Source: Oz EV Champions/Twitter
The first ultra-fast V3 Tesla Superchargers destined for installation in Australia have been spotted in Brisbane, Queensland.
The 250kW cabinets, which can add almost 250km driving range to a Tesla electric car in about 10 minutes, were photographed in storage at a carpark in Toombul, north of the Brisbane city centre. It is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the location of the most northerly 350kW charging site run by Chargefox.
V3 Supercharging was first introduced by Tesla in 2019, beginning in the Bay area of San Francisco. It has since been shipping the one-megawatt charging units, which are designed so that the energy supply is not split when more than one vehicles are charging on each cabinet, to Europe and China for several months now.
“A new 1MW power cabinet with a similar design to our utility-scale products supports peak rates of up to 250kW per car. At this rate, a Model 3 Long Range operating at peak efficiency can recover up to 75 miles of charge in 5 minutes and charge at rates of up to 1,000 miles per hour,” Tesla wrote in 2019.
The new units were captured and shared on Twitter by OZ EV Champions, who notes that “Toombul shopping centre is a popular location with Tesla & other EVs already & not too far off the M1.”
VedaPrime, who tracks items Tesla is shipping confirmed to The Driven that the packages arrived in September 2020, but at the time it was not clear if the units were V3 charger or not. The Driven can reveal that as many as five units first arrived in Melbourne. A photo of the label on the covered units now shows clearly that they are V3 Superchargers.
Tesla’s Supercharger site website does not explicitly mention the addition of V3 chargers to Australia but has several sites that list “Coming soon” including a blank listing that states Brisbane, but not any specific suburb.
Other blank listings include Bundaberg, Colac, Frankston, Geelong, Perth, Traralgon, Warrnambool, Wollongong, as well as two more sites in both Sydney and Melbourne.
Tesla was not available for comment at the time of publishing this article, and we will keep you updated when more information is known.
Tesla estimates that V3 Superchargers, which are more than twice as fast as its previous 120kW V2 Superchargers, combined with battery pre-conditioning that can be activated by entering a Supercharging site into the vehicle’s navigation, cuts the amount of time that tesla owners spend charging by half.
“Combined with other improvements we’re announcing today, V3 Supercharging will ultimately cut the amount of time customers spend charging by an average of 50%, as modelled on our fleet data,” Tesla said in 2019.
At the time, it also increased the charging rate of its V2 chargers to 145kW.
This article has been updated with information about the delivery date and number of units delivered.
Bridie Schmidt is associate editor for The Driven, sister site of Renew Economy. She has been writing about electric vehicles since 2018, and has a keen interest in the role that zero-emissions transport has to play in sustainability. She has participated in podcasts such as Download This Show with Marc Fennell and Shirtloads of Science with Karl Kruszelnicki and is co-organiser of the Northern Rivers Electric Vehicle Forum. Bridie also owns a Tesla Model Y and has it available for hire on evee.com.au.
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