Tesla Building $250,000 Chargers for Model S Drivers in Highways

Alan Ohnsman, Bloomberg
September 25, 2012 | 4 Comments

Tesla Motors Inc., the electric-car company led by Elon Musk, plans to build a network of solar- powered chargers on major U.S. highways to expand the driving range for owners of its cars at no charge.

Tesla has installed the first six of its so-called superchargers on highways in California, Nevada and Arizona, Musk said yesterday at its design studio in Hawthorne, California. The system recharges Tesla’s Model S sedan at a 100- kilowatt rate, providing power for three hours of highway driving within just 30 minutes, the company said.

The system provides “a level of convenience equivalent to gasoline cars for all practical purposes,” said Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Musk, who is also the Palo Alto, California company’s biggest shareholder. “We are giving Model S the ability to drive almost anywhere for free on pure sunlight.”

A network of fast-charge devices on U.S. highways is a way to overcome the problem of limited range, one of the challenges automakers cite for battery-powered cars. Tesla, named for inventor Nikola Tesla, wants to become profitable as early as next year from sales of its $57,400 Model S and by supplying battery packs and motors to investors Daimler AG and Toyota Motor Corp.

The company’s goal is to deliver at least 20,000 Model S sedans next year and achieve a gross profit margin of more than 25 percent, Musk told Bloomberg Television on Sept. 21. The superchargers are designed to work with versions of Model S with 85-kilowatt hour battery packs that allow the cars to go more than 200 miles per charge, Tesla said.

$250,000 Chargers

The superchargers cost $250,000 each and can power four to six cars at one time, Musk said. Tesla plans to install 100 of these super-chargers at a cost of $20 million to $30 million over the next three to four years, he said.

Following the first six charging stations, with power supplied by SolarCity Corp., a Musk-backed solar panel installer, Tesla said it aims to install superchargers in busy traffic corridors across the U.S., “enabling fast, purely electric travel from Vancouver to San Diego, Miami to Montreal and Los Angeles to New York.”

Tesla said it also plans to begin opening superchargers in Europe and Asia in the second half of 2013.

Tesla rose 2.1 percent to $30.66 at the close yesterday in New York. The shares have gained 7.4 percent this year.

Lead image: Highway via Shutterstock

4 Comments

frederic pouyot
October 3, 2012

Following my post of Sept 26, I decided to make available for free the type of tool which I suggested would be important (EVScreen). I have also created a free course to help enter meaningful data into the tool. Anyone can download EVScreen from the course located at: http://cleanenergyinstitute.net/course/view.php?id=53 If anybody has suggestions for improvement, feel free to contact us (contact information available from EVScreen) if you want us to make modifications (some fees may apply). This tool should be useful for fleet managers and individuals who want to seriously look at the economics of EVs. The plan is to add to Version 4 more features such as impact of climate (very cold or very hot climates have an impact on batteries and fuel consumption) and driving patterns (emergency vehicle's consumption patterns not the same as postal services vehicles). Also future versions will deal better with various currencies and units (SI versus imperial). Anybody who is interested and qualified to help develop this tool (engineers, Excel experts, programers), please let us know. We plan to partner with EV vendors, Automobile Associations, vehicle fleet associations, Governments (DOE..)and Environmental associations to develop EVScreen and increase awareness about the economic and environmental benefits of EVs.

William Fitch
September 26, 2012

Hi: I hope his vision not only comes to pass but can be replicated many, many times over....

.....Bill

Kim Hanna
September 26, 2012

Very good points above. Great news from Tesla.
Go get-em Tesla.

frederic pouyot
September 26, 2012

The development of a network of chargers deals with one of the barriers to the development of electric cars. I would suggest that car makers also focus on providing economic evaluation tools that take into account total cost of ownership over 10 years for individuals or over 100,000 miles. Such tool needs to allow users to enter energy escalation rates for both base case (gasoline) and electricity, but also itemized cost for yearly maintenance and life cycle major maintenance. The calculator needs to allow for input of the residual value of the vehicle, as the fact that EV Batteries have a second life (and residual value) for solar, wind or grid energy storage applications for example has been largely ignored so far. This type of tool would allow user to enter lower operating cost thanks to lower insurance that are available for Electric Vehicles, and the fact that there is more value in used EVs as they do not experience the same level of wear and tear on brakes, and have lower cost due to simplified transmission, no trip to Mr. Mufflers or such, no tune up of the gas engine. This type of tool would be especially useful for people looking to compare high end cars with Tesla Model S, or for Taxi, municipal and other car fleet managers. These markets appear to be the most logical target markets for the Tesla Model S in North America where gas prices are some of the lowest in the Word. But the energy escalation rate is very important and users need to be able to conduct some sensitivity analysis on this. Indeed, we cannot always predict Gas prices in the next 10 years purely based on current prices or even on what happened in the last 10 years. One may want to take into account the fact that the inevitable increasing erosion of the value of the dollar will be one of the most important factors to understand and predict likely values for gas prices in the next 10 years. I have seen dozens of econom calculators for EV and yet have to see any that covers well these issues