No subpanel. There’s also $100 for hooking up the Tesla wall charger so all in all the actual plug isn’t that expensive - it’s all the other stuff.
Ouch. Sucks that the 50% tax credit for EV charging infrastructure expired in December. Thanks, Obama.
It totally does! I didn’t actually know there was one so I guess I don’t feel too bad.
Dr. Strangelove - if you do intend to put in a wall charger, Tesla will send them to you with free shipping, takes about 3-4 days.
I snooped around the garage and various panels, and I think I’m going to just stick with the mobile charger and get a NEMA 6-20 outlet installed. Still a pretty good boost in charge rate, but as best I can tell I don’t really have enough spare capacity to justify the wall charger. I’ll get an electrician over to give me the final word, though.
The autopilot calibration finished as I was driving to work, but I wasn’t in a position to actually try it. Other cars started showing up on the display, though. Cool.
The “sport” steering mode is a very nice improvement. Still not quite BMW level, but close enough. To be honest, much more feedback is probably a comfort decrease, although I personally like the feel. In any case, there’s nothing remotely sloppy or loose about the steering; it has the same “drives on rails” feel of the Bimmer.
I didn’t even think about a second vehicle. Imagine a family with teenagers who need 3 or more chargers.
It’s almost certain to be an issue of “who gets what parking spot” rather than ever needing to charge three cars at one time.
So today I took the owners factory tour at Tesla in Fremont. If you have a chance to go, Dr. S I recommend it. Pretty cool in a fanboy way to see how the sausage is made. Only 1 hour long so I wouldn’t travel for it but if you are in town it’s cool to see.
Cool! Yes, I took the factory tour a while back (though my investment advisor). This was well before any Model 3 work but still very cool. I don’t think I get a free tour from buying the 3, but I’ll have to check into it. I live about 15 minutes away from the factory…
No charge for the tour - available to any owner (I think it includes the 3s, but not sure). Lots of 3s, Xs, and Ss to see in various stages.
Drove in the rain today. Didn’t try to test the limits of the traction control or anything, but the auto-sensing wipers worked well. Not quite as aggressive on misting rain as I’d like, though they still cycled, which is better than the BMW (which never worked in mist). The BMW autowipers also never started on their own; I’d always have to pulse them once to get started. On the 3, they just came on. So, I’m not seeing a real user interface problem here, especially since I still have the stalk button as a backup.
Do a 14-50 plug instead. Just because it’s a 14-50 plug doesn’t mean you can’t use a smaller breaker. And you can set the car to only pull whatever it is you can supply (I guess 20A?). By having the 14-50 plug (and 6 gauge wiring) you’re all set if you later decide you need a panel/service upgrade.
Edit: Just to be clear: The 14-50 plug still uses the mobile charger, no wall unit needed. I’ve been using the mobile charger (and level 2 charging at work) the 4 years I had my car and it’s never been an issue.
Thanks for the suggestion. I live in a condo so it’s likely that a service upgrade isn’t in the cards, but I’ll look into the cost difference. Maybe it’s tiny. Currently, I have a number of 110v outlets in the garage, as well as a 220v/30A box leading to the AC/heater. That seems like the logical place to tap from but I don’t know about the existing wiring or the heater requirements.
After a few days of driving, I can say that I’m very pleased with the minimal interior. Not once have I tried to glance through the wheel at some missing information, and not once have I scrambled through options on the display trying to find something quickly. All the important stuff is already at hand, and the rest is easily accessible. I now prefer the speed to be in the new location since it’s never blocked by my hand or steering spokes, and it’s much larger (and thus requires less time to refocus my slowly decaying eyeballs).
A nice trick with the wipers that I spotted today–pressing the stalk button takes you to the wiper menu regardless of where you are. So if you do find that the auto wipers are insufficient, just tap the stalk button, and it shows the standard intermittent wiper options right there. No need for any swiping.
Another nice thing: I was wrong about not being able to shift directly from reverse to drive. In fact it is allowed, from 1 to 5 mph, which is exactly the range I care about (reversing out of a parking spot and transitioning immediately to drive). It passes through the 0 mph point perfectly, which is awesome. I care a great deal about minimizing the derivative of acceleration.
You don’t like jerk huh? Guess this a good place for you then.
What’s the best you can expect (in hours) with upgraded charger for a complete recharge at home?
A wired-in wall charger peaks at 48 amps, or 44 miles/hour according to the Tesla site. So 6-7 hours, depending on what you set the stop point to.
I’m currently hitting a whopping 4 mph from the 110 outlet. I dialed it back to 10 A charging since I have a fridge on the same circuit and I’m using a short extension cord (a beefy one, though). Still, just last night’s charging put on 60+ miles. I just switched electrical plans and they give me the lowest rates from 11p to 3p on weekends, so I potentially have a good 16 hours of charge time per day.
That would do it.
An obvious solution to this would be to make the chargers come with optional port(s) for a hardwired data cable. (probably ethernet). If you have multiple chargers, you’d link them together with data cables, then set DIP switches inside that limit all paired chargers to some total number of amps.
Then you could potentially have all the chargers on the same 50 amp breaker, and the current limit would then be variable and based on how many EVs are currently charging.
Like so : https://www.evbox.com/learn/faq/how-does-smart-charging-work
Or, I have read the Tesla chargers can do this.
power rationing is not what the public wants. they want to wake up to a car with a full tank of gas.
Again, I think this is mostly a problem that non EV people like yourself are fantasizing about. The idea that three cars are driven to nearly zero, return home, and then all three cars are expected to drive 250 miles or so the next day, is rather far fetched.
EV drivers, unless they are actually planning a long road trip, as a whole have gotten over the basis of your fear: range anxiety. I routinely start my day with charges of less than 100%, sometimes maybe even 25%, because I’m not scared about running out of juice during my commute or running errands and whatnot.
If at some point you get an EV, you’ll start to understand this within a couple of weeks or maybe months.
Is this 1988? The chargers will all have wifi, and connect to a cloud service which will use a phone app to let you group them into a single shared amperage unit. You’ll be able to set evenly shared charging, priority charging, or round robin charging.