We unveiled the Supercharger network in 2012 which we hadn't told anyone about. We build these up in secret, so when people did their first reservation of the Model S they had no idea that we were going to create a Supercharger network. We built into every car a high-voltage DC bypass direct to the pack that would enable high-speed charging. This was critical to solving the long-distance travel problem. As you have more and more electric vehicles on the roads, you have to find someplace to charge them.
I'm not too worried about recharging stations.There actually are far more charging stations than people realize. People drive long distance a lot less than they think they do. The great thing about electricity is that it's really ubiquitous., there are more power outlets than anything. There are more power outlets than access to any other kind of energy by orders of magnitude. What we saw with use of the Tesla Roadster was that almost all charging happened at home, ninety percent plus. In the case of Tesla and most of the electric cars that are coming out, the charger is built into the car so you can plug it in almost anywhere. The ideal place to charge the car is at your home or office. Essentially the same place that you'd charge your phone.
If you want to charge fast, you're going to need a high power outlet. Traditional charging headway had been way too slow, and it was not effective for long-distance travel. It was very important to address this issue of long distance travel, because when people buy a car they are also buying a sense of freedom. What it comes down to really is freedom, when you're buying a car you're really buying freedom to go where you want to go, and if you are constrained to your charge location you don't have the freedom. We had to make something that was really quick to charge, to be able to go wherever they want and not be tethered. We wanted to enable people to travel anywhere in the country, and ultimately people to drive anywhere in the world. Superchargers are really about giving you the freedom that you want when you buy a car and make it really easy and convenient to go wherever you want. They ended up being fundamental to answering the question: "can I drive my car long distances?" The key take way was that I was confident that the Supercharger will completely alleviate people’s concern about range with electric vehicles. We were certainly hoping that some other company or companies would create convenient high-speed charging networks, but nobody did. So then we said we better do it.
The name 'Supercharger' is originally obviously from the gasoline car industry. The idea there was you'll be able to charge your car with the same level of convenience as you'd normally use your gasoline car. Superchargers are really meant for when you have an unusually long trip - you've been away from your home or office for a while - or you need to top up when you're out and about, but by far the most convenient is home or office charging. I think a lot of people are used to an old way of doing by default. I think part of it is just that people are used to a paradigm where they go to a gas station to fill up and that's just normal. Then they get an electric car and they go to the Supercharger station to fill up, because that's just normal. But the best thing to do with your electric car is to charge your car where you charge your phone. Would you really take your phone to a gas station?
We were able to figure a way, with some advanced charging technology, to have it such that you could stop for half an hour and have three hours driving. About a six to one ratio, which is about the convenience inflection point for most people for a long range trip. If you drive for three hours, you want to stop for 20 or 30 minutes, because that's normally what people will stop for. If you start a trip that starts at 9am, by noon you want to stop for a bite to eat, hit the restroom, coffee, and gas up your car and keep going, and that's a good 20 to 30 minutes. That's the natural cadence of a trip.
We made that work, and then we added solar panels to some Supercharger stations to address the long tailpipe argument that says, oh, you're just pushing emissions to the power plant. Well no, because the Supercharger stations will actually generate more electricity than the cars use in recharging. It'll have enough solar panels to generate electricity back to the grid on an annual basis. That's how we're sizing them, so they'll be slightly energy positive.
We also had the SolarCity IPO in 2012, which was a very difficult IPO to get done and that IPO occurred just by the skin of it's teeth. It was such a tough one. If it wasn't in December, it would mean pushing it out quite a bit, and the problem was that we'd already pushed it out quite a bit already. If we didn't go public we'd have to go a private round and then the whole thing just wouldn't feel right. It's like you're sitting at the altar and you don't do the wedding - it's a bit awkward, you know. So, we really needed to do it and I think if we hadn't done it, people would have looked at it as a failure and it wouldn't have been good because there had just been too many failures in the solar - or not enough successes in the solar arena. We needed to chalk up the success.
What we're planning to do over time is go to 100% renewable power generation for our Supercharge stations. We've sort of temporally not added solar power in the interests of just having national and international coverage, so you can drive anywhere in the US, Europe or Asia using Superchargers. There are a few that have solar panels, most don't. But in the long term.... all of them will either have solar panels or otherwise get their power from renewable sources, and in the long term I expect it to be solar panels to a stationary battery pack, so that the solar panels can charge the stationary battery pack over the course of the week and then that stationary battery pack can buffer the energy and release it during peak times. It's possible for us to make the charging stations completely independent of the grid because we also add a battery pack so that the solar panels charge the stationary battery pack which charges the car. Which gives you 24 hours a day charging capability. However it's usually still advantageous to connect to the grid because there are times when we will produce excess energy that we then can provide back to the grid. We want each charging station to be energy positive.
What we see with Superchargers is huge differences in usage. You can imagine, when people go away for the weekend, like Friday nights and Saturday nights, huge peak usage. People are going somewhere, like on a family trip for the weekend, but say, Wednesday at 11am, low usage.
You want to have a stationary battery pack, solar panels and then it could work even if the power grid goes down. That'd be cool I think, to have something like even post-apocalypse you can still drive around.
We’re experimenting with our first sort of – I don't know what we call it – Mega Supercharging location, like really big Supercharging location with a bunch of amenities. We're going to unveil the first of those relatively soon. I think we'll get a sense for just sort of how cool it can be to have a great place to – if you've been driving for three, four hours – stop, have great restrooms, great food, amenities, hang out for half an hour, and then be on your way.
We are totally cool with other companies using our Supercharger infrastructure. There is no intend to create a walled garden or to create some sort of protectionist thing. Basically the only requirements for using our Supercharger network are that the car needs to take the high power level, because if it's really low power level it is going to hog the spot and sit there for too long, so it’s got to be able to be charged fast. And it needs to be proportionate payment to how much the other car manufacturers are using the network. How ever much the manufacturers cars are using the network, they just pay that proportion, which I think is pretty fair. If other car companies also want to create a network and we can have a shared network that would be cool. We are for anything that will promote the future of electric vehicles.