Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Tesla, Inc. Supercharger announcement. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If you have a question, please press star followed by the number one key to enter the queue. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the pound key. If anyone should require assistance while the conference is in progress, please press star and zero on your touchtone telephone to reach an operator. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now introduce our host for today, Ms. Sarah Miron. Ma'am, please go ahead.
Thanks, Karen. Good morning, everyone. This is Sarah Miron, Head of Communications for Tesla, Inc.. I'm joined today by Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, who will make brief remarks regarding our Supercharger network. Then we'll open up the line to questions from the media. During the course of this call, we may discuss our business outlook and make forward-looking statements. Such statements are predictions based on management's current expectations. Actual events or results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including those mentioned in our most recent 10-K filed with the SEC. Such forward-looking statements represent our views as of today and should not be relied upon after today. We also disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. With that, I'll turn it over to Elon.
All right. Well, let's see. Thanks, everyone, for joining. The Supercharger page should be going live within minutes. That'll have more detailed information that you can refer to. I think our press release just went out. The basic thing we're announcing today is that we're making a dramatic increase in the deployment of our Supercharger network. This is obviously in response to people's desire to have really fast charge capability throughout the country. We're not just adding actually in terms of geography, but we're increasing the density on well-traveled routes. On well-traveled routes, there'll be a Supercharger probably every 80 to 100 miles. Then in terms of coverage, we'll be covering most of the major metros in the country by the end of this year.
Moreover, you'll be able to travel all the way from Los Angeles to New York just using the Tesla Supercharger network. It's an announcement of accelerating the Supercharger deployment, as well as the second thing is an improvement in the Supercharger technology itself. We're increasing the maximum charge rate from 90 kilowatts to 120 kilowatts. If you reference this relative to the standard Model S, which has a 60 kilowatt-hour pack, that means it could recharge, a typical case would be a two-thirds recharge in just over 20 minutes. What that allows somebody to do is to drive for roughly three hours, stop for 20 minutes, grab a bite to eat, coffee, the restroom, whatever the case may be. In other words, it allows people to stop for the normal amount of time that they would stop for anyway on a road trip.
Although the max charge rate is increasing by roughly a third, the actual experience that people will have in a lot of cases is going to be almost twice as good because when we first deployed the Supercharging capability, the charge rate would taper quite quickly. It would charge at the max rate only for a short period of time, then it would rapidly taper off. We've been able to improve the Supercharger technology and the algorithm to the point where that tapering point occurs much later in the state of charge.
Whereas the average experience at the beginning might have been kind of a 40-45-minute stop, with the upgraded technology, the higher charge rate, and the longer period of time at max charge, that you can actually use max charge, we expect the average stop time to drop approximately half to the 20-25-minute timeframe. Now, the higher charge rate is still in beta, but we expect to have that rolled out to all of the Supercharger stations within about three months. We're doing some beta testing right now, then, like I said, it'll be available to consumers at the higher charge rate in just a few months.
This is, I think, a pretty exciting development, and really, it gives people a sense of freedom because one of the things when you get a car, that you're getting with a car, is this ability to go almost anywhere, and that's what the Supercharger network will allow you to do. It'll allow you to drive anywhere in the U.S. or Canada just using the Supercharger network. Then, as I mentioned many times before, but sometimes people gloss over this, it's actually free. Once you buy a Model S, if it has Supercharging enabled, which comes enabled by default with the larger pack and is an option on the standard pack You have free charging for life at the Supercharging stations.
It's possible to drive anywhere in the country, leave your wallet behind, pack lunch, and stay with friends and not spend a dollar, which I think is pretty cool. Then something else that I'm looking forward to doing at the end of this year is actually doing a family road trip with all my kids, driving from L.A. to New York and actually redoing a college road trip that I did about 20 years ago. I was in a gasoline car where I went from L.A. to Vegas, to Arizona, Grand Canyon, went through the Four Corners, then over Wolf Creek Pass in Colorado, through Wyoming to South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore. Went across to Chicago to see the Sears Tower, then down through Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell, then end up in New York.
It's been 20 years since I did that, I think it'll be kind of fun to take my kids on that trip and sort of show people kind of in real-time what you can really do with this whole system. With that, let me turn it over to questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press star followed by the number one key on your touch-tone telephone. If your question has been answered or if you decide to remove yourself from the queue, you may press the pound key. Again, if you do have a question, please press star and then one at this time. Our first question comes from the line of Dana Hull from The Mercury News.
Good morning, Elon. Congratulations.
Hey. Oh, thanks. Hi, Dana.
A couple of questions. When will there be a Supercharger in Detroit? Which station in the network is currently the most popular? I think it's Harris Ranch. Is there any concern that rapid charging degrades the lifetime of the battery over time? My understanding is that you'd have to be Supercharging on a fairly regular basis in order for that to be a concern, but could you talk a little bit about that?
Sure. We've got a few questions there. Yeah, actually, we'll have Detroit covered by the end of this year. The way our Superchargers work is they're really intended to address the long-distance travel problem. We tend to place them between major metros. As I said, the Detroit area, in fact, I think almost all of Michigan will be covered by Superchargers by the end of this year. Like I said, people want to be able to do the road trip I just mentioned, which is, I think, just a fun road trip. It might end up being like some Chevy Chase movie, but I think it'll be a good memory for the kids. Let's see. The most popular one.
Our most busy one used to be Harris because we actually only had one functional Supercharger there, so people had the longest queue there. Harris, for people that don't know, is halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Right now, the busiest ones are, and it would be a close call between the one in Gilroy, which is just in the South Bay area for those that don't know, and then the one in Delaware on the East Coast.
Yeah. In terms of degradation, the warranty is unaffected. Even if you were to Supercharge every day, the battery warranty is unaffected by use of the Supercharger. The Supercharging doesn't affect the life of the pack very much. It's slight, but quite negligible. What's actually much more important for the life of the pack is the state of charge. Not storing the pack at close to 100% state of charge, which means it's close to the electrochemical breakdown voltage. That's the most sensitive thing for battery packs. Also not having to be stored hot. What a lot of people don't realize is that when lithium-ion packs are in, say, a cell phone or a laptop, they're actually being kept usually at the worst conditions, which is if they're plugged in, it's at full state of charge and hot.
That's the worst thing you can do to a battery. The best thing you can do is a mid-state of charge and cold.
Right. Okay, thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Phil LeBeau from CNBC.
Hi, Elon. I'm looking at your link right now for the Supercharger network, I really have two questions here. The first one being, what is the difference between the red dots and the gray dots? Are the red dots Supercharger locations and the gray dots are in the works or other recharging locations? My second question is what kind of barrier, if you will, has this been, the long-distance driving, the range anxiety. How much of a barrier has it been in holding back sales? In other words, have your sales associates said, "Listen, we hear from people. We're interested in the Model S, but we want something that we know we can just jump in and drive two states over.
Sure. If you go to the Supercharger page, you can actually see a rollout. If you go to the front page right now, it just went live. You can see a rollout of the Superchargers and the ones that are gray are the ones that are basically in process at that time.
Okay.
Basically, if it's gray, it's about to be complete. We're still signaling that it's going to be ready very soon. Usually we're just waiting for final permits and approvals, which are out of our hands. Technically the hardware is all there, but we're waiting for the final sign-off from the local permit approval authorities. Yeah. That's what that means. Sorry, what was the other question?
How much has the range anxiety been an issue holding back sales? In other words, what have you heard back from your sales associates in terms of people saying, "Boy, I'd be interested in buying a Model S, but I'm a little bit worried about being able to charge up on a longer drive," et cetera? In other words, how much does the Supercharger network expansion increase the likelihood of sales?
It's not necessary to maintain our current level of sales. In North America, we're just under a 20,000 units a year run rate on sales. A lot of people are buying it without. Actually, I think most people are buying it and don't even know there's a thing called Supercharging, honestly. With this announcement, we're hoping to educate people. A lot of people don't even know that the car they bought will have this capability. They're pleasantly surprised to discover it. Actually, a point I should make is that all Model S's have Supercharging capability. It's turned on and is part of the 85 kilowatt-hour pack, and it's optionally turned on with the 60. Even if somebody doesn't buy the 60 kilowatt-hour pack car with Supercharging turned on, they can choose to have it turned on later for a slightly higher price.
All Model S's are capable of Supercharging. That's a point that I've sometimes seen written inaccurately because I think we weren't clear on that. I think in terms of what it means to a larger group of customers, I think it does mean quite a lot to people, to mainstream customers. To be able to drive your car anywhere you want to go is really important to most people. Even if they only make the occasional trip, they want to know that they have that ability to do so, on a moment's notice, to go wherever they want. I think it's really important, like I said, for accessing a broader audience.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Alan Ohnsman from Bloomberg News.
Hey, Elon. Do you have any cost figures you can provide? At the original introduction last year, you had a ballpark figure for each station. At this point, is there a cost per station or average cost per station? Also, has the timetable accelerated a little bit? I think you planned for 100 stations in the U.S. and Canada by 2015. Has that been sped up a little bit?
It has. Yeah. The cost is approximately what we first estimated, which is roughly $150,000 per station in capital expenditures without solar, then another 150 or so with solar. It's roughly $300,000 per station. Some might be a little bit less than that, some might be a bit more than that, but that's roughly the average right now. Then, yeah, I think we'll be probably at the 100-station mark next year. It's probably we're growing about twice as fast as originally planned.
Okay, thanks.
Yeah.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ron White from the Los Angeles Times.
Hi, Elon. Thanks very much. I have three questions. One, how many stations are planned for California? The second question would be, how many Superchargers will there be across the nation altogether when you're done?
Okay.
The third thing is that, do I understand correctly in that your earlier buyers with the Roadster will not be able to use these Superchargers? That's it for me.
Okay. Yeah. We're expecting to have a pretty high density of Superchargers in California as well as on the East Coast corridor between Virginia and Massachusetts. Basically in densely traveled areas, we're going to have a lot of Superchargers. Like I said, with a distance of probably 80 miles, but certainly less than 100 miles between a Supercharger. When you're dealing with a car that has a range of at least 200 miles, you've got at least two to three Superchargers along the route just within that charge range. It's pretty easy to use. Actually, something else I should mention is that on the Model S, if you just tap the lightning bolt on the nav screen, it'll automatically route you to the nearest Supercharger.
Oh, wow.
That's a cool feature I should've mentioned. You don't have to wonder, oh, where are all these Superchargers and which ones are active and are they actually being used? Do I have to look on some map online? You don't have to do any of that. Actually, all you need to do is tap the lightning bolt, and it'll take you to the nearest Supercharger. We update the locations of the Superchargers in real-time as they go live. You don't even have to think about it. It just automatically updates and takes you to the right place. It's really easy and convenient for people.
In terms of the Supercharger locations, the actual number of Supercharger locations in California, I think ultimately it's probably going to approach 25 or 30 just in California and a couple of hundred across the country, including southern Canada. Including, yeah, Canada and the U.S.
Okay.
Obviously, this call we're talking really about North America Supercharging. This is not to neglect, obviously, Supercharging in other parts of the world, we're just reserving those announcements for when those markets are ready. We'll probably do European Supercharging announcements in a few months, I think. We're expecting our first European deliveries to arrive in July.
Thank you. Is there any possibility that the folks that are still driving your Roadsters loyally are going to be able to use this at some point?
Unfortunately, the Supercharger, it's not as though we don't want people to be able to use the Supercharger, but there is a pretty big step change in technology between the Roadster and the Model S. One thing the Roadster does not have is the ability to do a high-voltage DC bypass direct to the pack. The Model S, we designed that in from the start. It can either take AC current and route that to the onboard chargers on the car or through that same outlet, take really high power, high-voltage DC current from the Supercharger and route that directly to the pack. There's no way to easily send high power DC into the Roadster because in the Roadster, it all flows through the onboard charger.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ashlee Vance from Businessweek.
Hey, Elon. I was wondering why you're doing sort of the strategy behind having an announcement almost every week. I mean, it just seems like you guys have enough demand. So I was just sort of curious why you'd be out there drumming up on this. I've sort of never seen anything like this.
It is a sort of somewhat concentrated series of announcements. Yeah, I did say it was like a five-part trilogy. Although then we had intermission and did like billion-dollar financing round and paid off the DOE, which were not part of that plan. That was sort of an unexpected intermission. After this five-part trilogy, it was named in honor of Douglas Adams, we're going to be quiet for a while. You should expect that there's obviously this announcement, there's one more on June 20th, which I think is going to be pretty exciting. That'll be an in-person thing. Then we won't have anything to say for a while.
Can you explain, just sorry, just one last question, sort of how the solar works for the stations that do have solar?
Oh, yeah, sure. The general principle is that we want to generate more energy from the sun over the course of the year than is used by Model S's that recharge at the stations. The recharging tends to be concentrated during pretty obvious times like on a Friday afternoon and evening and on a Sunday afternoon and evening because people are going somewhere for the weekend or on holiday days and that kind of thing. Whereas it sees relatively low usage during the week. So the solar panels are generating energy throughout the course of the week and actually it cumulatively adds up to more than the energy the cars consume. Actually, I was thinking of maybe saving this information for a future announcement. You do make a good point. We've kind of had too much news.
I'll just pack it in here, which is that we actually have grid storage going on at some of our Supercharging stations. We've got stationary battery packs that take in energy through the week from the solar panels and the solar panels actually charge the battery pack, and then that stationary battery pack charges the Model S's. It's actually capable of going completely off-grid. This is something we expect to probably roll out to all the Supercharging stations. I think something that's sort of very cool is that these stations will then operate even if the entire national grid goes down. I was joking with someone that, even if there's the zombie apocalypse, which seems to be a popular theme these days, even if there's some zombie apocalypse, you'll still be able to travel throughout the country using the Tesla Supercharging system.
Even if the entire grid goes down, it'll still work.
Because I think that.
I can see the story now, by the way. Elon Musk predicts zombie apocalypse.
I've never seen the solar panels actually at one of the stations. Do you just pull from the SolarCity grid, or there are stations that have solar panels near them?
Oh, no. Yeah, we have solar panels above the Supercharging parking stalls.
Okay.
You can see some good examples of that at Tejon Ranch in California and at the Hawthorne Supercharging station. Over time, we'll have that at all Supercharging stations. It takes a little longer for the solar to get deployed, we don't want to wait for the panels and whatnot to get put in place. It has another side benefit, which is also it creates a carport, you're actually shielded from snow and rain while your car is parked at the Supercharger.
Okay.
All right.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you, our next question comes from the line of Chris Woodward from USA Today.
Elon, thank you for doing this call. I was wondering, how much of an issue has reliability been on the Superchargers? Is there a new kind of range anxiety if someone leaves to go for a weekend trip, worried that the Supercharger will be working or tied up with other customers?
Yeah. The main thing we need to do is make sure we've got a lot of parking spaces available. What the Supercharger is actually capable of doing is routing power to multiple parking bays. Right now it can route power to two parking bays, but we're going to be upgrading that so it can actually route power to up to four parking bays. Our goal is really just to expand the number of parking bays where you can do Supercharging and make sure that there's always an excess number of stations, except in extremely rare circumstances.
Has there been a problem of someone showing up and it not be working?
We have multiple Superchargers for redundancy. It's possible to, the minimum number, even in relatively low utilization Supercharging stations, is a minimum of two Superchargers, which then serve at least four parking bays. It's possible for one Supercharger to be down conceivably, but it's very unlikely that two or more would be down. It's also worth noting that the Supercharger, in creating the Supercharger, we actually did this by stacking a whole bunch of the chargers that we developed for the car. There's actually internal redundancy in the Supercharger itself. With the current 20 kilowatt version, there are actually 12 chargers, and even if some of those internal chargers break down, it just reduces the total power output of the Supercharger. It doesn't actually make the Supercharger itself break.
You'd mentioned that you're going through permitting in a number of states. Are there any places that are not allowing you to put in Superchargers where you really want them?
Actually, the states have been really welcoming. It was actually difficult in the beginning to do it, because you recall, usually we work with highway rest stop operators, either at the commercial estate level. When people hadn't heard of Tesla and we said, "Hey, we want to put this Supercharger thing," it took quite a bit of educating to say, "What the heck is this thing?" and, "Does it make any sense?" Even to get our calls returned in the beginning was really difficult. In the last several months, Tesla's awareness has increased quite a bit. Once we had a few stations operating, we could then refer highway rest stop operators to those stations.
They can actually see what they look like and, oh, it's actually no problem and it's good, and it actually ends up attracting high-end clientele to that particular highway rest stop. Now it's great, but it was quite difficult at the beginning.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mark Rogowsky from Forbes.
Elon, just to follow up on the last question, is the plan to not create a reservation system of any kind, but to increase the number of available spots so that there's never going to be a wait? Or is something going to be-
Yeah
done in the future so that you can reserve a spot?
Yeah, I think the most important thing is just to overdo it on the number of spots and just have a huge number of parking spots available so you never have to worry about reserving or anything.
Okay. Just trying to look at the map, I noticed that it appears that in California, it looks like the 101 is now on the list of future destinations. Are there other places where parallel roads are going to be an option? It's hard to tell from the map, and maybe the California circumstance is somewhat unique, but it seems like you can get anywhere so long as you take a Tesla-approved route in most cases. Is that a fair characterization of the way the future's going to look?
Yeah, that's correct. We will be putting Superchargers on multiple parallel routes. You won't just be sort of stuck on the route that we chose, one particular route. In California, as people who've driven it know, driving the I-5 is fast, but it's a little bleak, and not the best way to see California. Whereas if you drive, say, Highway 1 or the 101, it's really awesome. We wanted to enable both people who just want to get from Bay Area to L.A. really fast to go that route, or people who want to have a slightly more sort of scenic route, be able to do that. We want to enable that throughout the country.
Obviously on the East Coast, I know there's some cases like the turnpikes, or you can go off the turnpikes, and we want to enable generally so that people can do the scenic route and the fast route at a minimum. Like I said, long term, really the entire country's going to be within range of a Supercharger. You'll be able to go any route you want anywhere in the country.
This map is not the be-all and end-all, it's just the 2015 map.
Yeah. The 2015 map does encompass the entire country.
Right, but not all of its roads. I guess that's what I'm sort of
I think we'll probably end up doing more than even the numbers that's shown here in 2015.
Okay.
Yeah. The overarching goal here is to give people a sense of total freedom of travel. We don't want people to feel constrained that because they have an electric car, they won't be able to drive where they want, how they want. We will do whatever it takes to show that they have the same sense of freedom of travel. In fact, a better one really, than with a gasoline car. Because like I said, it's free forever.
Great. Thank you very much.
Yeah. Welcome.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Chuck Hannert from Road & Track Magazine.
Yes, hi. Actually, I have two questions for you. You say that most of the major metro areas in the U.S. will be covered within the next six months. How many stations do you plan on covering in the next six months? I noticed that by the map, you have dots all over the place, but that's by 2015.
Yeah. I think we'll end up doing a little more than this map shows right now. Yeah, like I said, really, we're aiming for in less than 12 months to be like 80%-90% of the U.S. and Canadian population within range of a Supercharger. Within two years, it's 100%. Yeah, it's pretty dramatic acceleration and like I said, I think we're going to try to exceed what's shown here on the map.
Do you have a guesstimate of how many stations that will be?
Ultimately, within the U.S. and Canada?
Yeah.
It's probably on the order of 200-ish. For our stations, like I said, it actually gives you coverage of multiple routes. I'm always slightly hesitant in terms of citing the number of chargers, because if you were to compare it to something like the Leaf, which has a very low range, you need vastly more chargers with a low-range car than you do with a long-range car. Obviously, in the limit, if you had a car that could do 3,000 miles range, you wouldn't need any chargers anywhere in the country. You could just travel L.A. to New York without recharging. As that range decreases, the number of chargers increases with the square. This may be something that people don't quite appreciate, but the range of the car is the area of the circle.
For something like, say, the Leaf, which has maybe a quarter of the range of the Model S, you wouldn't need four times as many chargers, you'd actually need 16 times as many chargers to get the same coverage.
Here's my last question. It's about location of the chargers. You say they'll be located within 200 miles of each other, or within the range of the vehicle of each other. Will they be located close to the major roadways, just as gas stations are, rest stops, et cetera?
Yeah. Along popular routes, they'll actually be at the 80 to 100-mile distance. Even in the long term, it'll be quite rare to even be 200 miles away from a Supercharger station long-term. Even if you're in a pretty unpopulated section of the country, probably under 150 miles between Supercharging stations. Yeah. In terms of locations, they're actually located at existing highway rest stops.
In the future, they will be as well.
That's correct. Yeah. They're located at the place that somebody would normally stop on a long-distance route.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Steve Russo from Popular Mechanics.
Hey, Elon. Just a quick speculative question. With such a massive fast charging network expanding throughout the U.S. by 2015, are there any plans to perhaps open this up to other EVs?
The Supercharger, because of the nature of the technology, it's a very high-powered charger. It needs to do this very complicated ultra-high-speed tango with the pack. Unless you have a close pairing of the Supercharger and the pack, you can't charge at this rate. To give you a sense of the level of power you're talking about, 120 kilowatts is 60 times the average power used by a house. Your average house, over a 24-hour period, on average, is using two kilowatts. The Supercharger's living 60 times that power level. That's an nutty amount of power. It's really extremely difficult to make that generic. It needs to know the pack that it's going to.
Now conceivably, if we were to do a partnership with a major manufacturer and they were interested in the Supercharging system, and were willing to use the same basic architecture, then it could be used by more than just Tesla. We're not closed to that idea. We're not trying to create some closed system as some sort of strategy or something like that. It's just that we need to solve the problem of long-distance travel, and we can't wait for others to agree with our strategy. If we wait for some sort of consensus, it's going to take too long. We just need to get going, and other manufacturers can either copy us or join us.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of David Baker from the San Francisco Chronicle.
Thanks for having the call. I wanted to circle back to the solar Superchargers and the grid storage that you mentioned back there. When you look at this announcement that you have today about all the chargers that are going to be going out there in the next couple of years, what % of them are going to have the solar component, and what % will have the grid storage along with that solar?
Sure. Like I said, long-term, I expect actually all Supercharging stations to have solar and grid storage. It's just a matter of time. In order for us to deploy the Supercharging Network very rapidly, we have to start off with them not having solar and then backfill the solar over time. The completion of the solar is going to lag the Supercharging Network by probably 12-18 months. Then grid storage is another six to 12 months after that, I would imagine. These are just rough estimates. Yeah.
You're going with the solar before you get the storage component there on site?
Yes.
Okay. How many of the grid storage units do you have out there, and how big are they?
We've got two in operation right now. They're pretty sizable, a half megawatt-hour.
They're capable of putting out a megawatt if need be.
Wow.
Yeah.
Where are they located?
A megawatt's quite a lot. Well, actually, I'd rather not say where they're located because I don't want people going and fussing around with them. I mean, I'll say they're in California. There's probably only a limited number of stations. We're actually doing this in partnership with the utilities, by the way. The grid storage is considered a helpful thing to the utilities because it allows them to use that pack as a grid buffer.
The utilities always have a challenge of dealing with too much or too little power generation at a time, and so we're able to provide that buffering capability, which they like.
Excellent. Thanks a lot.
All right. Welcome.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Kevin Bullis from "MIT Technology Review.
Hi, Elon. With 20-minute charges, do you see any role in the future for battery switches? I know you've talked about that in the past.
I was curious to get an update on that.
Well, today is about charging. I should say that I'm a big fan of optionality, and I've talked about battery pack swap for a long time, since really the beginning of Tesla. I don't think pack swap is a particularly brilliant idea. Obviously, we swap battery packs in cell phones and laptops. It's pretty obvious that such a thing can be done, at least at a small scale. The question would be, could you do it with something much larger? Then how convenient would it be, and what are the economics like? Maybe we'll have something to say about that in the future.
Okay, great. Thanks.
Yeah.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mark Vaughn from Autoweek.
Hi, Elon. This is a big step forward in reaching new customers. What else are you going to do to reach out to mainstream people? You've got the true believers already. They have bought their cars, now you're going to have these people who don't necessarily follow all this technical detail and things. What are you going to do to reach mainstream buyers?
Well, I think this is one of the key things to reach mainstream buyers, is to get the word out that there's super high-speed charging, a charging technology that's light years ahead of anything that they're familiar with. That's what today's announcement we're trying to make sure that there's this awareness, because people don't believe it's true until they actually at least read about it, then when they hear about their friends using it. I think this is quite crucial to reaching a broader audience. Yeah. Obviously, ultimately, we need to come out with a more affordable car, of course, which would, again, also be able to use the Supercharging network. We're hoping to get there in the three to four-year timeframe.
All your future cars will have this capability for Supercharging?
That's right. All future cars will have that capability.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mark Rechtin from Automotive News.
Good afternoon, Elon.
Hi.
One quick thing. I wanted to clarify the number of actual charging ports. We've been doing a lot of talking about stations, but each station has a different number of plugs, whether it's one or four or 10.
Sure.
I'm wondering how many actual Supercharging plugs you have right now versus what it's going to be at the end of this year and this time next year.
Actually, well, yeah, that number is actually increasing even faster. I don't actually have the number handy. One thing that's not obvious, and you're highlighting a good point, is that in addition to new stations, we're actually significantly increasing the number of ports at existing stations. For example, Harris used to have just one connector or one port, and Harris now I think has 10. If you looked at the map, it still looks like Harris, even though it increased by an order of magnitude. While I don't have that exact number for you, it's certainly true that the number of ports is increasing at a much greater rate than the number of actual stations.
Okay. When you're talking about having 25-30 locations soon and a couple of hundred across the country, you take that exponentially versus the number of actual charging ports and we're talking-
Yeah. Absolutely.
Several thousand spots.
At least an order of magnitude greater. Yeah. At least an order of magnitude greater. If there's 200 charging stations, there's probably 2,000 to 3,000 ports.
Great. That's what I needed. Thanks a lot.
Okay, bye. You're welcome.
Thank you. Our final question for today comes from the line of Tina Casey from CleanTechnica.
Hi, Elon. You alluded to affordability in one of your last questions. Now that you've got this Supercharger network and you've got this concept of freedom of travel, college road trips, what to you does a more affordable Tesla motor vehicle look like?
Sure. Well, we're just at the early design stages of that vehicle. Some of the obvious elements of that car are that it'll be a little bit smaller because the Model S is a full-size car. The Model S is comparable in external dimensions to a BMW 5 Series or Audi A6, A7. That high-volume car would be closer in size to an Audi A4 or BMW 3 Series in terms of external dimensions. Of course, we have a lot more room in the interior and have a front and a rear trunk as the Model S does. It would be at an order of magnitude greater volume, so you'd have economies of scale, and it'd be our third design iteration, so we'd have more opportunity to design the car to be easier to manufacture. Those are kind of the obvious elements.
We'll do at least those things. I certainly would like to come up with something in addition to that. So far, we don't have anything firm on that front.
I'm thinking specifically of style-wise, anything that would be a real departure from what you've done so far?
It'll be in family with the Model S.
Yeah. Model S and the Model X. The Model X, obviously, I think we're trying to do something innovative on the SUV front by having the first double-hinged gull wing, or falcon wing, as we call it and trying to address with an SUV sort of looking vehicle, a market that is normally covered by both minivan and SUV. We want greater than minivan functionality and something that with the aesthetics of an SUV and the performance of a sports car, that's the goal with the Model X. On that third-gen platform, there'd be a smaller version of the Model X. We'd have a smaller sedan and a smaller SUV. Those are kind of the obvious moves on that front. Yeah.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Thank you. That concludes our question and answer session today.
All right. Thanks, everyone.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program, and you may now disconnect. Everyone, have a good day.