Service Launch

May 30, 2013

Press Release

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Tesla Motors Supercharger Announcement. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to introduce our host for today, Ms. Sarah Meron. Ma'am, please go ahead. Thanks, Karen, and good morning, everyone. This is Sarah Meron, Head of Communications for Tesla Motors. I'm joined today by Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, who will make brief remarks regarding our supercharger network and 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 ks 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. And with that, I'll turn it over to Elon. All right. Let's see. Thanks everyone for joining. The Supercharger page should be going live within minutes and they'll have more detailed information that you can refer to and I think our press release just went out. But the basic thing we're announcing today is that we're making a dramatic increase in the deployment of our supercharger network. And this is obviously in response to people's desire to have really fast charge capability throughout the country. So we're not just adding actually in terms of geography, but we're increasing the density on well traveled routes. So on well traveled routes, there'll be a supercharge of probably every 80 to 100 miles. And then in terms of coverage, we'll be covering the most of the major metros in the country by the end of this year. And moreover, you'll be able to travel all the way from Los Angeles to New York just using the Tesla Supercharger network. So it's announcement of expanding the of accelerating the Supercharger deployment as well as the second thing is an improvement in the supercharger technology itself. So we're increasing the maximum charge rate from 90 kilowatts to 120 kilowatts. And 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 kind of a 2 thirds recharge in just over 20 minutes. And what that allows somebody to do is to drive for roughly 3 hours, stop for a 20 minutes grab a bite to eat coffee at the restroom, whatever the case may be. In other words, the thing that it allows people to stop for the normal amount of time that they would stop for anyway on a road trip. If you take those sort of obvious cases, starting a trip at 9 am, by the time you get to noon, you want to stop, take a break and by the time you come back to your car, charged and ready to go. And 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. So it would charge at the max rate only for a short period of time and then it would rapidly taper off. And we've been able to improve the supercharged technology and the algorithm to the point where that tapering point occurs much later in the state of charge. So, whereas the average experience at the beginning might have been kind of a 40 to 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 sort of the 20 to 25 minutes timeframe. Now the higher charge rate is still in beta. And but we expect to have that rolled out to all of the supercharged stations within about 3 months. So we'll do some we're doing some beta testing right now. And then like I said, it will be available to consumers at the higher charge rate in just a few months. So, this is, I think, a pretty exciting development and really it gives people a sense of freedom because one thing that you 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 will allow you to drive anywhere in the U. S. Or lower Canada just using the supercharger network. And then as I mentioned many times before, but sometimes people gloss over this, it's actually free. So 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. So it's possible to drive anywhere in the country, leave your wallet behind, pack lunch and stay with friends and not spend $1 which I think is pretty cool. And then something else that I'm looking forward to doing at the end of this year is actually doing a family road trip, so with all my kids, driving from LA 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 LA to Vegas to Arizona Grand Canyon, went through the Four Corners, then over Wolf's past in Colorado, through Wyoming to South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore and then across to Chicago to see the Sears Tower and then down to Philadelphia, see the Liberty Bell and then end up New York. And that's it's been 20 years since I did that, but I think it would be kind of fine 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. So with that, let me turn it over to questions. Our first question comes from the line of Dana Ho from San Jose Mercury News. Good morning, Elon. Congratulations. Hi, Dana. Hi, Dana. 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. And is there any concern that rapid charging degrades the lifetime of the battery over time? I mean, 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. So, yes, actually, we'll have Detroit traffic by the end of this year. Now the way our superchargers work is they're really intended to address the long distance travel problem. So we tend to place them between major metros. But 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. And then like I said, when we'll 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. And then let's see. So the most popular one, it's our most busy one used to be Harris because we actually only had 1 functional supercharger there. So people had longest queue there. And Harris, we feel like I don't know, is halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. But right now the busiest ones are it will 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. Yes. And then in terms of degradation, well, the warranty is unaffected. So even if you wear a 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 really I mean it's slight but quite negligible. What's actually much more important for life of the pack is the state of charge. So 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 and then also not having to be stored hot. So what I feel to 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 high. That's the worst thing you can do to a battery. And the best thing you can do is a mid state of charge and cold. Graham? Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Phil Lebout from CNBC. Hi, Elon. I'm looking at your link right now for the supercharger network and 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? And then 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 2 states over? Sure. If you go to the supercharger page, you can actually see a rollout. So if you go to the front page right now, it just went live. You can see kind of a rollout of the supercharges and the ones that are gray are the ones that are basically in process at that time. Okay. And basically, if it's gray, it's about to be complete. So we're still signaling that going to be ready very, very soon. And usually we're just waiting for kind of final permits and approvals, which are out of our hands. So technically the hardware is all there, but we're waiting for kind of the final sign up from the local permit approval authorities. Yes, so that's what that means. I'm 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, etcetera? In other words, how much does the supercharger network expansion increase the likelihood of sales? I think I mean, it's not necessary to maintain our current level of sales. In North America, we're just under 20,000 units a year run rate on sales. So and a lot of people are buying it without really I mean, actually, I think most people are buying it don't even know there's a thing called supercharging honestly. So 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. But I think they're pleasantly surprised to discover it. And actually a point I should make is that actually all Model Ss have supercharging capability, but it's turned on and is part of the 85 kilowatt hour pack and it's optionally turned on with the 60. But 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. So all Model Ss are capable of supercharging. But that's a point that I've sometimes seen written inaccurately because I think we weren't clear on that. So 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 any way you want to go is really important to most people. And even if they only make the occasional trip, they want to know that they have that ability to do so and on a moment's notice to go wherever they want. So I think it's really important like I said, for accessing a broader audience. Thank you. Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Alan Aungsman 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? And also has the timetable accelerated a little bit? Think you had a 100 or planned for 100 stations in the U. S. And Canada by 2015. Has that been sped up a little bit? It has, yes. So the cost is approximately what we first estimated, which is roughly $150,000 per station in capital expenditures without solar and then another $150,000 or so with solar. So it's roughly $300,000 per station. And some might be a little bit less than that and some might be even more than that, but that's roughly the average right now. And then, yes, I think we'll be probably at the 100 station mark next year. So it's probably we're growing about twice as fast as originally planned. Okay. Thanks. Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Ron White from the Los Angeles Times. Hi, Elon. Thank you very much. I had 3 questions. One, how many stations are planned for California? How many the second question would be how many superchargers will there be across the nation altogether when you're done? And 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? And that's it for me. Okay. Yeah. So we're expected to have a pretty high density of superchargers in California as well as on the East Coast corridor between Virginia and Massachusetts. So like 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. So when you're dealing with a car that has a range of at least 200 miles, then you've got at least 2 to 3 superchargers along the route just within that charge range. So it's pretty easy to use. And then actually, as Sameh also mentioned is that the just if you on the Model S, if you just tap the lightning bolt on the NAV screen, it will automatically route you to the nearest supercharger. That's a cool feature I should have mentioned. So you don't have to like wonder where are all these superchargers and which ones are active and are they actually being used and you have to look on some map online. You don't have to do any of that. Actually, all you need to do is tap a lightning bolt and that will take you to your supercharger. And then we update the locations of the superchargers in real time as they go live. So you don't even have to think about it. They just it just automatically updates and takes you to the right place. And yes, so it's really easy and convenient for people. And then in terms of the supercharger locations, the actual number of supercharger locations in California, I mean, I think ultimately, there's probably going to approach 25 or 30 just in California and a couple of 100 across the country across country including Southern Canada. So including Canada and the U. S. Okay. And obviously this call we're talking really about North America supercharging. This is not to neglect obviously supercharging in other parts of the world, but we're just reserving those announcements for when those markets are ready. So we'll probably do European supercharging announcements in a few months, I think. But as we were expecting our first European deliveries to arrive in July. Thank you. And is there any possibility that the folks that are still driving your road loyally are going to be at least at some point? Unfortunately, the supercharger, it's not as though we don't want people to be able to use supercharger, but there is a pretty big step change in technology between the Roadster and the Model S. And one thing the Roadster does not have is the ability to do a high voltage DC bypass direct to the pack. So the Model S, we designed that in from the start. So it can either take AC current and route that to the onboard charges 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. So there's no way to sort of send if they send high powered DC into the roadster because in the roadster it all flows through the onboard charger. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Ashley Van from Businessweek. Hey, Elon. I was just I was wondering why you're doing sort of the strategy behind having an announcement almost every week for a couple of hours. I mean, it just seems like you guys have enough demand. And 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. And I did say it was like a 5 part trilogy, although we then we had intermission and that like building it off financing around and paid off the DOE which were not part of that plan, but that was sort of an unexpected intermission. But after this bipod trilogy, the it's named in honor of Douglas Adams, We're going to be quiet for a while. So you should expect that there's obviously this announcement. There's one more on June 20, which I think is going to be pretty exciting. That will be an in person thing. And then we won't have anything to say for a while. And can you explain, sorry, just one last question, how the sort of how the solar works for the stations that do have solar? Yes, sure. So 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 Ss that recharge at the stations. So 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 or on a holiday days and that kind of thing, whereas it sees relatively low usage during the week. And so the solar panels are generating energy throughout the course of the week and actually it cumulatively adds up to more than what the cars the energy of the cars consume. And actually, I was thinking of maybe saving this for this sort of information for a future announcement. But 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. So we've got stationary battery packs that take in energy through the week from the solar panels. And so the solar panels actually charge the battery pack. And then that stationary battery pack charges the Model Ss. And so it's actually capable of going completely off grid. And this is something we expect to probably roll out to all the supercharging stations. And so I think something that's sort of very cool is that these stations will then operate even if the grid the entire national grid goes down. So I was talking to someone that like 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, because even if the entire grid goes down, you'll still be able to it'll still work. And I'm like because I can do this. I can do the story now. You almost predict zombie apocalypse. I've never seen the solar panels like actually at one of the stations. I mean do you just pull from the SolarCity grid or there are stations that have solar panels near them? Oh, no. So we have panels on above the supercharging parking stalls. So you can see some good examples of that at the Tejon Ranch in California and at the Hawthorne supercharging station. And over time, we'll have that at all supercharging stations. It takes a little longer for the solar to get deployed, so we don't want to wait for the panels and whatnot to get put in place. And it has another side benefit, which is also it creates a carport, so you're actually shielded from snow and rain while your car is parked at the supercharger. Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you. And 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? Yes. So, the main thing we need to do is make sure we've got a lot of parking spaces available. So what the Supercharger is actually capable of doing is routing power to multiple parking bays. And right now it can route power to 2 parking bays, but we're going to be upgrading that so it can actually route power up to 4 parking bays. So 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. But since it's unmanned, has there been a problem of it not of someone showing up and it not be working? We have multiple superchargers for redundancy. So it's possible to like if we have, say, the minimum number even in like relatively low utilization supercharging stations is a minimum of 2 superchargers, which then serve at least 4 parking bays. So it's possible for some of them for 1 supercharger to be down conceivably, but it's very unlikely that 2 or more would be down. It's also worth noting that the supercharger in creating a supercharger, we actually did this by stacking a whole bunch of the chargers that we developed for the car. So there's actually internal redundancy in the supercharger itself. So with the current 20 kilowatt version there are actually 12 charges. And even if some of those internal charges break down, it just reduces the total power output of the supercharger. It doesn't actually make the supercharger itself 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. Yes, I mean it was actually difficult in the beginning to do it because we'd call usually we work with higher risk top operators either at the commercial or state level. And when people hadn't heard of Tesla and they 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 it doesn't make any sense. And even to get our calls returned in the beginning was really difficult. But in the last several months, Tesla's awareness has increased quite a bit. And then once we had a few stations operating, we could then refer high risk operators to those stations that can actually see what they look like and it's actually no problem and it's good and it actually ends up attracting high end clientele to that particular highway rest stop. And now it's actually been now it's great, but it was quite difficult at the beginning. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Mark Rugowski from Forbes. So 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 done in the future so that you can reserve a spot? Yes. I think the most important thing is just to overdo it on the number of spots and have a huge number of parking spots available. So you never have to worry about reserving or anything. Okay. And just trying to look at the map, I noticed that it appears that like 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 that will So you won't just be sort of stuck on the route that we chose one particular route. Like in California as people who've driven it know, I mean driving the I-five 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. And so we wanted to enable both people who just want to get from there to LA really fast to go that route or people who want to have a slightly more sort of scenic route be able to do that. And we want to enable that throughout the country. And obviously on the East Coast, I know like there's some cases like the turnpikes or you can go off the turnpikes and we want to enable generally so people can do the scenic route and the fast route at a minimum. And then like I said, long term, really the entire country is going to be within range of a supercharger. So you'll be able to go any route you want anywhere in the country. So this map is not the be all in end, Alex, just the 2015 map? Yes. And yes, well, I mean, the 2015 map does encompass the entire country. Right, but not all of its roads. So I guess that's sort of I think we'll probably end up doing more than even the number that's shown here in 2015. Okay. So, yes. And really it's going to be a question of if we want to 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, where they want, how they want. And so 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. Yes. Welcome. Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Chuck Hennert from Road and Track Magazine. Yes. Hi. Actually, I have two questions for you. You said that the most of the major metro areas in the United States will be covered within the next 6 months. How many stations do you plan on covering in the next 6 months? I noticed that by the map you have dots all over the place, but that's by 2015. Yes. I think we'll end up doing a little more than this map shows right now. But yes, I mean it's like I said, I mean really we're aiming for in less than 12 months to have or rather than 12 months to be like 80% to 90% of the U. S. And Canadian population with the range of a supercharger within 2 years, it's 100%. So, yes, I mean, it's a 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? I mean, ultimately within the U. S. And Canada? Yes. It's probably like on the order of 200 ish, which for us, Asia, like I said, actually gives you coverage of multiple routes. I mean, I'm always slightly hesitant in terms of citing the number of charges because if you were to compare it to something like the LEAF, which has a very low range, you need vastly more charges with a low range car than you do with a long range car. I mean, obviously, in the limit, if you had a car that could do 3,000 miles range, you wouldn't need any charges anywhere in the country. You just travel L. A. New York without recharging. And then as you as that range decreases, the number of charges increases with a square. It's the there's maybe a lot of something people don't quite appreciate. The range of the car is the area of the circle. And so for something like say the LEAF II, which has maybe a quarter of the range of the Model S, you wouldn't need 4 times as many charges, you'd actually need 16 times as many charges to get the same coverage. And here's my last question. It's about location of the charges. Will they be located and you say they'll be located within 200 miles of each other or within the range of the vehicle of each other. But will they be located close to the major roadways just as big gas stations are, rest stops, etcetera? Yes. Actually along popular routes, they'll actually be at the 80 to 100 mile distance. So and even in long term, it will be quite rare to even be 200 miles away from a supercharger station long term. It will probably be within even if you're in a pretty unpopulated section of the country, probably under 150 miles between supercharging stations. So yes, and in terms of locations, they're actually located at existing highway rest stops. And in the future they will be as well. That's correct. Yes, I mean they're located at the place that somebody would normally stop on a long distance route. Right. Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Steve Russo from Popular Mechanics. Hey, just a quick speculative question. With such a massive fast charging network expanding throughout the United States by 2015, are there any plans to perhaps open this up to other EVs? The SIM charger is because of the nature of the technology, I mean, it's a very high powered charger. And it needs to kind of do this very complicated ultra high speed tango with the pack. So unless you have a close pairing of the supercharger and the pack, you can't charge at this rate. I mean to give you a sense of the level of power, it's home at 120 kilowatts is 60 times the average power used by a house. So your average house there over a 20 5 period is using on average is using 2 kilowatts and the supercharger is living 60 times that power level. That's kind of a nutty amount of power. So it's not it's really extremely difficult to take 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. So we're not close to that idea. And 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. And if we wait for some strict consensus, it's going to take too long. And so we just need to get going and then people can either manufacturers can either copy us or join us. Thank you. And 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, which percentage of them are what percentage of them are going to have the solar component? And what percentage will have the grid storage along with that solar? Sure. So like I said, long term, I think I expect actually all supercharger stations to have solar and grid storage. So it's kind of just a matter of time. And in order for us to deploy the supercharging network very rapidly, we have to start off with them not having solar and then kind of backfill the solar over time. But yes, so the completion of the solar is going to lag the supercharger network by probably 12 to 18 months. And then grid storage is another 6 to 12 months after that, I would imagine. These are just rough estimates. So you're going with the solar before you get the storage components there on-site? Yes. Okay. So how many of the grid storage units do you have out there? And how big are they? We've got 2 in operation right now and they're pretty sizable, a half megawatt hour. And they're capable of putting out a megawatt if need be. Wow. Where are they located? Megawatt's quite a lot. Well, actually, I'd rather not say where they're located because I don't want people going in and fussing around with them. And they're kind of I mean, I'll say they're in California. It's probably only a limited number of stations, but And we're actually doing this in partnership with utilities by the way. So the grid storage is considered a helpful thing to the utilities because it allows them to use that pack as a grid buffer. So the utilities have a challenge of like 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. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. All right. Welcome. Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Kevin Bullis from MIT Technology Review. Hi, Jan. So with 20 minute charges, do you see any role in the future for battery switches? I think you've talked about that in the past. Can you give us an update on that? Well, today is about charging. But 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 beginning of Tesla. And I don't think Pack Swap is a particularly brilliant idea. I mean, obviously, we swap battery packs in cell phones and laptops. So it's pretty obvious that that's a thing can be done at least at a small scale. The question would be could you do it with something much larger? And then how convenient would it be and what are the economics like? And maybe we'll have something to say about that in the future. Okay, great. Thanks. Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Mark Vaughan 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? I mean, you've got the true believers already. They have bought their cars and now you're going to have 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, like a charging technology that's like light years ahead of anything that they're familiar with. And so that's what today's really 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 and then when they hear about their friends using it. And so I think this is quite crucial to reaching a broader audience. Yes. And then obviously, ultimately, we need to come out with a more affordable car, of course, and which would again also be able to use the supercharging network. And we're hoping to get there in the 3 to 4 year timeframe. So all your future cars will have this capability for supercharger? That's right. All future cars will have that capability. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Mark Rechtman from Automotive News. Good afternoon, Elon. 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 1 or 4 or 10. 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, yes, that number is actually increasing even faster. I don't actually have the number handy, but because we're 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. And so for example, Harris used to have just one connector or one port and Harris now I think has 10. But if you looked at the map, it still looks like Harris, even though it increased by an order of magnitude. So 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. So when you're talking about having 25 to 30 locations soon and a couple of heard across the country, you take that exponentially versus the number of actual charging ports and we're talking Yes, absolutely. So at least an order of magnitude greater. Yes, yes, at least an order of magnitude greater. So we're talking yes, I mean if there's 200 charging stations, there's probably 2000 to 3000 ports. Great. That's why I needed. Thanks a lot. Okay. Thanks. You're welcome. Thank you. And our final question for today comes from the line of Tina Casey from cleantechanica.com. And Elon, just as 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 do you does a more affordable Tesla Motors vehicle look like? Sure. Well, we're just at the early design stages of that vehicle. And I mean some of the obvious elements of that car are that it will be a little bit smaller because the Model S is a full size car. So if the Model S is comparable in external dimensions to BMW 530 or Audi A6, A7 then that high volume car would be closer in size to an Audi A4 BMW 3 Series in terms of external dimensions. But then of course, we have a lot more room on the interior and have a front and a rear trunk as the Model S does. And it would be at an order of magnitude greater volume, so you'd have economies of scale and it'd be a third design iteration. So we'd have more opportunity to design the car to be easier to manufacture. So those are kind of the obvious elements. So we'll do at least those things. But I certainly would like to come up with something in addition to that. But 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 a family with the Model S. Yes, Model S and the Model X. So the Model X obviously is I think we're trying to do something a bit of on the SUV front by having sort of the first double hinged gullwing or falconwing as we call it and trying to address with an SUV both with an SUV sort of looking vehicle, a market that is normally covered by both minivan and SUV. So 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. And so on that 3rd gen platform, there'd be a smaller version of the Model X. So we'll have a sedan and an smaller sedan and smaller SUV. But it was kind of the obvious moves on that front. Thank you. Welcome. Thank you. And 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.