Comment by andrewmunsell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewmunsell | Hacker News Reader

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Eventually, yes, it will become a commodity. But the issue is, someone has to spend a lot of money to build out these chargers. Tesla has a big incentive to do it-- their very survival depended on early adopters willing to buy their car, which also means they need a place to charge it. Being able to go 100 miles from your house before you have to turn around was never going to work for car owners, hence Tesla's initial Supercharger build out.

But other car manufacturers, for whatever reason, don't get this. They build their compliance cars with a modest investment in EVs, but honestly, they aren't very good. The Leaf has its niche-- it's a good city car with low range and low cost. The Bolt really is one of the first non-Tesla players with a decent range, yet you can't drive it from Seattle to Yosemite because the lack of chargers and GM isn't investing anything in them. The same goes for BMW.

Volkswagen is forced to build chargers due to the diesel settlement, but ironically without their cheating and forced investment in EV, there would be fewer chargers out there than there are today (or in the near future).

Maybe I'm wrong and hydrogen or some other form of fuel will win, but if EVs do, car manufacturers will be scrambling to catch up and invest in chargers. I don't think this will happen soon, but maybe in 5 years they'll start thinking about it. Really, if they wait until the Model Y in 2020 and Tesla starts eating their lunch in the biggest segment in the US (CUVs), it might wake them up sooner.

Other carmakers don't need to build their own charging network. It's already being handled for them by thousands of businesses installing standards-compatible chargers. There are 3 new chargers on my block that were installed within the last month. Another 6 scheduled to be installed in my building's garage in the next month. That's in addition to the dozens that are already located in my part of LA. In Santa Monica, the city installed several dozen chargers in their city parking structures and lots. The Inglewood Stadium and the Dodgers are installing chargers in the off-season. Most malls have dedicated spots for charging EVs. Nearly every parking structure in Century City has EV chargers....

Meanwhile, the closest Tesla superchargers are nearly double-digit miles away, far from the freeways, so at best 30 minutes away without traffic and up to 3 hours away with traffic. And since there are so few of them, you basically cross your fingers and hope that one of them is free when you get there.

The problem is that all of these community chargers inevitably break down and there is zero incentive for them to be repaired. It seems like local businesses might get a tax break to install a charging station, but without any incentive to maintain them they get broken in a few months and never work again.

Why don’t they charge for them?

Destination chargers are normally much slower charging and are not really usable for a long trip. Good for overnight but nobody wants to charge a half hour for every hour on the road.

If you're referring to Blink and Chargepoint chargers, then I'm not worried for Tesla at all. Both of these suck really badly and take forever to charge. I used to use these all the time for my electric Focus and would maybe get 20 miles charged in an hour. With my Tesla, I charged the car up to full in about 20 minutes and it sent me a text with 5 minutes left so I was able to grab a quick bite to eat.

Most of the ChargePoint and other chargers are 6-8kW. SuperChargers are 100-120kW... they are more than 10x faster to charge. It's the difference between 10min for 100mi 2hours!

That means that even with absurd 6mph traffic that takes 3 hours to get 30mi, you might still finish charging first on the SuperCharger (15min vs 3hours).

I rented a Tesla for a few days for a long drive, and very quickly I learned to ignore any charging station that wasn't a supercharger. For a gas station analogy, non-superchargers are a broken-down single-pump station with peeling paint in a bad neighborhood that may or may not be open, and a supercharger is a clean, brightly-lit 24-hour Shell station. Which would you prefer for filling up your car?

Tesla currently has 400 supercharger sites in Europe, 2400 bays in total, by 2020 Ionity, which is a consortium of Daimler, BMW, Porsche, Ford, Audi and VW, is planning to build 400 sites, 2400 bays total, most with a 350kW charging capacity, which is double the power of Tesla’s chargers. There are also about 5000 CCS chargers already existing in Europe, lower power but ‘destination chargers’ will probably be valuable as well. Tesla plans to double its network over this time frame, but Ionity is just one organization, there will be many smaller players as well, both commercial and government. It seems very likely this advantage will be commodified as the market emerges.

All chargers are not created equal. "Planning" to build something is not building it. 350kW is a lot of energy and you need to pay for all the power electronics to run that much DC power.

I have no doubt the'll start building chargers but I think the ramp up will be slower and the power levels will be lower than what people think. Most cars can't even charge at 350kW because their batteries are too small. You'd damage the batteries.

350kW is about 1800 m^2 of PV panels; you need twice that plus a battery bank to operate at night. You might want a grid tie only so you can do net metering. At current prices for Chinese panels (not counting the Trump tariff) that's on the order of a million dollars. Now double that to pay for the electronic chargers themselves. So $2 million in capital costs and no recurring costs except maintenance. That's almost certainly cheaper to build and permit and operate than a petrol station, and those seem to pop up everywhere.

I don't think it will take more than a couple of years for well-maintained superchargers to be ubiquitous, and that's if you give away the power for free with government subsidies. If you charge customers for the energy, it might happen even faster.

> 350kW is about 1800 m^2 of PV panels;

Or about 1/7th of a windmill.

Windmills require good locations to be cost effective, solar works almost anywhere.

You can track Ionity‘s progress here: https://ionity.evapi.de/#/

I have no doubt that they are serious and ambitious, but they are so far behind Tesla that it‘s not likely that they will catch up until 2020. Also, they are planning to place their fast chargers only 120 Km apart to accommodate for a wider range of vehicles, which puts them at a disadvantage too.

I would love to see them do that. I traded up from an electric Focus that uses the standard chargers and they suck balls. The Tesla is amazing in comparison. Ionity can plan to have all these by 2020 but that doesn't mean they will. Meanwhile, Tesla is already planning upgrades to the Supercharger network and is also constantly adding new locations. I think Tesla will be the one that other EVs turn to and they'll probably have to license the standard.

Licensing the standard has likely been the long-term plan. Since Tesla bought SolarCity and built the gigafactory, Tesla must think of itself as an energy company.

I hope so. Someone needs to invent some goddamn self-contained solar covered parking spaces. I live in the Southwest and I can't believe that we're in 2018 and no one is tapping into solar power for everything during the day.

Tesla has always thought of itself as an energy company. Electric cars were to bootstrap battery manufacturing capacity (typically low margin, made high margin by Tesla through selling luxury vehicles). Who would've given Tesla funds (through bonds) to build Gigafactory 1 with no proven demand for those cells produced?

It is why teslamotors.com is now tesla.com

So they say that in a couple years in a time the market is moving fast. Given Tesla experience with these chargers, its quite difficult to handle the whole cycle of regulatory approval, build and operation.

So far I have heard a lot of announcements about great cars and great charging networks from these companies but nothing they have actually done gives me any confidence.

People also said that the other car makers will switch the electric and start building electric cars in mass easily and quickly. So far however most of these projects have seen delays and other problems.

I would also say that all the 'lower' level chargers will benefit Tesla equally to everybody else, so its no intensive to buy a non-Tesla.

Don't forget tesla's can charge on ccs in europe too.

Only on the low power "AC" version of CCS, this is limited to 17KW, and so is quite slow in comparison to the high power DC CCS-2 adapter, which can (at least in theory) pump out 350kW. There are quite a few 150kW stations already available, but the Tesla can't use them either.

Tesla’s can use CHAdeMO with an adapter. In the States, there are still more Chademos than CCS, and most new DC Fast chargers have both CHAdeMO and CCS.

CHAdeMO is the better standard for fast charging, IMHO, since it allows bidirectional charging.

I've never heard it was bidirectional use, are there any vehicles that support that? The main negative against chademo (besides the huge plug format) is that it's not Hugh enough power in practice.

There is 100kW Chademo available. The protocol is the strong aspect of it; everyone should just use Tesla's much better plug.

Almost all leafs support bidirectional charging. I think some of the very earliest ones didn't.

Tesla could use DC CCS-2 with a software update an adaptor.

They choose not to make such an update though...

Agree - Tesla had an existential incentive to build chargers, but other car makers would prefer to wait and see (and let someone else build out the commodity chargers).

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