Tesla Australia is celebrating a major milestone with their 100th Supercharger site in the country. Tesla’s first Supercharger in the country was installed way back in late 2014, 10 years ago and having continued to invest, the locations have now grown to more than 100.
Over the years we’ve seen the locations grown and Tesla recently updated their Supercharger map with more planned locations. Each individual site ranges from 4 to 16 charging stalls that provide DC fast charging up to 250kW.
Unlike other automakers, Tesla didn’t wait for Government funding to start rolling out their charging network to strategic locations, preferring to go it alone knowing that without decent charging options, selling cars into Australia would be difficult.
For many years, Tesla’s Supercharger Network was exclusively for use by Tesla owners, however in recent times, Tesla is opening up an increasing number of locations to non-Tesla EVs.
When Tesla first rolled out Superchargers in Australia, they rolled out Tesla’s own proprietary standard, which where then later retrofitted to feature dual connectors, adding support for the now standard CC2. While Tesla’s NACS standard is now being adopted by others in the US and effective is become the default charging standard with it’s small, efficient connector, Australia is a different story. CCS2 ultimately won the format wars and some Model X and Model S owners have since opted to retrofit the CCS2 connector in their car to have more charging locations available to them.
Personally I’ve driven many Tesla’s including my own more than 70,000kms and charged a lot of different Superchargers (almost 20 see below). While there are now a decent number of 3rd party DC fast chargers, Tesla’s network remains the leader in terms of availability and reliability, even if the cost is creeping up there.
Tesla’s charging experience has also been one of the best. Just pull into a Supercharger bay, plug the connector into your vehicle and after a quick handshake, the charging session begins. This simple, and straight forward experience is enabled by leveraging the payment details attached to the account tied to the car. Only now, almost a decade later, are other charging networks arriving at the same approach.
Let us know in the comments if you have a favourite Tesla Supercharger in Australia.
Tesla is having a