Charging your electric car in a Tesla Supercharger is child’s play when you own a company vehicle. However, some other cars have had a cable size issue so far, which Tesla has pledged to fix.
At its Inverstor’s Day event, Tesla not only announced that it wanted to do away with rare earths in its electric car motors, but the company also said it would bring a big change for its Superchargers.
Since last year, Tesla has opened its Supercharger network to other electric cars, meaning that you can now recharge your vehicle at Tesla terminals, even if it was purchased from another manufacturer. However, users have until now been faced with a major problem: the length of the charging cable.
New Superchargers will have longer cables
To charge your Tesla at a Supercharger station, you had to park in reverse so that the cable could connect to the socket. At Tesla, it is located on the left side, at the rear of the vehicle. However, this is not the case with all electric cars.
As shown in the latest MKBHD video, some vehicles such as the Rivan R1T have a port located in the front, which forces drivers to face the terminal to charge their vehicle. The problem is that not all vehicles have the same size, and the cable built into Superchargers is sometimes too short to reach the sockets. This is particularly the case with the huge Ford F150 Lightning pick-up, which will really have to be glued to the terminal so that the cable reaches the connectors of the vehicle.
The worst thing is that this situation causes some vehicles to have to park strangely to reach the terminal, and in particular touse two places to be able to recharge. Such a situation would therefore quickly lead to a shortage of Superchargers, but the company already has a plan to avoid such a situation.
During his conference, Tesla has indicated that it will equip its next V4 Superchargers with longer cables, which should allow more flexibility to park your vehicle at a terminal. This is for the moment the only information we have about this new generation, but we imagine that Tesla will also take advantage of it to increase the maximum charging power, currently limited to 250 kW on the V3.