Tesla Cuts Waiting Time At Electric Car Charging Station By Limiting Max Charge To 80% Capacity

Tesla is facing a new-found problem with its increased number of users. Tesla car owners are having to wait for long duration at the company¡¯s superchargers used for charging its electric vehicles. Though Tesla has come up with a solution for this. Going forward, some of such chargers will be limited to charging up to 80 percent of a car¡¯s battery.

To enable this, Tesla will be updating some of its Supercharger stations. The new limit on the State of Charge (SOC) to 80% will be applied at select high-traffic stations in order to reduce wait times, reports Electrek. The information comes through a memo sent to Tesla employees.

As per the memo, the new limitation will be imposed on 17% of all the Tesla Supercharger stations in the US. Among these, 8% of stations will see the limitation at all times, while another 9% will have the restriction during high-traffic periods.

Tesla will also alert the car owners of the limitation to 80% of the battery capacity as they arrive at such a station.

Tesla Supercharging station. (Image: Reuters)

Also read: Indian Auto Giant Ashok Leyland Wants To Team Up With Tesla For Electric Cars In The Country

The Tesla memo explains the timeline of the rollout: ¡°80% SOC Limit will be enforced 24/7 at all impacted sites. Please note, some sites will have 80% SOC limits enforced on a permanent basis while others will only be enforced on national holidays and to accommodate large regional events.¡±

As per Tesla¡¯s calculations, the restriction will result in a ¡°34% improvement in throughput¡± in combination with other improvements, like the On-Route Battery Warmup feature and V2 Supercharger upgrades (to 150 kW), to the superchargers at the affected stations.

Tesla, however, has kept in mind those on a long distance travel. Tesla owners who are on a long distance trip through the trip planner will be able to charge their vehicle for the full 100%. If one is just going to the Supercharger though, the feature will not work.

A commonplace issue?

If you think about it such an issue will be commonplace in new and emerging EV markets, including India. Since the charging of a regular EV takes around 2 to 3 hours at the least, even a small number of such vehicle owners might have to wait for extended duration to get their vehicles charged.

The only possible solution to this, especially for battery electric vehicles, will be a faster charging speed or an extended range of the battery or both. Firms across the globe are pursuing the two ultimate objectives and BMW, recently had also unveiled its new research project that claimed to charge an all-electric car within 3 minutes.