Tesla Asks Drivers To Vote On New Supercharger Locations, But Will They Be Rural?

Tesla has opened up a site that allows Tesla owners to vote on new locations for them to install Superchargers. Tesla’s supercharging network is by far the best and has been, and is, a major advantage conferred by buying one of their cars. The vote will capture different opinions on popular locations, but it’s an interesting question whether popularity is the best metric.

When Tesla first introduced their network, it was 100% there to sell cars by making Tesla buyers know they could take intercity road trips in their cars, something not really practical at all in electric vehicles of the time. The charging was in fact free for the lifetime of the car, and so a cost center for Tesla, but it made people more willing to buy a Tesla. The early network had very few stations in cities — the stations were along highways to enable those trips, mostly the interstates.

Over time, things changed. Stations showed up in cities, and owners used them to charge even in their home city, mainly those who didn’t or couldn’t install charging in their homes. Over 80% of EV owners charge at home, and that is definitely the easiest and cheapest place to do so, but not all can do it. With this, Tesla stopped giving free unlimited charging to new buyers, instituting prices that were much higher than charging at home but more reasonable — Tesla claimed they were priced at break even, around 25 to 30 cents/kWh. For a while, the Tesla referral program handed out 1000 mile free supercharging rewards to buyer and referrer, but this ended.

Today, supercharging has gotten much more expensive — as much as 60 cents/kWh during daytime hours at some locations. Urban stations have also become larger and more common. Tesla also recently released a $250 adapter that allows post-2020Teslas to make use of the CCS stations used by most other vehicles. A retrofit for older ones will be available next year. There are rumors of Tesla adapting its stations so that non-Tesla CCS cars can charge there, but as yet this has not happened.

Because of this, the Tesla network is a major competitive advantage. Not only is it large and fast, it is considerably more reliable than the various CCS networks out there. Those CCS networks have grown quite a bit, and now some can charge some cars even faster than Tesla superchargers, but with Teslas being the only car that can use all networks, and the car that can use the largest network, road trips in Teslas are vastly easier and more pleasant than with other cars, and many people will still give the recommendation that if you want to do long intercity drives, a Tesla has clear advantages over the others.

Back to Rural

Recent government plans such as the Inflation Reduction Act offer large subsidies for the installation of fast chargers. Many of these fast chargers will end up being in cities and perhaps along major highways, as these will be the locations where people drive the most and which thus are the most popular. Certainly popular locations have some merit — there must be enough charging capacity along the highways for everybody to drive them and charge conveniently. But for the larger problem of getting the world to switch from gasoline to EVs, popularity is not the only metric.

In cities, charging at home or work is clearly superior to the gasoline thinking of fast charging to replace that. Only a little of the money is allocated to that. Charging needs to be put into apartment parking lots and office/commuter lots. This is particularly true as we attempt to move to a solar powered grid. The solar powered grid will offer cheap surplus power from 9am to 3pm, and so that is the time that cars should charge. You want them plugged in during those hours so you need to put charging in the places that cars are parked during those hours. You don’t want people charging in the afternoon or evening, as they might do fast charging while shopping or running errands.

The other big factor is Tesla’s original plan. Buyers want to know that getting an EV is not a compromise over their old gasoline car. This is a must to bring about the complete switch that some states like California have already mandated. Today, if you have charging at home, it’s true — an electric car is superior in every way to the gasoline car. It’s even cheaper, when you look at lifetime cost of ownership. Even though it costs more to buy, it costs so much less to run that it wins on every account.

The main remaining place of compromise is on those intercity and tourism road trips. In order to convince buyers that an EV is superior in every way — which means you don’t even need a legal mandates to get people to switch — you want to remove that compromise. This can be done with faster charging, but also by placing charging at the places people already stop on their trips.

In addition, small amounts of charging need to go into much more remote locations. Today there are still many places where it’s very difficult to travel with an EV compared to a gasoline car. These must be filled in. They don’t need massive 20 stall chargers or 250kW charging. Small stations with 50-100kW can do the job to start. But you can’t just do the main roads — tourism road tripping involves taking side roads and going off the beaten path.

Today, some of the “great road trip” roads are still EV charging deserts. This includes the Alaska Highway (and parallel Cassiar highway) and much of Alaska. It includes the incredible Utah National Parks route on routes 12 and 24 past Bryce Canyon, Escalante and Canyonlands. The Icefields Parkway in Alberta, a contender for the title of the most scenic route in the world, just had a Supercharger added at its Jasper endpoint, but it still is short on charging. There are many other examples around the continent. Almost all of Baja California is without fast charging as well, along with many other areas of Mexico.

To get people to make the switch, you want to tell them, “there’s nowhere you can’t go, and go easily.”

Tesla’s poll does include some of these sites, but it’s incomplete. Some of the sites are doing well in the vote, like Big Bear in the mountains above Los Angeles, the road to Tofino on Vancouver Island, and a site near Bryce Canyon (but not enough further on that route.) Alaska locations are included but no way to get to Alaska from southern BC except the ferry.

These holes can now be filled with CCS chargers as well — and indeed that supports all cars except older Teslas and Leafs. But the CCS networks are not motivated to help EV vendors sell cars the way the Tesla network is. It’s not entirely clear what financial justifications fund the CCS networks, since selling electricity as a commodity is a very difficult business, and arguably not a business at all. But for them the metric continues to be place with lots of traffic, for obvious reasons if one hopes to sell more kWh.

For many of these rural locations, RV parks are a great potential choice, as they already have lots of electrical power in most cases, and are already in all the popular tourist drive locations. Unfortunately there is not always a lot to do at these locations, and you want charging where you can do things or eat.

Solar power (with batteries) can be another way to put charging in locations that there isn’t a lot of grid power.

Tesla’s candidate station is not in Bryce Canyon National Park, it’s outside. This is true of pretty much all charging stations near national parks. Presumably this is because of both lack of power and a surplus of bureaucracy in these parks. But nobody wants to sit for an hour outside the entrance of the parks. The charging should be at the popular parking lots inside the parks if possible. The Dept. of the Interior could do well to try to do everything it can to encourage this, because encouraging EV travel to the parks is a great way to help preserve them, reducing emissions and noise both in the park and elsewhere. The use of solar with storage, or charging stations that are able to make use of spare power from the park’s existing grid(*) can help this happen, though if power is scarce, visitors may need to make a reservation if they want to be assured of use of such chargers.

To make EV charging zero-compromise, you want to do it where you were already going, such as the parking lot for a popular site in the park. That way, it takes zero time out of your day. You just visit as you were going to anyway, enjoy the area, and then leave recharged. (It is necessary to design charging stations which have many cords that share power so that people can go on a long hike without worrying about moving their car when it is full.)

What to subsidize

Tesla’s map actually does have a healthy supply of remote locations. But it still misses out on many of the greats, and still leaves large gaps. If there are going to be subsidies to charging to promote EV switching, it could make sense to allocate some of them to areas that are charging deserts but which still get a reasonable amount of traffic. Tesla has shown it’s even willing to put CCS cables on their stations to get these subsidies. The stations can be small and low power and even solar. Ideally they will make it so that there’s nowhere that you’re more than 100 miles from a charger along all common routes to and from it. Maybe 50 miles. The latter is needed for the next stage — getting RVs and off-road vehicles with trailers to switch to electric. They have a bigger compromise because their range is short.

Read/leave comments here or if you’re a Tesla owner, go vote.