Tesla: New Supercharger Features Will Cut Charge Time in Half

Teslas will "charge faster than any other electric vehicle on the market today," the company claims.

Fastest Charge

Tesla apparently wants drivers to spend more time on the road and less time charging their vehicles.

On Wednesday, the company announced several improvements to its Superchargers and vehicle software that it claims will work together to cut the time drivers spend charging their vehicles by 50 percent — and says the new upgrade "enables our vehicles to charge faster than any other electric vehicle on the market today."

Souped-Up Supercharger

Tesla detailed the new improvements in a blog post.

One is V3, the third generation of its Supercharger. V3 Superchargers will feature a 1 MW power cabinet capable of providing 250 kW of power to four Teslas at once — so no more sharing power with other vehicles.

Unlike the V2, which made use of an air-cooled cable, the V3 uses a liquid-cooled cable, and this shift will enable it to provide up to 1,000 miles worth of charge per hour or 75 miles in just 5 minutes.

Tesla also announced a new software feature called "On-Route Battery Warmup." Whenever a driver begins heading toward a Supercharger station, their car's battery will now automatically begin heating to the optimal charging temperature.

"This combination of higher peak power with V3, dedicated vehicle power allocation across Supercharger sites, and On-Route Battery Warmup enables customers to charge in half the time and Tesla to serve more than twice the number of customers per hour," the company wrote.

Roll Out

Not every Tesla owner will be able to take advantage of the new Superchargers right away. At first, V3 Supercharging will be limited to Model 3 owners enrolled in the company's Early Access Program and only at one location: a public beta site in the Bay Area.

According to the blog post, Tesla plans to roll out V3 Supercharging to "the wider fleet" in the second quarter of 2019 as more of the new chargers come online. The company will break ground on its first non-beta V3 Supercharger site in April.

It will then add more sites throughout North America in the second and third quarters of the year before heading overseas to Europe and Asia-Pacific in the fourth quarter.

READ MORE: Introducing V3 Supercharging [Tesla]

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