locate Tesla supercharger reduction of dc fast charging

Locate the fastest stall on a Tesla Supercharger

Depending on the situation not all charging stalls deliver the same charging speed. But how to locate the fastest stall on the Tesla Supercharger? Tesla’s Supercharger V2 fast charging stations are designed the way that two charging stations share one charging rectifier. Which charging stations belong together can be recognized by the label A/B. Each rectifier has a total of 120kW of charging power, which both vehicles have to share. In this article I have described this principle and the numbering in more detail.

 

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The best stall to charge as fast as possible is therefore chosen as follows:

  1. If possible, choose your pair of chargers where you charge alone. Change the charging station if a pair of chargers gets available within minutes and you are currently charging as the second charger on another pair.
  2. If there are no free pairs, the best stall to charge is next to the Tesla, which charges at the slowest speed of all currently charging vehicles.

With the following trick, you can often even tell from inside your vehicle which one of the other cars is charging fast or slow. Depending on the current charging power, the green LED on the charging port flashes at different speeds. Below 70 kW it flashes slowly, above 70 kW very fast. This looks like the following (click on the pictures to see the animation).

Tesla Supercharger Platz

slow charging lower than 70 kW

Tesla Supercharger Platz
fast charging with more than 70 kW

An example situation

Let’s assume I come across a Supercharger V2 with a total of four charging stalls and the situation is as follows:

Tesla Supercharger Platz

Stall 1A and 2A are occupied. I recognize when driving past that the LED on vehicle 1A is flashing fast, while the LED on vehicle 2A is flashing slowly. According to the pair of charging stations mentioned at the beginning of this article, it makes more sense to charge at stall 2B because there is more charging power left there for my vehicle.

Locate the best stall at a Tesla V3 Supercharger

Since 2019 Tesla builds the new Supercharger V3 charging stations. These stations have the limitations with A/B not anymore. So, you can take any stall you want. Unfortunately, you can’t identify the stalls immediately easily. They look almost the same as V2 but have a thicker cable. But in your Tesla’s navigation system is informing about V2 and V3 stored in the Supercharger Details. You may identify them by max Power.

Conclusion

There is one disadvantage: the LED only flashes when the vehicle is not locked. This means if nobody is sitting in the vehicle, the LED is not visible. You can make the LED visible for a short time by pressing the button on the charging plug. But I don’t think it makes sense to tamper with other vehicles and therefore I advise against it. In case of doubt, it might be better to ask the other drivers who have been charging the longest. Or just try it out and park again, in case you have caught the stall where someone with a low battery level plugged in two minutes before. There it can happen that the charging of your vehicle dozes with about 30 kW for 15 minutes until more power is available from your neighbor.

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