm sorry Jane, would you mind terribly if I place a tank full of volatile and carcinogenic liquid next to your house?"

Gas cars have their own problems, we're just used to them by now. EVs aren't perfect, and there are many legitimate scenarios where they aren't (yet) practical, but their problems get exaggerated beyond belief.

I live in the Northeastern US and that situation would be 70% of my out of town trips, and I take a real lot of out of town trips. I don't think I'm very atypical, but maybe I am?

I think the point is most people don't want to plan all of their activities around the needs of their car.

My point is that most people's activities will fit fine within an EV's capabilities as-is, without having to think about it.

I understand that there are people where this is not the case, and that some of the people commenting on this thread are in that group. I just don't think that it's the common case anymore.

I do almsot this exact route(296mi roundtrip) about once a week.

Only reason at all I bought a Tesla is there's a Supercharger about 60mi from my house on that route. I can do the trip in good weather without the Supercharger. However with cold it becomes necessary.

Other fast charging? Forget about it. All the CHAdeMO along the route(there is only two) are 40kw which would take me 3x longer to charge. Also the tend to be non-functional regualrly and only have 1-2 slots vs 8 for the Supercharger.

The reason I started the parent thread is exactly this, once you own an EV with 120kw charging it changes everything for long trips.

What if grandma lives in an apartment?

>There's a range calculator on the Model S webpage. If you drop the temperature and turn on the heater, even the 90 kWh battery doesn't have 240 miles range.

Yeah, it seemed at least three years ago driving from DC to Boston in the winter was pretty much impossible... and that's one of the most traveled routes in the country.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/automobiles/stalled-on-the...

There's a lot of people I talk to who the only driving they do is from home to work to the grocery store. These are the ones insisting very loudly that range isn't an issue with EVs and there's no convincing them otherwise, its only a theoretical problem for them.

If you drive like an idiot, fail to think for yourself, and perhaps deliberately try to run down the battery, then it was pretty much impossible.

And three years is a long time. Here's what the Supercharger situation looked like then:

http://mikeash.com/tmp/screenshot_AFED015E-139C-420B-A040-FE...

Here's what it looks like today:

http://mikeash.com/tmp/screenshot_A922B393-0F4B-4E07-9CEA-50...

You'll notice a slight increase in the availability of chargers along that corridor.

In my experience, the people insisting very loudly than range isn't an issue with EVs are all Tesla owners who have taken their cars on 1,000 mile road trips, while the people who insist that Superchargers are worthless and long trips in EVs are terrible are all working from partial information, speculation, and imagination.

Great. Now you're limited to eating only somewhere in the vicinity of a charging station. Personal vehicles are there to facilitate your life, not the other way around.

In a non-EV I have to go out of my way to find a gas station several times a month even if I'm always within range of home.

I'm not going to say that EVs are always perfect, but for many people, the charging experience can overall be a a point in favor, not against. It's not like traditional cars are perfect in this regard, we've just become used to them.

EV is a non-starter for me explicitly because I have to park on the street. The 'charge at home' thing doesn't work unless you have a garage-laden suburbia. The charging-at-home experience is highly dependent on whether or not the person has a garage, really.

The requirement is really just a dedicated parking spot, not a garage. The two often go together, but certainly not always.

I totally agree that if you park on the street, it's not going to work well for you right now. Eventually we'll get to the point where charging is plentiful even for street parking, but that's going to be a very long time.

I can see it now, the dangrossman of turn-of-the-20th-century pointing out that these new-fangled motor carriages need these so-called fuel pumps, and t'ain't any in a 10-county region 'round 'im.

The OP's point stands, for the target market. dangrossman, to some extent myself, and others like us, are not the target market. And that's okay. This is the Zen of new tech that drags in a significant logistical tail along with it. For those whom the tech works, great, for all others...wait.

We are still years away from the days when EV's are soccer-mom-mainstream. In the early days of motor cars, people (mostly men) planned their trips around known fueling and maintenance garages, and we are in a similar phase right now with EV's. Be happy with your internal combustion/diesel/hybrid vehicle until the EV industry works out the infrastructure and products so you can drive to your grandparents without planning the trip, and be happy there are millions of customers in the intervening years willing to shell out the R&D bucks ahead of you to make that eventuality possible.

The really interesting options EV's open up are in fuel sourcing. The power generation/storage tech is approachable enough that individuals or small groups can source their own if desired, and with software-mediated assistance, even perform small-scale "load balancing". We've barely scratched the surface in these directions.

Funny, I don't know how you got this impression. I drive a Leaf, one of those "new-fangled" EVs, as I've mentioned elsewhere on this page. I plan around that range every day, not just theoretical holidays at grandma's. My comment was about how carmakers other than Tesla are going to be able to sell EVs to early adopters despite not having the Supercharger network because (a) the Supercharger network isn't near most routes in much of the US, and (b) the non-Tesla charging network is even larger and still growing.

I think the GP pointing out the Supercharger network as a positive selling/marketing point when contrasting with other EV manufacturers is valid, but it read to me like you were discounting their position; sorry I misread, I can see what you are getting at now. My reply was meant to address that in such early days with early adopters like yourself, gaps in infrastructure for certain individuals---even early adopters like you---are part of the landscape. The Supercharger network was never meant to be a fast-growing, practical, charging network, it served a different purpose and that it doesn't fit your individual use case, I'm claiming, is A-OK in this early state of the market.

I suspect the Supercharger network was initially only meant to address a marketing point: an EV couldn't drive cross-country in a roughly comparable time span as an ICE. This was an extreme form of the range anxiety played upon by detractors. The Supercharger stations went a long ways towards defusing that sales objection for the target market. Turn back the pages of history and you'll find exactly the same marketing stunt was performed for ICE's. People planned expeditions across the country on rutted dirt and mud tracks that were only charitably called roads, and staged fuel in advance like mountain climbers staged base camps with supplies, at extraordinary cost and effort. If my suspicion is correct, then the Supercharger network not being near most routes means it was never meant to really serve most routes, only sufficiently enough routes to serve its key initial purpose to TSLA. If that purpose happened to fit some small target market, then TSLA is happy to take that market (and any adjacencies they can take for a marginal cost of adding a Supercharger station here or there), but I don't think TSLA plans on the Supercharger network becoming the way to recharge.

The closest analogy I can think of for the net is Google Fiber. I don't think GOOG plans on GF becoming the way to access the net, they are just pointing/prodding the way forward.

That leaves me wondering though, if the non-TSLA charging networks have built their charging stations to be easily upgrade-able to higher voltages and amperages in the future; the ones I've casually inspected don't seem to lead to some conduit or similar infrastructure that can easily swap for bigger buss bars or similar. Ripping and replacing all that pavement and underground infrastructure to bring in more current has got to be murder on the capital budget. Someone must have made the calculation and figured out that the adoption rate is too slow to build in that expand-ability up-front.

As maxerickson points out below, the Supercharger network is highly likely to be completely overwhelmed by the time Model 3 gets into the hands of most people. The popular stations near me in LA are often very close to capacity already (even after expansions), and that's with just 70,000ish cars on the road. With another 70k Model S/X and 200k Model 3 roaming the streets, either Tesla is going to have to start charging to use the stations, or people are going to be waiting in line. And waiting in line means probably adding another 20 minutes to an already long fill-up. Either way, the "huge difference" needs to be tempered against reality because the experience today will not be the same as the experience 3-4 years from now.

Making superchargers free was a really stupid move on Tesla's part, IMO. Humans often do really irrational things to save money, especially if they're receiving something for free. I've seen people wait in line for half an hour to save 50 cents on gasoline.

Why not charge market rate, exactly the same as if you charged it at home? Then you wouldn't get people charging up at the supercharger purely for cost reasons, and who would complain about being able to fill up your car for $5?

Edit: I thought Musk said that model 3 supercharger access would be free, but perhaps he just said that there would be access and didn't say it would be free? The introduction of the 3 would be a good time to start charging for supercharger access. Free access could be considered a perk of the high end models, and model 3 users are probably more price conscious and likely to abuse free access to chargers.

Tesla charged S/X owners $2,000 for "free" supercharging for life. Based on my first 3 years of S ownership, Tesla's making a lot of margin from me on that part of the car. I'm OK with that, I love having low-friction fast charging on long trips.

Currently on the Canadian configurator for the S, free supercharging is a standard feature. I thought the only car that didn't include supercharging was the P40, which they cancelled and never delivered (delivering instead software limited P60's to those who preordered the P40).

So when they charged $2000, what happened if you didn't pay the $2000? No access to supercharging, or paid access to supercharging?

Charging a flat rate is even worse than giving it away, IMO. Many people have the mindset that if they had to pay for it, they're going to make sure they get full value for their dollars.

Unless you specifically want a pure EV, a hybrid with a gasoline-powered generator onboard is going to be more practical. I have a different perspective because there are no superchargers within 50 miles, and in fact for the most common longer drives I make there are no SuperChargers within range of the vehicle. So they are a non-factor in any consideration I would have in deciding on a possible EV purchase.

300,000 new Tesla's on the road should boost that number, however I would like to see a Tesla range extending roof box with a small engine in, however unlikely.

I'm guessing at some point they're gonna realize they have to come to Tesla cap in hand and ask to plug into theirs.

Tesla might say yes. They want EVs to win, not just their particular brand. They're already giving away the juice. My guess is they'd just ask the other companies to shoulder their share of the bill.

I doubt it, there's ~4,000 plugs right now, the Tesla "experience" gets watered down when you have to wait for the plebes to charge their POS daily driver.

I wouldn't be real shocked if the Model 3 has to pay to charge. Not only because of the electricity cost, to keep the stations available.

Do we know if the fast charge power connectors going to be compatible? There's an industry standard SAE J1772 which Tesla at least has adapters to support.

CCS and CHAdeMO have similar voltages so I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla can use them(they already have an adapter for CHAdeMO).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com