Can someone explain to me why "magic dock" is even necessary?
There must be some hardware limitation related to the cable/station itself, as yeah it would be way cheaper to just flip a software switch and say “here buy our expensive adapter” than to retrofit existing stations with the magic dock. I’m sure if that was doable they would have done it ages ago because they would have made $$$$ off of it. I’d gather near 100% of CCS car buyers would have bought a Tesla supercharger adapter if they could.
Exactly and it honestly seems super counterintuitive and a poor design decision to have some type of authentication or check built into the cable itself rather than it be just a dumb evse and then just control the station with software to authenticate with whoever has the Tesla app and a car near the location to activate it.
NEVI funding requires CCS compatibility without a separate adapter. Building it into the station like that may allow Tesla to bypass the language of that requirement without the cost and redesign of adding a second cable.
Ditto for Arizona.
Taken in reverse order:
Feel free to charge more often. You dictate how often you charge based on how heavy your foot is and how much HVAC you use. Those are the variables you can control. Enjoy.
Not sure why Internet forums always seem to devolve into this kind of "shouting past each other", but I think that what you and vaznayak said regarding speed is basically the same thing: traffic conditions largely dictate your speed. That is, in Texas, there are large stretches of highway where if you travel consistently at 70 MPH that you are likely to be the slowest car on the highway, and you'll be getting constantly passed by big rigs, which is not exactly the most pleasant, nor safest, driving experience. Similarly, on other stretches of highway in other parts of the country, you'll rarely see cars traveling faster than 75 MPH, as you point out.
Good perspective. Although at the Chicopee MA EA in the winter, I never got more than about 150 regardless of SOC and always with preconditioning before charging. That was also true cross country at 150 and 350 EA stations whether empty or with other cars charging.
Yeah not surprising, I feel like everyone gets one or two unicorn high kW sessions from a random EA site, then the rest are inexplicably slow or problematic for no apparent reason regardless of conditions. To be fair that 301kw session I got at Chicopee did quit 12 minutes in for no reason give and I had to reconnect, maybe it overheated.
100% of cars*
A car in 2nd or 3rd gear going 30mph is more efficient than in 5th gear going 65mph? Maybe that’s true but at least with MPG I thought highway efficiency was better than city efficiency? That was one big selling point to my wife for switching out her Subaru which got 24mpg city for the Volvo XC40 recharge which will save us $1700 a year in fuel costs vs charging when you factor in the $10K off MSRP for leasing, making a new nice EV cheaper to own than a 2019 gas car.
Sure, until you go faster. It’s a bell curve (roughly). Low speeds are inefficient. There is a sweet spot, typically 40-55mph, and then you lose efficiency again the faster you go due to additional wind drag and tire compression and a lot of other things. More aerodynamic cars handle this better, but physics is physics. You’re still cutting lots of air, faster.
www.fueleconomy.gov
I live in SLC. And I've done road trips to Vegas California, Arizona, Chicago, ans then DC to SLC last winter.
