The Charge Port Location Problem
Or why Tesla Superchargers need longer cables.
I experienced an interesting situation over the weekend.
I was at the Everything Electric North event in Harrogate. As I am an early riser I decided I’d head over to the public Tesla Supercharger site at Crimple Hall and charge my car at the ultra cheap rates there (32p/kWh) before 8am.
At 06.35 I turned up at the 6 unit site in my Polestar 2 to find every charger occupied.
No problem. The app told me the average wait would be about 5 minutes. But here’s where it got interesting. Every single vehicle charging at the site was a non-Tesla with the charge port on the ‘wrong’ side for the units.
With Superchargers they are designed - mostly- for cars that have the charge port at the rear left of the vehicle 1 . They have short cables that work very well with ports in this location. However, with cars that have ports on the rear right of the car they still work BUT you have to use the charger from the adjacent bay to plug in. This means that although that adjacent bay is empty a Tesla or other left-rear chargeport car (such as my Polestar 2) cannot charge there.
With 6 chargers and 6 vehicles using the site I couldn’t charge anyway even if they had all been Teslas. That’s fine. I’m OK with a short wait.
True to form, about 5 minutes after I arrived one of the cars unplugged and left. But because of the issue I highlighted above I couldn’t use that bay. The charger I would need to plug into was occupied by the vehicle in the adjacent bay.
In fact, the situation meant that I could only charge under one of two conditions-
- If the vehicle on the extreme left of the rank of chargers left OR
- Two vehicles in the middle left.
I waited for about 25 minutes - allowing 2 other ‘wrong-side’ vehicles to go ahead of me in the meantime - hoping that 2 spaces would open up.
Finally, one opened in the middle and one opened on the end. I approached one of the two vehicles I had waved ahead of me and asked if he’d be willing to move up to the bay at the far right and free up 2 bays in the middle. He did so and I was able to charge.
Am I posting this as a complaint? No. Once Tesla opened their chargers to all vehicles there was always going to be the issue of ‘bay blocking’ due to non standardisation of charge port locations. I’ve been on the other side of this situation where I’ve bypassed cars waiting at a Tesla Supercharger because they needed 2 bays to open to allow them to use the ‘wrong’ charger in an adjacent bay.
I can also understand the frustration from Tesla drivers who see available chargers being blocked by cars with the incorrectly located charge port. But I also know that there are roughly the same number of Tesla Superchargers open to the public as there are open only to Teslas.
I see this as a maturation of the charging market. As Tesla upgrade their sites to V4 hardware and relocate chargers so they are perpendicular to the bay rather than parallel this problem will go away.
In the meantime I’ll remember that the non-Tesla drivers who are motivated enough will get up early to go and sit at a Supercharger to get 32p/kWh charging.
As a small postscript to this: When I plugged in the Genesis using the unit next to me was sitting at 75% state of charge. I charged for about 21 minutes. When I left the Genesis was still plugged in charging, presumably, to 100% and proving that reduced price charging is something people are looking for everywhere.
Where do you sit with the whole ‘opening Tesla Superchargers to the general public situation’?
Some of the newer locations have V4 Superchargers that have much longer cables