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Comment by drb91 | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure leafs can use superchargers? That doesn’t seem correct at all.

I’m not sure what other charging network i would refer to.

You can use all non-tesla fast-charging stations, charging to 80% in 20 minutes. Do note that tesla supercharger stations also have "normal" fast-charging stations. Tesla is the only company remaining to deploy vendor-specific chargers.

Interesting that while we tend to beat on the standards drum in HN, Tesla might get a pass ...

I don't think it's entirely fair to expect Tesla to _wait_ for the rest of the car industry to agree on a standard that suits everyone. When the Model S was developed, no other car company except Nissan had any notable interest in electric cars, and no other company had plans to make cars even _close_ to Tesla's in terms of battery capacity.

Assuming that a charger network was necessary for success, which I would argue it was, waiting for the others to catch up could have killed the company.

Note that there have still been no large-scale deployments of charging standards with more than 50-60kW of power, which is half what Tesla is currently deploying to most of its charging stations in North America.

They don't even have to wait for an open standard, they could make their proprietary system one.

Tesla offered their implementation to all car manufacturers, including access to the Supercharger network, but none took the offer.

https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

Not a Tesla fanboy at all but it's too early right now to settle on standards, it would stifle innovation.

Tesla released their patents on charging back in 2014 in the hopes that others would adopt their tech: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

Have you seen Tesla's charging connector? It's way superior to the bulky standardized connectors. And as said by others, there really is no other game in town right now for long distance travel in an EV.

Disclosure: I own a Tesla Model S.

Tesla super charging stations don’t have normal fast charging stations co-located.

Tesla is the only car company which creates large scale charging networks.

In the UK I've never seen a supercharger (though they exist) but lots of car parks at offices, shopping malls, etc, have generic charging points.

BP are adding them on petrol forecourts too.

See this map for example https://www.zap-map.com/charge-points/

Superchargers are usually built outside of cities along the long-distance routes. So they might not be as obvious as other chargers. Here is a map of all active superchargers: https://supercharge.info/

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