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Tesla Is Rethinking the Rest Stop For California Road Trips (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In-N-Out Burgers has some new competition for attracting drivers on two heavily traveled stretches of California freeways that help link Los Angeles to Las Vegas and San Francisco: Tesla's biggest Supercharger stations yet. The charging stations in Kettleman City, off Interstate 5, and Baker, near Interstate 15, each have 40 stalls, making them the largest among more than 1,000 in North America, according to an emailed statement Wednesday. If filling up your Tesla takes half an hour, you might as well get comfortable. The Kettleman City station north of Bakersfield has a play wall for kids, a pet relief area and outdoor space for families. It's open round-the-clock, there's wi-fi and there will be food as well. But if you want to stretch your legs, the nearest In-N-Out is just across the street. And there are inevitable Tesla touches at both: solar-covered parking and Tesla Powerpacks.
Not 40x50kW. 20x145kW max. Each Tesla Supercharger (excluding the new urban superchargers) delivers a max of 145kW to up to two stalls, with a maximum of 120kW per stall.
Most supercharger stations aren't battery buffered, but the new ones (and particularly large ones) increasingly are. This isn't designed so much as to provide backup power when the grid is down (although it will do so at low demand times) as it is to buffer out the surges between vehicles, reducing the peak draw and thus getting lower demand charges on their power bill. It also lets them incorporate the solar awnings (not the majority of the power delivered, but still useful).
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
You lack vision, but I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night. Soon, where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
They have to start somewhere. You don't have to have the capacity to charge a population of 90% electric cars when the population doesn't currently have 90% electric cars. Just pace your scaling just ahead of demand and you are fine, no need to go overboard otherwise you suck at business.
2007 called and they want their predictions back.
You can fast-charge to about 80% for one - and not in the theoretical 'we did it in the lab' but in the actual 'pull into a supercharger stall and it happens' kind of way. Battery life is something Tesla very, VERY carefully tracks and ... guess what? The packs are quite durable.
Heat management is also built into the packs since the peak power *output* is greater (though not sustained) than the supercharger input...oh, and they have to do thermal management from below freezing to over 100 degrees anyway.
And to wrap it up, no one is saying EVs are charging at parity with ICE. We aren't there yet...hence the point of TFA about rest stops so people can make use of the 30-60 minutes of down time.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Give it a fucking rest already
Perhaps we could use this new rest stop for that?
Ezekiel 23:20
Meanwhile in the real world:
1) Teslas use NCA, not LCO or LFP
2) Model 3 can add 70-75 miles per 10 minutes charging at under 50% DoD (slow taper down after that, still fast), easily enough for road tripping without extra delays beyond meals and bathroom / stretch breaks.
3) It's unusual to charge to full (which takes about 75 minutes, not 3 hours) when on road trips; you generally charge to 80% or so. Or less if you're planning a stop at a certain point for which 80% would be overkill.
4) Model 3 (which can take up to 525A, versus the current 300A that superchargers can provide - aka, has the potential to charge *even faster*) uses a fan and radiator to get rid of waste heat while supercharging. There are louvres under the air dam that open up when there's heat that needs to be rid of and close otherwise.
5) Any need for faster charging than a vehicle can get rid of waste heat can be done with a cooled cable, with the charge port incorporating a heat exchanger - aka, waste heat goes into the cable coolant and back to the charger (which would have coolant tanks and a chiller). You don't need a thicker wire - just a cooled wire, and current can be increased by 1-2 orders of magnitude (passive air cooling of cables is a very slow way to get rid of heat)
6) It's not the "fill time" that matters for gasoline vehicles, it's the overhead. I've actually taken measurements on this - "speed running" gas station fills. With a gas station immediately on the way (no detouring), no traffic (waiting for a single car turning in front of you can significantly slow you down - let alone having to wait for a pump), paying with a RFID tag rather than credit card (faster), unscrewing the cap while validating the tag to save time, and filling up a car with a very small fuel tank, I find that the minimum time before I rejoin my path home is three minutes. Meanwhile, in your everyday life, an EV fuels in 10 seconds: 5 seconds to plug in in the evening, 5 seconds to unplug in the morning. In the comfort of your garage.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
About fast charging, I've seen that Tesla use Panasonic NCR18650B batteries, looking at the datasheet ( http://www.batteryspace.com/pr... ), I see a maximum charging current of 0.5C and it takes nearly 2 hours to get to 80%. I'm genuinely curious as how they manage to get so far out of specs and still maintain decent longevity. Please enlighten me because seriously, every single technical writing I've seen related to Li-ion batteries don't match real-life results, especially regarding fast charge.
There is a Tesla charging station at Harris Ranch in Coalinga.
https://www.harrisranch.com/complex/tesla-charging-station-battery-swap/
There's a hotel there as well, and the Harris Ranch restaurant serves one of the best steaks money can buy. I stop in there every time I have to drive the I5.
"The median range for electric cars these days is just short of a single tank of gas, around 380km."
Ahem ... A typical North American sedan will have a practical range of about 300-400 miles on a tank of gas -- that's 480-645km. Of course, some folks prefer absurd vehicles with worse mileage. But I assume they have larger fuel tanks to compensate.
I also don't believe for a second that the median range of current EVs is 380km although I'm sure that a few can manage that on a nice Spring day starting with 100% charge on a reasonably new battery pack.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey