Skating to where the puck is going

[strife]

A big part of Tesla's strategy is to put charging stations at Rest areas on highways (they have 3 off I-95 in Connecticut already), so it would be a normal part of a trip to stop and get some food, use the bathroom etc. while it charges. I think you get a 70% charge in 40 minutes at the Supercharger stations. Remember, the only time you really need a charging station for a Tesla is for long trips. If you go to their site, they have a map for planned stations, with the intent by end of 2014 of having a station within max charge range anywhere in the country.

In a perfect world that's right... but let's use my perfectly plausible scenarios.

Bob has a Tesla A which has an estimate range of 205 miles(depending on which battery he has). Bob works 60 miles from his home, so day 1 Bob drives to work and back for 120 miles, goes home and forgets to plug in his car. The next day he gets up, drives to work and on his way home realizes he forgot to charge his car last night. So here is Bob needing to drive 60 miles from work in a car that only has 25 miles of range left. In a gas powered car, this is no problem. Stop at the next light and 5 minutes later he's good to go. But he doesn't, so he has to find the nearest charging station and wait 40 minutes to get a full charge... or wait 20 minutes to get half charge just enough to make it home and then charge again from home.


Plausible scenario 2. I'm taking a road trip from Houston to El Paso which is 763 miles. I leave the house and driving 80 MPH(will they even go 80MPH w/out wasting extra battery?) average I get close to my 205 mile range after about 2 1/2 hours. We stop and get some food and use the can and wait the 40 minutes to get charged again. Get back in the car, drive 205 miles more and wait 40 minutes to get charged again. Repeat again and we're now 615 miles into our 763 mile trip. We've now wasted 2 hours charging our cars that we could have been driving, so this trip that should have taken us about 10 hours is now up to 12 hours just because of having to charge.


Also, 40 minutes for a charge... better hope they have 100's of charging stations... having cars sit there for 40 minutes if they ever get anywhere close to popular is going to be a hell of a backup.