Tesla has just opened its first Australian supercharger site which took only days to install on site, instead of weeks.
The new supercharger site with 4 Tesla V4 Superchargers has just opened in Bordertown South Australia with a pre-fabricated setup which arrived to site on the back of a truck.
This allowed the Tesla supercharger installation contractor to set the site up in days instead of weeks typically seen at other fast charging installs across the country.
Thom Drew, Tesla’s country manager, shared the opening on LinkedIn by saying: “New Tesla Supercharger: Bordertown, SA (4 stalls). This is the first pre-fab site in APAC, which reduced hardware installation time from weeks to days!”
According to Drew’s post, this is not only the first charging site to utilize this method in Australia but also across the entire Asia Pacific.
The Bordertown supercharger is located at the OTR service station in Bordertown and has a charging price set at $0.68/kWh for chargers capable of delivering up to 250 kW of power.
As of now, the site is only opened to Tesla vehicles but that may change in the future given the longer length cables in the V4 superchargers, making it easier to accommodate for non-Tesla EVs charge port locations.
The pre-fab method to deploy sites is fairly efficient. Fast charger projects traditionally took many months of planning, acquisition of hardware and construction before they are ready to be commissioned for use by EV drivers.
Any time that can be saved by doing it in a controlled environment away before the hardware gets to site, helps save time and increases the speed to help get the site open sooner.
This month, Tesla has also hit a significant milestone with the global supercharger rollout. The company now has over 60,000 superchargers globally.
It celebrated the milestone by opening the 60,000th supercharger in Japan wrapped in an iconic design and by sharing on X: “Today we opened Enshu Morimachi in Japan, commemorating 60,000 Supercharger posts globally and 600 Supercharger posts in Japan.”
Riz is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.