Tesla Supercharger fizzled out on me today

[MrLoganRoss]

I should start by saying that when I travel, I have been renting either a lightning or a mache
-e, and using an electron adapter to charge a Tesla.

Today, I happened to be traveling a little bit further from my house, to Bothell, Washington. I decided to test my A2Z and Ford manufactured adapters. Unfortunately, I did not have a great experience. I started with the Ford adapter, and charging was rolling along at 180 kW until I reached 50% state of charge and then it inexplicably dropped to 27 kW. I stopped the charging and switched to the a 2Z adapter, but got a charging station fault. I started again with the Ford adapter, but it didn’t go any higher than 27 kW. I gave up, and drove to an electrify America site and the truck charged with the expected curve.
Strange. Maybe there were too many people charging at the Tesla site and it was throttling back. It looks like I will be bringing the Lectron with me on my next trip just in case.

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[COrocket]

Some of the older Tesla stations power share with an adjacent stall eg. 2A and 2B split capacity when two vehicles are plugged in. It’s something to watch when the stations are not busy and only a few people are charging.

Or the truck battery could have reached a higher than ideal temperature and commanded a reduction in charging speed.

Or the station simply could have partially failed. Sometimes moving chargers can fix a problem like that, either because of a charge failure or the power share thing. Newer superchargers have the capacity to dedicate 250+kw to each stall and use a more robust power supply equipment so the experience should get better over time, especially as the longer cords come online.

 

[MrLoganRoss]

Great points. Since the EA charger down the worked fine I am going to assume the Tesla charger was the issue. I will say that it had a long cord, so I assumed it was a newer generation.

 

[potato]

Some of the older Tesla stations power share with an adjacent stall eg. 2A and 2B split capacity when two vehicles are plugged in. It’s something to watch when the stations are not busy and only a few people are charging.

This is true, but not at any station at which a CCS vehicle can charge. On the V3 and V4 cabinets the power sharing is per group of 8 dispensers I think? Not A/B like the V2s.

 

[RickLightning]

Lectron...

 

[The Weatherman]

Great points. Since the EA charger down the worked fine I am going to assume the Tesla charger was the issue. I will say that it had a long cord, so I assumed it was a newer generation.

That is a V4 cabinet.

 

[Charge_Rob]

I should start by saying that when I travel, I have been renting either a lightning or a mache
-e, and using an electron adapter to charge a Tesla.

Today, I happened to be traveling a little bit further from my house, to Bothell, Washington. I decided to test my A2Z and Ford manufactured adapters. Unfortunately, I did not have a great experience. I started with the Ford adapter, and charging was rolling along at 180 kW until I reached 50% state of charge and then it inexplicably dropped to 27 kW. I stopped the charging and switched to the a 2Z adapter, but got a charging station fault. I started again with the Ford adapter, but it didn’t go any higher than 27 kW. I gave up, and drove to an electrify America site and the truck charged with the expected curve.
Strange. Maybe there were too many people charging at the Tesla site and it was throttling back. It looks like I will be bringing the Lectron with me on my next trip just in case.

This mirrors my experience with V4 stalls, 3 times at one site in Madison, Wisconsin the exact same thing happened, each time I unplugged and moved the truck, only to have it repeat, and after I unplugged each time the stall itself went "Out of Order" in Tesla's app and "Unavailable" in FordPass. I was the only vehicle on site so it wasn't power sharing.

So it's not you, and not your adapter. Best guess is it's a fault in the V4 dispenser or cabinet that fails-safe to that power level.

 

[ddimit]

Some of the older Tesla stations power share with an adjacent stall eg. 2A and 2B split capacity when two vehicles are plugged in. It’s something to watch when the stations are not busy and only a few people are charging.

Or the truck battery could have reached a higher than ideal temperature and commanded a reduction in charging speed.

Or the station simply could have partially failed. Sometimes moving chargers can fix a problem like that, either because of a charge failure or the power share thing. Newer superchargers have the capacity to dedicate 250+kw to each stall and use a more robust power supply equipment so the experience should get better over time, especially as the longer cords come online.

Only older V2 power share and those are not compatible with non-tesla vehicles

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