Tesla Inc. has a new idea to ease electric vehicle range anxiety.
When the California automaker began launching its third- generation Supercharger stations last month, it introduced an in-vehicle technology called on-route battery warmup. The system begins heating the battery when the driver directs the vehicle navigation system to find a Supercharger, allowing the battery to reach the optimal charging temperature before it's plugged in.
The feature can help reduce charge times by 25 percent, Tesla said.
Tesla said its new V3 Superchargers, available first for the Model 3 and rolling out in the coming months on the Model S and Model X, use a new 1-megawatt power cabinet to support peak rates of up to 250 kilowatts per vehicle. That means the new stations can add 75 miles of range in just 5 minutes.
The chargers, considered the fastest in the industry, are able to support up to four vehicles at a time. According to Tesla, it will now take approximately 15 minutes to get a full charge.
"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 in a blog post.
