By the way of promoting its Supercharging network and the Navigate with Trip Planner feature, Tesla revealed a very interesting management tool for the entire charging network.
As we can see in the video, and the captured image below, the company developed a very sophisticated solution to present all its charging points in North America (and most likely also in other parts of the world).
Through a color code, the operator can quickly see which stations are running fine, and which ones are overloaded or broken. Everything is in real-time.
Tesla Supercharging network in North America (source: Tesla)
A zoom-in and one click on a particular charging station will open an additional status window with details related to this particular location. Tesla can easily determine which stalls are faulty, and what is the wait time, and even create a report for service teams.
On the right side of the window, there is a general table with stats about the entire network – how many stations are occupied at more than 50 percent, less than 50 percent, or fully occupied. What are the wait times – less than 10 minutes, 10-20 minutes, more than 20 minutes? This last option (more than 20 minutes is associated with a dark red color, indicating a bad result.
The stats include numbers of how many stations have down posts, reduced service, are entirely offline (just two, according to the image), or have connectivity issues, as well as temporary closures and scheduled outages.
The map itself – if combined with reports based on history – should allow us to pretty easily determine the weak spots in the network and prompt the decision to add more stalls or a new station nearby. We guess that such a tool was also very helpful when Tesla applied temporary promotion of free off-peak Supercharging hours during holidays, as well as which sites were selected for the non-Tesla EV Supercharging pilot program.
The Tesla Navigate with Trip Planner, linked to this system, most likely is aware of where to guide a particular car in real-time, depending on the availability of Supercharging network.
“Enter a destination on your touchscreen and Trip Planner will automatically calculate your route with Superchargers along the way. Trip Planner considers driving style, elevation, outside temperature, traffic, stall availability and more.”
Such a system is an advantage of having an in-house charging network. However, we guess that other electric car manufacturers are also improving their navigation systems with each iteration and input from charging networks.
