Tesla Supercharger network in Ireland

Not gonna lie I'd have done the exact same thing if I were the tesla driver. The audi would be blocking 2 stalls.

Vat are zeez rulz bitte?

German Rule #1: respect the queue. I'm with the E-tron on this one.

Also, German car on home turf.

Respect the queue… there was a space for the german car, not the tesla's fault the german car has the charge port on the WRONG side.

I was at that location last year. Bit of a shít show where it’s laid out near the exit. Ram packed full when I arrived in the afternoon. Funny you mentioned an e-tron. As I was lining up to park in 1B, an e-tron was coming into the stalls via the exit and was angry in his glass box when I reversed into place and plugged in. He was blocking the exit and had to go back around and eventually ended up parked in 1B beside me. He had a face like a smacked àrse.

I was waiting for my son to finish an exam before heading on my way back to France for the night, so had time to kill and stayed to 100% to give me the longest run. Nobody was waiting for a charge except the e-tron driver. I didn’t realise he needed me to move off before he could occupy two spots to charge. I was very busy playing solitaire. Ah well 🤣

The V4 chargers have longer cables, but the older ones are only good for Teslas and cars with charger port on the right side. Any other cars like the e-tron will take up 2 spaces because they park in one spot and use the charger cable from the spot beside it.

Yeah, that's a rare enough example where the car can park offside. Most sites won't have that flexibility.

I’ll put it like this. If I was driving a non-Tesla with a charge port on the wrong side, I’d be pretty hesitant to use a Tesla charger location for 2 reasons.

1. I don’t know if I will have a spot where I can charge when I arrive, because I will need 2 spots, or the rare spot at the end of the grass verge to be free.
2. If I take up 2 spots and the site is busy, I’m preventing someone from accessing a charge point. I’m blocking access.
   

This is something Tesla need to sort out. It’s not good enough to open up locations that are unsuitable for other EVs. They have the data, so should be able to offer suitable locations to EV owners based on the car they have. So, e-tron drivers for example should be routed to V4 locations only, or locations that are always below capacity, or locations with upgraded, longer cables. It’s not that hard. They’re just doing it àrseways.

In time the equipment will need to be replaced, but until then I'd rather they focus on building out more sites and more chargers than going back to modify the functional but imperfect ones. The pressure at Sandyford will be released as the sites planned by Tesla and others in the Dublin area and on the main road network come on stream.

I think Tesla had to open up their existing chargers in order to get EU funding for the new chargers.

It's not as big an issue in a lot of other countries where they quickly went ahead and deployed an additional V4 site near the existing V2/V3 site. Or had enough room at an existing site for the V4s, eg.

But all the existing sites in Ireland are tight and crap. And it takes so long to get anything done and we're not a big market, so we won't see any V4 benefit for a while whereas other countries in Europe have been benefiting from the V4s for over 12 months.