By Michael Graham Richard / Source: TreeHugger

Smaller, lighter, potentially faster

There’s a community of Tesla fans that are always on the lookout for new innovations by the Californian electric car maker. Their latest find is a new model of Supercharger that is liquid-cooled (including the charging cable itself), rather than air-cooled, allowing it to both be smaller and run cooler. This has many benefits, from small things, like making the charging cable lighter, to big things, like the potential to make charging even faster, since keeping things cool is one of the big challenges when dealing with this much power.

Some of the new Superchargers have been spotted at a station in Mountain View, California, and Youtuber ‘KmanAuto’ (real name: Christopher Allessi II) made a great little video that even shows how things are different when seen with a thermal camera (Tesla fans are nothing if not thorough and engineering-minded!).

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Here’s the video, which shows the new station design as well as some of the visible changes, like the new handle button and the air vents at the bottom of the stations:

As you can see below, Superchargers have been growing like weeds:

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As of last month, Tesla now had 437 Supercharger stations with 2,395 Superchargers.

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It’s not entirely clear if only new stations will get the new liquid-cooled Superchargers or if existing stations will get retrofitted any time soon. If I had to guess, I’d probably say that they’ll be limited to new ones until Tesla announces the availability of faster charging, and then old ones will get progressively replaced so that everyone can benefit from the faster charging.

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