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Comment by glenstein | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this is a dumb question, but why not just charge commercial users more instead?

Just my speculation, but from the article and Tesla's announcement, it looks like this is an availability thing given Tesla's current scale, not a cost thing per se. Ie., they're not worried that commercial users are consuming too much electricity or anything like that, rather the limited resource in question is the actual number of physical spots at a supercharger area, which is a hard thing to scale quickly. Eventually we can expect that electrical car infrastructure will become sufficiently ubiquitous that it won't be an issue, but for now in a still relatively early bootstrapping stage of things I presume that Tesla is concerned that their customers feel as little anxiety or charging irritation as possible. Tesla is most interested in raw numbers of customers (necessary for efficiencies of scale) rather then how hard each customer is using the car, so they want superchargers build out optimized for serving the maximum number of customers regardless of price.

You're right that maybe long term they could set up more to serve commercial capacity on the back of higher commercial prices, but particularly in metro areas acquiring land, permits, and so forth and building physical infrastructure isn't quick.

Thanks for the great analysis.

Capacity. It doesn't do Tesla any good if they charge commercial users, they pay and block all the super chargers 24/7.

Your hypothetical scenario sounds like they just aren't charging enough.

More likely Tesla understands that charging will increase congestion, not reduce it. See http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/chapters/freakonomic...

The article actually does a horrible job of explaining the moral of the story, which is that charging a fee to discourage undesirable behavior can signal that the behavior actually is desirable or at least not disapproved (after all, you paid it, so you should get to enjoy what you bought), causing even more of the behavior.

Tesla is not trying to make money; they're trying to stop the behavior. So either they raise the price so high for commercial users that it's outright punitive, or they just say it's prohibited and skip all the money mechanics.

They chose the simpler option.

> So either they raise the price so high for commercial users that it's outright punitive, or they just say it's prohibited and skip all the money mechanics.

This sort of assumes the utility of a supercharger is the same to any commercial user, but it might not be, and a money cost would help keep capacity available for those commercial users without impacting non-commercial use too much.

That said, it seems like commercial fees could be turned around and reinvested in more superchargers pretty quickly. For now, they're significantly damaging the commercial value of their vehicles, new and used. Maybe they don't consider that a problem (and I would be surprised if any Tesla made an economical taxi, even before losing supercharger access).

Sorry, where's the proof that there's any damage to vehicle value? If anything I see positive value in this announcement, and am hoping it gets rid of the limo drivers I always see at the Hillsdale supercharger.

It's not positive value if you were intending to sell your Supercharging-enabled car to one of those limo drivers.

There's plenty of demand for used Teslas. And demand will likely increase a tiny bit if people are confident that they'll be able to find a supercharger stall the few times a year that they want one.

Tesla is also planning to roll out their own ridesharing platform[1], so it seems like they might have an interest in discouraging the use of their cars in competing taxi services, beyond just the economics of the supercharger stations.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-rideservices/tesla-...

Again, they'd just not be charging enough.

The Israeli daycare study is an example of people being able to buy convenience and pay-off guilt when it's inconvenient to be on time, every now and then, through a small payment of a few dollars, which is peanuts compared to the actual cost of a typical daycare. Rest be assured, if they had to pay a $200 fine and had to do it structurally as a commercial user, it'd be a completely different story.

Not that I think it makes sense to charge commercial users at this point, but that's for other reasons...

I suspect Tesla learned that lesson when they imposed idle fees for cars that had finished supercharging and didn't move to free up the stall.

The first thought I had was of that Freakanomics article.

Indeed - were the price to charge commercial vehicles close to the ridiculous $1 million/hour, and traditional owner rate was unchanged, Supercharger slots would open.

I don't think Tesla wants to be seen as "ridiculous" in an anti-customer way.

Isn't this approach pretty ridiculous for any commercial customer?

No. It costs more to pay a driver to wait to supercharge than the energy is worth.

I get the feeling that they don't want to charge different rates to different customers (for some marketing related reason, perhaps?) and that they also want to minimize costs for non-commercial customers that are buying their costs (subsidize your complements?).

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