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Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) Wants To Improve Your Experience In Manhattan

With parking companies like ParkIt and Champion and hotels like the Waldorf Astoria reported to participate, Tesla’s charging plan will help New Yorkers without their own garages to recharge their electric cars. Now, they will be able to charge their EVs for hours while they are standing at parking lots. As Manhattan is highly populated, such an arrangement will be flawless for those living in apartments for whom a parking spot is not ideal to charge their vehicle. Rather, it is up to each each garage to determine how much to add on to their parking fees for the service. The company is going to partner up with two dozen garages around Manhattan to provide high-speed 240 volt chargers for people who own Tesla vehicles. Whereas a Tesla owner with a private garage can simply install a Tesla-branded 240-volt charger and charge their vehicle fully overnight, city dwellers are reliant on limited public charging stations. With apartments filling the area, it has become almost impossible for auto owners to find charging stations compared to when driving on major highways. In the past, the company has set up superchargers along major highways and has also been focused on providing so-called destination chargers for places such as resorts, restaurants and parks within the United States.

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Owners could purchase a Powerwall, Tesla’s solar-powered home-charging device that fetches upwards of $7,000 including installation, according to SolarCity (SCTY). Chargers will come to 30 garages in the next couple of weeks, and Tesla plans to add more in the near future. Over the coming months, the company says it plans to sign several dozen more locations to the network. While the company’s Australian charging network is a long way off rivalling its US footprint, Tesla has been slowly but surely expanding across Australia’s east coast in a bid to make the complete Tesla offering more appealing to potential buyers. This is somehow not as fast as superchargers in highways that normally take half hour for a full charge. A law passed in 2013 requires that 20 percent of all new parking spaces include accommodations for electric-car charging.

A Tesla supercharging station in Sydney.               Claire Reilly  CNET