Tesla To Blanket US With Superchargers In Two Years 311
dublin writes "Electric car manufacturer Tesla is planning to triple its construction of "supercharger" rapid charging stations, with a trail of stations in place for L.A. to New York trips by the end of this year. In addition to the east & west coasts, islands in Colorado, Illinois, and Texas will grow together to cover nearly the entire continental US by 2015. The two biggest obstacles for electric cars are high cost and range problems. Cost is still a problem, but this move to blanket the US with supercharger stations could fix the range half of the e-car equation."
If you build it, they will come (Score:4, Interesting)
Electric cars have long been a chicken or egg problem. We would have gladly rented a Tesla model S for our trip to New Orleans from Dallas last weekend (Elon, lend me a car when we can do this and we'll document the trip), but A) you can't readily rent a Tesla and b) there are no charging stations yet.
I think it's interesting that they're building out a "free forever" stations, and carpeting the nation with them. They probably represent a fixed cost, as you can only charge so many cars per day, and eventually competing stations will pop up along the most popular routes. Electricity really isn't that expensive.
I was thinking about how US automakers might try and sue Tesla in federal court over providing "fuel" for the cars, but I wonder if the "free forever" is due in part to the fact that it's much more difficult to sue a company for anti-competitive practices if there's no money changing hands in the fueling process.
Re:... with government funds and subsidized chargi (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, you are a bit off, Cost of install depends on size of install. 4 station charger will cost more than a 1 or 2 station. The power draw is easy enough to get around as they are installed in commercial districts with more than enough power available. Most of them are being installed in conjunction with Solar panels anyways. Eventually these will be refueling stations at a cost to all electric cars so the costs to build them will be fully recouped.
Re:... with government funds and subsidized chargi (Score:2, Interesting)
You're right that they're more efficient than combustion engines, but so are bicycles. The point is that fast charges are not the future-- they're a dead end to a technology.
Battery swapping, on the other hand, is the most cost efficient, environmentally friendly, and quickest form of refueling an battery EV.
Re:As far as I'm concerned . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
cost is the MAIN problem.
Wait till you get to replace those batteries and discover the real costs :D
From what I've read about the Prius the battery life is exceeding expectations by a wide margin.
Most drivers have never faced a battery replacement, because they are easily managing 10 years (200K miles) and the batteries
have shown no sign of needing replacement [wikipedia.org].
Admittedly it costs around 2000 to 2500 bucks when you do need a replacement, although salvage yards will sell them
to you for around $500. A cottage industry has sprung up refurbing Prius batteries.
EVs not really for long road trips (Score:5, Interesting)
I feel like this is trying to force the current gas station paradigm (refuel, adding 300-500 miles of range in 5-10 minutes) onto EVs, when that paradigm doesn't really fit well.
Based on a little Googling, Tesla's Superchargers can apparently charge 50% of an 85 kwh battery in about 30 minutes. Not bad (a bit over twice the charge rate of DC fast charging on a Leaf), but based on the EPA estimated range of 265 miles, that gives you about 130 miles of range. So every 130 miles, you stop for 30 minutes - more if all Superchargers at a station are in use. While I'm all for taking frequent breaks on long trips, this is a lot more than the usual 10 minutes every few hundred miles.
To match gas station refuel times, the power requirements get ridiculous pretty fast. Superchargers put out 120 kw according to Tesla. Let's say we have a hypothetical battery that can take a full 85-kwh charge (265 miles) in 5 minutes like a gas pump. That's 12 times faster than the Supercharger rate of half-capacity in 30 minutes, or 1.44 MW per car! By way of comparison, most (many?) homes in the US have 240-volt, 100-amp service, or 24 kw maximum available power. 1.44 MW is equivalent to 60 homes all maxed out and about to trip breakers! If a typical charging station will service a similar number of cars as a gas station, multiply that by maybe 10 - or 600 maxed out homes. For one refueling station. Insanity. It gets even worse if you want more than 265 miles of range in 5 minutes.
The bottom line is that even if battery technology gets there, how will the grid handle such quick charging? I see that being the bigger obstacle to EV road trips as convenient as gas-powered trips are now.
The easier solution is to shift the paradigm - how we think about and use our vehicles. Everyone could have an EV for commuting and regular driving within its nominal range. You charge at night or any other time when you're not using the car anyway - NOT when you are on a trip and just want to keep going (but can't, until you wait to recharge). If/when you need to take a long road trip, you take a gas-powered car. Either an extra car in your household, a rental, borrowed from someone you know. Whatever. Or if you're not hauling a bunch of stuff, maybe it makes more sense to fly.
As a current EV owner (Nissan Leaf), I've already made the switch in paradigm - and I love it. I'm saving tons of money on fuel costs, driving my Leaf over 16k miles per year. Pretty much every trip within its range will use that car, because it's cheaper and fun to drive. Going to Vegas (from SoCal)? We use the other car. Or any longer trip. Most multi-driver households have multiple cars, so road trips shouldn't really be an issue. I think this kind of strategy makes way more sense than seriously increasing travel time (waiting to charge) or the failed battery swap idea.
Re:... with government funds and subsidized chargi (Score:5, Interesting)
Battery swapping, on the other hand, is the most cost efficient, environmentally friendly, and quickest form of refueling an battery EV.
That would seem more credible if the company that tried it hadn't recently gone out of business.
Re:Business Model (Score:5, Interesting)
I always figured Tesla would (literally) make a model T, soon after the model S.
The Tesla Model T, the electric car for everyone.
Better be an open system (Score:3, Interesting)
If they only charge Tesla vehicles, that would be like building gas stations that only sell proprietary fuel for Ford vehicles. Maybe sell the juice cheaper to Tesla owners but they need to provide high current plugs for all of the major electric vehicles.
Cross-country travel is still gong to be a hard sell, tho. They're talking about 30 minutes to 50% charge. So call it an hour to 90% and 1.5 hours to 100%. And I assume they're talking about the small Tesla pack to get the best numbers. And non-Tesla vehicles will have to be charged at a more conservative rate so they're going to have people hanging around for an hour or two charging their vehicles. That's a lot of time to kill.
Re:EVs not really for long road trips (Score:5, Interesting)
The easier solution is to shift the paradigm - how we think about and use our vehicles.
This part is right.
If/when you need to take a long road trip, you take a gas-powered car. Either an extra car in your household, a rental, borrowed from someone you know. Whatever.
And this part is totally wrong. The clean solution is to take a page from Europe, make your train network actually useful, and let trains haul you AND your car from one city to another. You drive the station, park your car ONTO the train (as well as charge it if you like), then go sit comfortably in the passenger cart of the same train, let it take you to the destination city, and then get on your car and drive away.
The train ticket may sound expensive, but if you account for the fact you saved fuel/electricity cost for the car, and you can comfortably rest or sleep overnight for the entire trip, it is a bargain.
You have such a big problem with long road trips in the US because your train network sucks.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
Germany has so much solar because it has *insane* subsidies. It's moronic *not* to put money in solar in Germany, because (although this is changing), any excess power you produce *must* be bought by the power company at a very hefty multiple of the normal price. Germany is *not* the way we want to go here - in fact, the rush to solar and the Green's crusade against nuclear have created very significant instability in Germany' power grid. They are not far from the time that a large, dark front could crash the country.
Germany's subsidies are a lesson in how to create a really unsustainable ecosystem. It only works because Germany's industrial base is a world leader and makes enough to keep the socialist redistribution (barely) afloat. With its current balance of trade, I'm not sure that the US could even pull off German-style subsidies, and the Germans themselves are backing away from them very quickly as they begin to see the train wreck unfold.
BTW, fraud and abuse is rampant in the industry in general (I work in solar, and have worked int he oil industry - "green energy" really is thousands of times sleazier than oil & gas ever was) - in Spain, for instance (which also pays a premium for power delivered from solar plants), a large solar PV farm was caught using a bunch of generators to inject power into the grid at night - not only was this dirtier than a real power plant, they were getting many. many times more for that power since it was "green" because it came from a solar plant!