California

Tesla today officially announced the Springfield Oregon Supercharger had opened thereby allowing Tesla owners to travel the whole West Coast of the US without spending a penny.

I had called the thing a bit early last week but Tesla wasn’t ready to give it the green light until the Springfield OR station opened because the distance between the two previous Oregon stations “would be a little bit risky” for 60kWh owners.

The new station is a few blocks off the highway, contains 8 stalls and is open immediately.

• Springfield, ORI-5 exit 195 Holiday Inn Eugene – Springfield
  919 Kruse Way
  Springfield, OR 97477

Press release follows:
Expand
Expanding
Close

The NYTimes:

In an effort to spur lackluster sales of electric cars, California, New York and six other states said on Thursday that they would work jointly to adopt a range of measures, including encouraging more charging stations and changing building codes, to make it easier to own an electric car.

The goal, they said, was to achieve sales of at least 3.3 million vehicles that did not have any emissions by 2025.

The states, which represent more than a quarter of the national car market, said they would seek to develop charging stations that all took the same form of payment, simplify rules for installing chargers and set building codes and other regulations to require the stations at workplaces, multifamily residences and at other places.

Charging stations, charging stations, charging stations.

Related articles

• Coalition of States Seeks to Spur Use of Electric Cars (nytimes.com)
• Eight U.S. states band together to promote clean cars (reuters.com)
• Eight governors make zero-emission car pledge (usatoday.com)
• 8 States Vow 3.3M Zero-Emission Vehicles by 2025 – ABC News (abcnews.go.com)
• 8 states sign deal to boost electric-car sales (sfgate.com)
• California joins initiative to put 3.3 electric vehicles on the road (techi.com)
• Oregon one of eight states aiming to put 3.3 million zero-emission vehicles on the road (oregonlive.com)
• California joins seven other states to put 3.3 million zero emission vehicles on road by 2025 (mercurynews.com)

Great find from @mgillet onTwitter. This appears to be a Tesla dashboard at the headquarters showing significant growth in charging over the past few months.   More importantly, we some highly anticipated charging stations ‘coming soon’.  Probably most exciting for Tesla is the Oregon and northern California stations that will close the I5 corridor meaning the West Coast will be covered.  Also two stations on the California/Arizona border will allow trips to/from Phoenix and LA/San Diego.

You’ll notice that two stations, one in Colorado and one in Texas, are lit up even though Tesla hasn’t pushed to the  Supercharger Station website Map, below.

Texans will get two more Supercharger stations in Eastern Texas linking them to Arkansas and Louisiana. East coasters will get a couple in Northern New Jersey as well as Virginia and North Carolina allowing folks in Vermont/New Hampshire to travel to the Carolinas and vice versa.

Some fun facts:

• Fremont (Tesla Factory) and Hawthorn in SoCal seem to be far and away the busiest Superchargers with Gilroy coming in third over the last 30 days.
• Unsurprisingly, most people put 20-40kWh into their Teslas during a stop.
• 1576 cars visited superchargers in the last week
• Almost 4 million miles have been charged at Supercharging stations…
• That equates to 14,000 MWh…
• Which has saved nearly 160,000 gallons of gas.

Compare with the current map as of today, 10/21/2013:

Google+

Expand
Expanding
Close

Not much not to like here.  How does $27,500 go for a $199/month lease? Add in the $7500 tax credit.  I’ll be interested to see how low that 82 mile range gets in the winter – oh you can only get on in California and Oregon which have mild winters so we’ll have to wait awhile and see.
Expand
Expanding
Close