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Comment by bnycum | Hacker News Reader

I live in a city that’s within the top 150 by population, we have one Tesla supercharger. It’s at a nearly dead mall, only food there is a cafeteria style restaurant that isn’t great and no theater or anything. That mall borders a somewhat sketchy part of town. That’s my experience knowing EV charging unfortunately.

Also the lack of charging means I could not drive an EV to visit family members, only destination charging available at hotels where I wouldn’t be staying.

Obviously the supercharging network is constantly growing and it’s all still new, but in my neck of the woods its still pretty tough to have.

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Top 150 is a weird stat to quote, as if you were trying to make your city (or town) seem larger than it is.

Assuming you mean the US, the 150th-largest city is Salem, Oregon, which has 174K people. [1] If that's the size of your city, and it's not in a part of the country that tends to buy Teslas, I'm slightly impressed that you have even have one supercharger.

[1] https://www.biggestuscities.com/

I mean technically I’m a city and a town away, but I was more just giving an example of the area that we are probably bigger than say just a rest area charger. Having only seen this one, it taints my perception of traveling with an electric vehicle. There are quite a few Tesla’s around here, and my neighborhood.

Aren't most superchargers (at least until relatively recently) actually between cities, not in them? The idea being that superchargers are primarily meant for road trips, so if you're going from city A to city B the assumption is you can charge at your origin and destination, so superchargers are spaced so you have enough juice to get there.

There's urban chargers at 72kw and highway superchargers at 150-250kw max charging rate. The urban ones are often at major shopping destinations in high traffic areas.

Actually recently Urban SC development has seemed to come to almost a halt. Even in Urban settings it seems they much prefer to just put in the V3 cabinets with the 250kW max pedestals.

That’d be fine, but it’s 400 miles between here and family with one charger 150 miles from here. I could make it there with any current Tesla, but not make it back to a charger. Could make it work renting an RV spot but that’s still a little inconvenient.

We drive to the in-laws, and just unplug their dryer and plug the Tesla adapter in and get back to full charge the next day.

Shreveport, LA or Pearl, MS?

Ha, I’m near Shreveport.

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