Suggested Supercharger Locations

I've made so many addenda to this I've started a new version here.


Tesla's superchargers are a DC fast car charging technology that makes their Model S and subsequent cars fully capable long range cars.  Short of malfunction, there's almost no circumstance that will result in a full charge taking much over an hour, and most of the time, well under half an hour for these cars, which can go 250 miles or so between charge.

As of this writing, Tesla has 206 functioning Supercharger stations in the United States, most of them near to interstate highways and almost all midway between cities.  They figure people who are in a city are likely to have access to home or destination charging, which can be slower and charge while you sleep.  They are in process on another 20, which from obtaining a license to breaking ground, pouring concrete, doing the wiring and so forth, seems to take a few months.

Where should the next few stations be?

Finish I-90.  There's a 244 mile gap between Sheridan WY, and Rapid City, SD.  You might be able to make it in an 85kwh car if you go slow.  This is a beautiful part of the country for a road trip, and it'd be nice to be able to take a side trip to the Black Hills on the way.  There's an obvious place in Gillette, WY.  This is the last real gap before I-90 is a transcontinental supercharger route, although it would be helpful to have one near Erie PA.

Finish I-84.   The Boise supercharger is under construction and should be turned on any day now.  Boise to Tremonton, UT (just north of Salt Lake) is 267 miles.  There's an obvious place in Twin Falls, ID, which would serve both I-84 and also US 93 for people going from Boise to Elko or Wendover.

US-1/101 along the west coast.  My favorite bits of this are #1, Big Sur, #2, the coast highway near Mendocino, #3, the coast highway near Coos Bay, #4, the redwood empire.  There's a station going in at Crescent City.  Crescent City to Petaluma is 316 very twisty miles.  At least one station is needed.  Garberville or Legget is right in the middle in the redwood empire and would serve my #2 and #4.  Monterey to Atascadero is about 150 miles along the coast.  It'd help if there was something in the middle but it's not desperate.  Eugene to Crescent City is about 180 miles...makeable, but it'd help if there was something in the middle.  Florence would be about right.   Although I've spent the night in Newport and places around there several times and I'd be happy to do it again..If I could get destination charging there, no further help would be necessary.

Olympic Peninsula.  The obvious big circle between the Kingston ferry terminal and Centralia is about 300 miles, so something in the middle would be necessary.  I'd put it in Forks or Beaver or somewhere like that.   Or maybe one in Port Angeles and one in Hoquiam.  (Much of this is 101--the same 101 that's in California.  I'd love it if they were to put a supercharger every 100 miles or so the full length of 101.)

North Cascades Highway. (US 20).  Truly spectacular.  One of the most beautiful roads anywhere, and definitely the most beautiful within 200 miles of my home.  Go as soon as the snow is clear from the road but not melting too much on the slopes yet--April, maybe.  Burlington is just a little too far from Ellensburg and a lot too far from Ritzville.  Put it somewhere like Brewster or Omak, so it can serve people doing the north cascades loop (2, 97, 20), and also people going past Grand Coulee

South Cascades: Ellensburg or The Dalles to Seattle via 410 is too long, although 12 to Centralia might work.  A small supercharger or even an 80 amp J1772 or HPWC at Naches would be perfect.

Finish I-80.  It's 439 miles between existing chargers in Salt Lake City and Cheyenne, WY, and another 499 between Cheyenne and Omaha, NB.  That calls for at least 4, better 6 new stations. There's a way around on I-70 that's already been completed but is a few hundred miles longer, so this would not be my top priority, but it should be done.

Finish Route 66.  It's now called I-40 and I-44, and all but two of the cities in the song have superchargers already or under construction.  Only Joplin, Missouri and Amarillo, Texas are missing, although Winona and San Bernardino have to rely on the town next door...  The only real gap is St Louis to Oklahoma City:  512 miles, so it needs 2 stations, better 3.  Joplin is nearly in the middle.  Amarillo is in a shorter gap--204 miles, which is a little long but it's flat and probably doable.  Texas is among those states that have tried to block Tesla's dealer model.

addenda 22 Aug 2015

Permit for an 8 berth Supercharger has been granted for Twin Falls ID.  It should open in a few months.

Permit for a Supercharger in Ukiah, CA has been granted.  Crescent City to Ukiah is too far so there must be another one coming somewhere between Garberville and Eureka.

I'd like to see US 395 made to be a practical route.  My favorite part of this road is between Yosemite and Death Valley.  There's already one at Lone Pine, Neatly between Mt Whitney and Death Valley.  Lee Vining (the closest point on 395 to Yosemite) is the next obvious place north.  Lee Vining to Susanville is too far, so about midway between Reno and Susanville is necessary (I love the mountains just west of Susanville).    Next north would be Alturas, then Riley, where 395 comes together with OR 20.   (adding Riley would make the mysterious Detroit Lakes charger make more sense) These are mostly obscure little towns in a beautifully desolate area.  They can probably all be 2 or 4 berth stations.   Tesla's intentionally vague future map seems to put new ones in Reno, Lee Vining, and Bend, OR.

addenda 30 Aug 2015

Construction has begun on a 6 stall Supercharger in Gillette, WY.  It should open in a few months.

addenda 26 Sep 2015

Gillette is now open, and a permit has been applied for in Amarillo.  Still waiting on Erie to finish I-90, and Joplin and neighbors to finish Route 66/I-44.  They may choose instead to head straight east to Nashville, which would include the first supercharger in Arkansas.

addenda 6 Nov 2015

Amarillo is now open and a permit has been granted for Catoosa, OK, which is a suburb of Tulsa, and on I-44.  Look for a new ones near Joplin and Buckhorn, MO, which would make the modern version of the old route 66 completely supercharger-enabled from Chicago to L.A. and make Tesla-driving Nat King Cole fans very happy.

Twin Falls, ID, is now open, making Seattle or Portland  to Salt Lake City via  I-84 completely viable.

Gardnerville, CA is now open and Mammoth Lakes has a permit.  Once this is complete, access to the south eastern part of the Sierras along US-395, from Reno to L.A., will be complete.  Next comes the north eastern Sierras through Susanville and Alturas.  This is a much lower traffic area than the southern part of 395, so I don't expect it to be completed for a while.

addenda 6 Dec 2015

Permit for Eureka, CA has been issued.   I'd have guessed it'd be a little farther south.  Ukiah to Eureka is 155 fairly hilly miles.  Makeable, but just barely, so I'm guessing there'll be another in the long term.   I'd have used it last weekend, had any of it been available...Instead I went to Vacaville and I-5.  Longer, and much less fun.  (I was visiting friends near Santa Rosa).

I found the Springfield to Grant's Pass route to be a little Range-Anxiety inducing.  I'm hoping the next station in Oregon is near Roseburg.

Mount Shasta is plainly too small: I stopped there twice: there were between 3 and 6 Teslas at this 4 berth supercharger every time I looked.  It's a lovely place though...hard to imagine a better place to wait, if you must.

I also visited Sandy, OR.  This location is a pain to get to, and it's hard to imagine doing it unless you're really going to Mount Hood, Sandy, or the town next door, Boring.  (this sounds like a joke but it's not)   It's far enough as to not be useful at all for Portlanders.

Another route I'd like to see completed is I-15, from LA through Idaho and Montana, right up to the Trans-Canada highway.    LA to Salt Lake is complete already, and Butte has a station.   I think 5 or 6 more would do it.  One complication is that one of the most important sites on that route, Yellowstone NP, is a little far from it.   I'd like to see a station at West Yellowstone.

addenda 2 Jan 2016

One logical place for a supercharger would be US-95 between Winemucca, NV and Boise.    It's 253 miles, mountainous and often cold--way too far--and there's precious little charging available at all--NEMA 14-50 at RV parks near either end.  It's a desolate route but it would be useful for those traveling between western Nevada and eastern Oregon or Washington.  To get, for example, between Spokane and Reno, you either have to go 400 miles out of your way to I-5 or 300 miles out of your way through Salt Lake City, relative to this route.  Because it's so desolate, it could be a tiny station. Supercharging would be best, of course, but even an 80 amp HPWC near the middle would save most of a day for such travelers.   There's a gas station and a tiny motel at a place called Burns Junction, near the middle at the intersection of US-95 and OR-78 that would be perfect.

addenda 16 Feb 2016

Progress on Route 66 is nearing completion: Permits have been issued for Catoosa, OK (near Tulsa) and Rolla, MO.  Joplin is midway between these two.  Once all three have been issued, it'll be a fairly easy link.

Permit has been issued for Erie, PA.  No construction yet.

Ukiah is now open.  No visible progress on Eureka or  Crescent City.  Ukiah-Eureka and Eureka-Grants Pass are just barely doable, so once Eureka is open, the redwood empire will be.

Another song, Willin' by Little Feat, contains the line "I've been from Tuscon to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonapah"   Tuscon is 64 miles from the nearest Supercharger, near Phoenix.  There's already a supercharger at Tucumcari, NM.  The route is a little circuitous, but doable.   Work on I-10 and I-25 will make this better.  Tehachapi is near Bakersfield on CA-58.  There's a supercharger near there at Mojave.  A permit has been issued for Tonapah, NV, and once it's completed, it will be an easy route by supercharger.  Tonapah, AZ is just outside of Phoenix and getting there from Tehachapi is already easy.

Burns, OR came into the national news since my last comment here, where I mentioned nearby Burns Junction.  There are several RV plugs in the Burns/Malheur area, but getting there in a Tesla will be slow and take a lot of planning.   I'd put it low down in my list of priorities though.  For the time being, Malheur bird watchers will need an internal combustion engine.

addenda 11 Sep 2016

Since my last update, Eureka and Crescent City, CA have opened as well as Seaside and Lincoln City, OR.  Permits have been issued for Bandon, OR and Aberdeen, WA, and once they are complete, it will be possible to use 101 by supercharging all the way from San Diego to Forks.  But once you get there, you're constrained to slow chargers.  Something needs to be built between Port Angeles and Forks.

Bend, OR is mystifying to me.  There must be a squeaky wheel somewhere near there.  Not that I object, but I think there are a bunch of places that should be higher priority.

395 is complete, Reno to LA.  No signs of progress north of Reno.  There's still no good Reno-Spokane route.

US-95 is complete Yuma, AZ on the Mexican border, through Las Vegas, to near Reno and Winnemucca, in northern NV.  Two more stations on the part between Winnemucca and Boise would make it a viable connection to Spokane and points north.

I-15, LA to Butte, MT is almost complete with several stations near Yellowstone.

Route 66 will be complete once the stations at Springfield and Rollo, MO are up and running.  I'm only slightly disappointed they skipped Joplin.

There are 4 new stations going in along I80 in Iowa and Nebraska.  The rest of Nebraska and all of Whyoming remain before I-80 is finished.

No signs of progress  on either I-10 or I-94.

I-35 is complete, San Antonio to Duluth.

Centralia, WA, has started having waits.  This would be reduced by adding a station somewhere near Longview.  It's an easy130 miles from Seattle, and 150 miles from Longview to Springfield, converting two stops into one.

Trump the Troll

Donald Trump has leapt to the top of the Republican polls.  His central issue, like his central issue last time, is a wedge issue¹ that gives him fervent traction among a few crazies but his position is strongly against the position of most Americans and will totally alienate an important voting bloc.  In order to get the 17% support from Republican voters that he has, you only need about 5% of the population:   In a recent study², 35% identify as Ds, 28% identify as Rs and 33% identify as independents.  5% is a huge number of people, something like 6.5M of the 129M that voted for president in 2012, but it's far from enough people to win a national election.  What it is, is enough people to get a lot of people to watch you speak, get excited, and buy products from your sponsors.  The people who are enthusiastic about Trump are almost exactly the people who are enthusiastic about Rush Limbaugh: Naive, older white people with a little money, poor critical thinking skills and knowledge of history, and a strong belief in their own patriotism and loyalty.  Rush's show is about selling them various small scams: gold, reverse mortgages, cheap life insurance, etc., while getting them to vote the way he wants them to.  Everybody is angry about something.  Rush is good at kindling that anger into profits.  Trump is doing the same thing.

But many of Trumps sources of income are appalled at his behavior and have pulled their backing.  Trump doesn't seem to be phased by this at all.  At the same time, Republican leadership has been doing everything they can to get Trump out of the race.  He is forcing the "regular" republicans³ to move even farther to the right to try to keep up with him.   No such candidate  is even close to electable.  Such a nominee is guaranteed only the 28% of voters that are so partisan that they will never vote for a Democrat, no matter how awful the Republican is.  Republican leaders are running scared.  There are 33 Republicans who have declared and 16 of them are seen as credible by leadership and the media, far too many to fit on a debate stage (even the 8 of last time was absurd.) and Trump's ability to attract media is giving him extra visibility.  The guys they'd really like to see (Bush, Walker, and maybe Rubio), already competing for the rightmost edge of the political spectrum, have felt forced to say even crazier things than would be their wont.

How do I think this will play out?
1) Perhaps Trump thought this would be good for business and was surprised how his message so alienated his traditional sponsors while attracting the crazies.   Having wrecked a large part of one of his businesses, he's decided to play the hand out.  He may be as delusional as he seems and thinks he actually has a shot, but more likely he's enjoying himself and knows that when he crashes and burns he can live out the rest of his life (he's 69, an age when most people have already retired) in luxury, living off his real estate and casino fortune.

2) Perhaps he really believes in what he's doing and saying.  I am very skeptical of this.

3) A Troll, in internet parlance, is someone who says things contrived to disrupt and swing the conversation the way they want it to go, strongly against the wishes of everybody else, and takes pleasure from the anger this generates.  I'm not the only person to have had this idea.   Nate Silver's data-driven political prognostications have been amazingly accurate.

4) He's a stalking horse/manchurian candidate.  He's a pretty smart guy.  Not quite as smart as he pretends to be, but smart enough to be terrified that any of the republican candidates might have a real chance to become president.  He saw what Nader succeeded in doing, by accident, in 2000, what conservatives wrongly think Perot did in 1992, and what Anderson seemed to intentionally be doing in 1980.  Only in 2000 did it really matter⁴, but it did matter, disastrously.  He has said he will run as a third party candidate if he doesn't get the nomination--this would be exactly the right move if he actually is a manchurian candidate.  He will draw votes...perhaps only 5%, but that's very likely enough to swing the election, since they will all be from the Republican.  Moreover, when he does leave, he will leave a Republican field that remains much less electable than they would have been without him.  He is known to have been supportive of Hillary in the past (he gave money to her 2007 campaign, and a lot of money to the Clinton initiative), to have been in favor of universal, single payer health care, to have been pro-choice.  If this is still secretly his view, he is definitely playing a long game: he ran as a wack-job in 2012.

I'm usually a skeptic of conspiracy theories, but this one holds together unusually well.  It will probably cost him less than what the Kochs are spending, and might be more effective.  And he may actually be having fun.

(spoiler alert) In the Harry Potter books, it turns out that the biggest hero of all is Snape.  He spent his life as a mole in the darkest of possible places, doing what he could to undermine Voldemort and his Death Eaters, and protect Voldemort's enemies where he could, while scrupulously not blowing his cover and seeming horrible and evil and drawing the hatred of everybody except the very people he was trying to destroy.  He died thinking it all may have been for naught.  I doubt the Voldemorts of the Republican party will have Trump killed, but I imagine it's crossed their mind. Severus Trump?<sup>5

1</sup> Immigration is not really a problem.  Immigration rates are low, crime rates among immigrants are exceptionally low (although not zero).  Their presence is depressing wages a little at the low end, which generates anger among low wage workers, but not enough to actually do something about it--Like raise the minimum wage for everybody, including farm workers, to something livable.
² http://www.people-press.org/2012/08/23/a-closer-look-at-the-parties-in-2012/ 
³It would be a mistake to call any of the present Republican candidates "mainstream". Kasich, Christie and Pataki are well to the right of 75% of Americans, even though they are far to the left of the rest of the Republican field. The others are to the right of 95% or more.  http://mr-entropy.blogspot.com/2014/05/overwhelming-majorities.html
⁴ http://mr-entropy.blogspot.com/2014/01/third-party-candidates.html 
⁵ I'm not the only person to make this connection: https://asecondmouse.wordpress.com/2015/07/09/is-trump-pulling-a-colbert-on-the-republican-party/