Tesla is starting to predict Supercharger availability upon arrival by looking at how many vehicles are going to the charging station.
Currently, if you need to stop at a Tesla Supercharger station, you can look at your in-car navigator to quickly check how many stations are available. This is very useful if you are fairly close to the location. You can decide to go to another station if one is too busy.
However, it can be less useful if you are on a road trip and you are still an hour or two away from your charging stop. Even if charging stalls are available at the time, they might not be by the time you get there.
Tesla has a solution for this now.
Software update tracker Not a Tesla App found a previously unreported feature in the new 2023.38 Tesla software update that enables the automaker to predict Supercharger availability upon arrival.
They reported based on what they found in the update:
Tesla will now predict how many Supercharger stalls will be available at your arrival, and display the predicted wait time, if any. Tesla says they will factor in your travel time to the Supercharger, as well as other Tesla vehicles’ travel times, to predict the charger’s availability when you arrive.
Tesla owners are incentivized to enter a Supercharger location in their navigation system because it enables the car to prepare the battery pack for fast charging. This also enables Tesla to know how many people are going to a Supercharger station at any given time and know when they will get there.
Electrek’s Take
This makes a lot of sense and should save some people headaches because there’s nothing more frustrating than believing that you have a spot ready to charge when you arrive at a Supercharger and it is full.
However, the timing of this is interesting since it’s happening as Tesla is opening up its Supercharger network to non-Tesla EVs, which should make this feature more difficult. Tesla doesn’t have access to the same data on non-Tesla EVs, which will start to populate some Supercharger stations, but it is still going to be a very useful feature.