Tesla has done a phenomenal job making it easy and convenient to own and drive an EV. Other automakers are trying to catch up on range and acceleration, but if they really want to compete they need to consider the entire user experience.
1) Often only had 1 high output charger. 2) The one they had was often either in use, or broken leading to very long charge times.
This combined with the less than stellar driver assist the would never get any better for the life of car made him almost instantly regret sticking with the leaf.
He owned it for about 2 months before trading it in on new Model 3.
There is a private network of charging stations in our area. He has a few stories about them.
One time he arrives at a station that disconnects him after 5 seconds. He calls them. Customer service says it's functional and nothing is wrong with it. He asks them to look up the previous charges. They all disconnected after 5 seconds. Coincidence!
He goes to another broken station. He calls them. Apparently they're not aware of it being down right now, but tell him it's a recurrent problem with this one. Nothing else is done.
He breaks his own rules and takes his chances on a charging station without having enough charge to go to another one in case this one fails. Sure enough, it's broken. He call them. He has to get towed to the next station, and they will pay for it, but that doesn't include his own transport. He has to pay for a cab himself.
He gets to another non-functional charging station. He calls them. They tell him it's a compatibility issue with his car despite him having used the same ones for the past 5 years. There is nothing else they can do for him. He asks to speak to someone higher up and to pass on his complaint. He never hears back.
He wasn't even discouraged by the long recharge times. In the end, it's because he was tired of being late to appointments and having to worry about this crap all the time.
The reason is that the owner bought them from a random company, they installed it and do have a service contract - the problem is that the service queues are measured in weeks and spare parts are scarce.
The same thing is with chargers on the parking lots of some chain stores. Corporate has mandated that there has to be X charging spots - enter /r/maliciouscompliance - ok boss, here's the charger. Does it work? No. Do they care? No. Does corporate actually care? No, they can quote numbers of installed charging stations in their quarterly reports.
Meanwhile bigger operators standardise on one station provider, have their own trained staff and a stockpile of common spare parts. A few even frequent the local EV driver FB groups and interact with their customer base there.
Tesla on the other hand knows exactly what's happening on their Superchargers and share that data with their vehicles.
Not saying your points are untrue but for completeness you would expect less for a cheaper car. We can certainly point to the technology gap between the two being too wide but at the end of the day they are not at the same price point.
I can buy the cheapest, junkiest gasoline powered car and still have ready access to fuel anywhere I need to go. That's what EVs have to compete with.
I actually think Tesla propped up its resale values in the beginning with the guaranteed buyback price thing. They managed to maintain this until people started getting used to "tesla is expensive". (although teslas are more useful because of the large battery and charging infrastructure)
I am uncertain about this. They've tried this with phones, and it ends up that the cost gets bundled into a more expensive service. Also changes might be forced to get people upgrade more often and make the devices throw-away.
I think with ownership, there might be pressure on the manufacturers to focus on longevity.
For normal Tesla wall chargers, like one that might be installed at someone's house, I think there are adapters that might work for the Leaf, but I have no experience with them.
That said, other than Tesla, I think there is standardization. Especially with Electrify America. But, Tesla's network is so convenient and widespread that it is currently a big selling point for the brand, in my opinion.
A what now? I haven't seen anything CCS related in the US. Is that a European accessory? Don't all Teslas outside the US ship with CCS standard?
The US Teslas come with a J1772-to-Tesla adapter so you can use L2 Chargers.
There is a ChaDeMo-to-Teska adapter for $400. No idea why anyone would want this though, ChaDeMo is rare and, in my experience with my Leaf, often broken.
ChDeMo is a better connection in some regards (can feed energy back to the grid for example), but they are a lot fiddlier than CCS and Type2, which are just huge chunks of thick plastic.
Teslas outside of the US have shipped with CCS since early 2019. Older Teslas had the proprietary port.
What is a "Tesla Level 2"? There exists an adapter to convert CCS to the proprietary Tesla connector but that's not L2.
It is true that the V3 version of the Tesla destination charger (which is relatively new), which has a microcontroller/wifi/etc, has a config flag you can set to only charge Tesla vehicles and can whitelist by VIN, but it's still in the very early stage of release.
@vel0city: In response to your deleted reply to this comment, if legacy automakers want access to Tesla's supercharging network for their own EVs, they should be prepared to contribute towards the enormous capex costs Tesla incurred as well as the ongoing operational expenses. Otherwise, legacy automakers who made no material effort to transition to EVs are free riding off of Tesla's hard work to build the network they now desperately need to remain in business.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/destination-charging
[2] https://smile.amazon.com/Lectron-Tesla-Charger-J1772-Adapter...
While this seems very fair it also seems very problematic. They definitely should do that. But if they chose to not do that and build disjointed infrastructure instead the outcome will be worse for everyone and it will give Tesla an advantage that perhaps would not be unfair to them but at least would be unfair to consumers.
So there is an unnecessary difference between US and EU cars, even from the same manufacturer.
Tesla wants to profit off the fruit of their labor and extract some value from their product that is providing value to others and fund its development. It also is used as a sales vector since their charging network is a huge selling point for their cars.
Consumers don’t want to be stuck with two standards for no reason other than corporate politics and pay higher prices via those licensing fees. Or be locked out from certain charging stations just because of the model of their car.
And other automakers don’t want to be put at a competitive disadvantage because they have little choice but have to license the tech from Tesla.
And the world doesn’t want to put up with having to duplicate the massive human effort of setting up a charging network n times just because of corporate politics.
I always thought this was the basically the perfect situation for gov’t to step in and “fix” the market by just funding the development of the charging technology and providing it to all automakers for free/at cost so everyone gets the best charger on the cheap.
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-elon-musk-open-supe...
https://www.gearbrain.com/tesla-supercharger-accessible-othe...
He's even fine with them using adapters for Tesla's plug, they just have to pay "their fair share" to use the Tesla superchargers. Of course the devil's in the details who knows what a licensing agreement like this would cost.
If they think they can build a better infrastructure, they should. That's the free market.
I bet they can't, worst case Tesla can always buy these charging locations at a discount.
The problematic part is if they choose to shut out other players without any better reason than wanting to dominate the market.
Free markets aren't infallible and they can quickly become unfree when moats have been established. (Amazon feels like the obvious example of that. Competing with them is close to impossible.)
You aren't just buying a car with Tesla, you are buying an ecosystem that just works.
Legacy automakers had almost a century to create this network. And look at the current reputation and state of their dealership network.
This is the key.
You can just punch in a destination in a Tesla, it'll map out the correct route with chargers. Other cars can usually do this too.
The car will pre-heat the battery for optimal charging temperature before arriving at the charging location. Not all EVs do this, they should. Cold-gating during charging is a big deal when traveling long distances in below freezing temperatures.
A Tesla can also check if there are free spots in the charger. No other car does this as far as I know.
Inasmuch as GM had responsibility to help build Tesla’s supercharger network, I agree.
The fact that an SV startup managed to build itself what might be considered a moat by some regulators in a few years while being laughed at by the legacy carmakers is very ironic.
Buying Tesla is supporting vendor lock-in and proprietary standards instead of supporting open standards.
By this logic Tesla should be banned from using all other charging networks. Is that what you're proposing?
What should actually happen is that Tesla should switch to CCS Type 1 Combo plugs in the US and then they should open their chargers to all brands of EV. The way EV owners can contribute to Tesla's charging network is by simply paying for the electricity the charger dispenses, just like ICE vehicle owners pay for fuel.
Tesla switched to CCS type 2 Combo plugs in Europe:
https://insideevs.com/news/343728/most-tesla-superchargers-n...
Now the next step Tesla needs to take is to open their European chargers to all brands of EV.
A big part of the Tesla network is that there are only Teslas in there - vehicles that are guaranteed to have the ability to charge at 150kW+.
If every joe schmoe with a PHEV or Leaf would be hogging the HVDC chargers, the competitive advantage would go away and there'd be a lot more congestion.
Charging a 50kW max car from a 350kW charger is like driving a go-cart on a freeway. Yes, you can do it. Should you? Probably not. Will other people be annoyed by you? Definitely.
Ultimately buying Tesla is supporting vendor lock-in and proprietary connectors instead of industry standards. And what a joke, as if Tesla bothered to even offer such a thing to allow the other automakers to use their connector and signaling.
For one, there is now n+1 standards. For the more important point, tesla could have made their standard free instead of proprietary.
They are in it for the money. Not any "greater good" or "advancement of humanity" or any other such bullshit. Money. And it's obvious if you look and not listen to them (this includes apple and such).
Tesla is a part of "the industry".
Tesla offered access to their supercharging network, as well. Predictably, the traditional auto makers wanted nothing to do with it, not even as a stop-gap, and instead had committees design inferior plugs for a minuscule and fragmented charging network that reliably fails to charge any vehicle.
Tesla is distinctly not part of the traditional auto industry. Tesla management insight into engineering and the marketplace is a fundamental differentiating factor.
Let’s say you’re a traditional upmarket car maker with a reputation for engineering excellence, and you want to computerize your dashboard. What’s your approach? I can tell you exactly what you’d do, because I’ve seen it: license windows CE and break your requirements down into team-sized chunks. Each team makes its own windows CE device. The devices are all supposed to talk to each other, but the teams implementing them don’t need to talk to each other, because they have formal specs for their components. Shockingly, when all the systems are assembled together, doors lock and unlock randomly, headlights are unreliable, and it’s common knowledge that you better not roll down a window, because you may need to go to the dealer to raise it. So, you try and fail to improve for the next model year. This continues for a decade before you even consider a different approach.
Or, Tesla could adopt the industry standard so I don't have to tear out the charger on the wall every time I want to buy a different brand of car.
Its quite a joke that having vendor lock-in increases competition and innovation. If you've paid the thousands of dollars to have a Tesla wall charger installed, and you'll have to pay to get a different one for a different brand, do you think that'll weigh on your decision to buy another car even if the other car is technically better? Proprietary connectors lock people into the platform and increases friction to customers leaving for a different product.
If you don't want a Tesla, don't buy one. No one is forcing people to buy them, or to use their chargers (fast DC or otherwise). If jurisdictions desire Tesla to open their network for others, compensate them for their private investment they're demanding they open up.
Regardless, I appreciate the conversation and the perspective as an electric vehicle enthusiast.
Tesla could still differentiate themselves through better service and infrastructure (I saw other posts describing how bad Leaf charging stations were). But they wouldn't be able to hassle consumers with lock-in.
When did locking in consumers become a fair way to recoup investment?
Lets also look at it the other way in a theoretical to analyze the idea of widespread proprietary connectors and their connection to innovation. Say Nissan had a proprietary connector and made the big investment to deploy a massive charging network. The Nissan cars are technically vastly inferior to the Tesla cars, but because Nissan made a well-timed capex they've got a leg up on the chargers. People then tend to buy the inferior Nissan cars because of the brand presence and vast availability of chargers. While the Tesla cars are technically better, all of those owners already have proprietary Nissan connectors at home. Their offices have Nissan chargers. Their grocery store has Nissan chargers. The highway rest stops have Nissan chargers. Truck stops have Nissan chargers. Do you think the technically better Tesla wins? Imagine when new construction of houses starts to have vehicle charging connections common. If your house came with a Nissan charger and it'll cost you $500 to swap it out for a Tesla one, doesn't that raise the price of the Tesla $500 simply because of the cable in your home? Sounds terrible to me.
Obviously it would be better for consumers if all these companies got together and used a single standard and shared resources to build out a great network. Also better for consumers would be decoupling the charging network from the manufacturers, like ICE cars and mobile phones do (cables aside, in the latter case). No one is arguing otherwise, the discussion is about why this isn't better for manufacturers.
One way to make it better for manufacturers is to mandate a standard, leaving manufacturers who don't use the standard in violation of statute.
But another way is to wait until there are enough manufacturers of EVs, who actually care about their EVs and not just making compliance vehicles, and who actually care about building EV charging networks and not just building them to comply with consent decrees they're subject to thanks to past illegal behavior, and who as a result actually care about having a useful, usable, reliable network of fast charging stations for cross-country trips.
Right now, only Tesla cares about this.
Eventually, other manufacturers will too. Then, one day, it will make sense for both manufacturers and consumers to use a single shared plug, and all new installations will have it, and old installations will be retrofitted. It will take 10+ years here, but it's already happening in Europe thanks to mandates. In the meantime, mandating everyone follow some terrible standard and support other manufacturers' vehicles is just punitive to the manufacturers who do care, and punitive to future consumers who would like to use a functional system and not be stuck with the garbage that passes for fast charging outside Tesla's network in the US today.
</soapbox>
The industry standard answer to the Supercharger connector exists. Its available on multiple brands of cars today. The day for a single shared plug could be today if Elon says so. Retrofits for charging stations could start happening tomorrow. They could probably start cranking out CCS compatible cars for the US market within a quarter. But Tesla doesn't want a single shared plug, they want to own the market for chargers. They want to use the wide spread proprietary connector as a selling point to sell their cars. Which is exactly the concept in my "straw man" post. Its not really a straw man when its literally the exact scenario that's currently playing out in the market though, a car manufacturer using a dominant position in deploying chargers to push their cars. For evidence, see TFA. Do you think Tesla owners are installing J1772/CCS chargers at their homes and using adapters, or are they installing Tesla chargers? When someone sees an article like this, is that not convincing shoppers to look at Teslas first over other brands of electric cars? Seems less like a straw man and just taking a hard look at the objective reality of today.
Buying Tesla is supporting vendor lock-in. Its obvious to you that a single, open connector is better for the market and yet you'll continue to support a proprietary one.
> The thing is, Tesla wants to push their proprietary connector and have that be the dominant plug. Its their connector which will only be featured on Tesla cars.
Yes
> You really think Tesla would be going along with retrofitting in Europe if it wasn't for regulations? That they'd just willingly give up their market dominance position in charging network just because they feel like it and have some altruistic desire to embrace some future connector?
No, and no.
> The industry standard answer to the Supercharger connector exists. Its available on multiple brands of cars today.
CCS1? CCS2? CHAdeMO?
> The day for a single shared plug could be today if Elon says so.
Not exactly, but very close.
> Retrofits for charging stations could start happening tomorrow. They could probably start cranking out CCS compatible cars for the US market within a quarter. But Tesla doesn't want a single shared plug, they want to own the market for chargers.
Yes.
> They want to use the wide spread proprietary connector as a selling point to sell their cars.
The connector is only loosely related to the network. Tesla prevents other cars from using Superchargers both by connector and software. But the connector is irrelevant, really: they could just as easily prevent non-Teslas from using Tesla Superchargers with just software, as they do (for now) in Europe.
Given that they have a proprietary network, why not use a nice plug designed for this purpose, instead of a garbage monstrosity with a bunch of extraneous pins? (This is mostly directed at CCS1 and CHAdeMo. CCS2 is slightly less terrible.)
> Which is exactly the concept in my "straw man" post. Its not really a straw man when its literally the exact scenario that's currently playing out in the market though, a car manufacturer using a dominant position in deploying chargers to push their cars.
Yes.
> For evidence, see TFA. Do you think Tesla owners are installing J1772/CCS chargers at their homes and using adapters
Yes.
> or are they installing Tesla chargers?
Also yes. Anecdotally, in my neighborhood, I see a lot of both. More J1172's though.
> When someone sees an article like this, is that not convincing shoppers to look at Teslas first over other brands of electric cars? Seems less like a straw man and just taking a hard look at the objective reality of today.
Yes.
> Buying Tesla is supporting vendor lock-in. Its obvious to you that a single, open connector is better for the market and yet you'll continue to support a proprietary one.
Yes.
None of this has dissuaded me from the argument I made earlier, which is: other manufacturers, aside from Tesla in the US, need to care about charging networks in order for fast charging to become widespread, and for EV adoption to increase. Right now, they don't, and so Tesla is eating their lunch on EV sales and charging.
Let's be clear, the straw man argument you are arguing against is "The world as-is with proprietary Tesla connectors is preferable to consumers, compared with a single shared standard" -- and you are arguing "if you don't support mandated standards, that means you don't care about standards, and if you don't care about standards, you support a world of vendor lock-in that reduces competition and results in Tesla winning with their proprietary stuff."
It's a straw man because no one is saying "it's preferable for consumers for Tesla to have a proprietary connector". And it's not Tesla's desire for a proprietary network to support its EV sales that causes fast charging to be a disaster in the US for non-Teslas.
Let's be clear again why fast charging is a disaster in the US: it's not because of Tesla's proprietary connector, or proprietary charging network, no, it's that other manufacturers don't care! It's that they don't really care about EVs (or haven't, anyway, can't know if they actually do care now) and so don't care about charging networks, and Tesla has no incentive to play nice because it gains nothing from other EVs using their superchargers.
Obviously Tesla has a profit motive, obviously it's using the charging network to push its EV sales, but if any other manufacturer had a comparable network, or even if the others combined did, or if EV chargers were sufficiently available, it would be a no-brainer for all parties to agree to share: all their customers would benefit, and they would incur no real costs because a proprietary network is no longer a competitive advantage.
We want that world, not the world in which we force Tesla to use a crappy connector, and to open its limited supercharger network to other EVs, and end up with Tesla's near-capacity network becoming even-more-stretched, eliminating Tesla's incentive to keep building it out (since it doesn't provide a competitive advantage anymore), and also not incentivizing anyone else to build out a fast charging network that's well-placed, well-maintained, and available-—because they can just use Tesla's!
The US may at some point want to mandate a standard connector. But to do so now, without also making manufacturers care about building more fast charging, will just make the situation worse, not better.
And yes, Elon could easily say "Tesla is moving all production to CCS2, all future Teslas manufactured after today will be CCS2, all Supercharger stations will be retrofitted with CCS2 cables" and we would be living in that standard where pretty much every car on the road can receive power at pretty much every car charging station. Pretty much every car in the US sold with CHAdeMO also supports CCS1 (J1772), I don't know of a single model which doesn't. We don't live in this world because Elon would prefer for everyone to be locked into proprietary cables and a proprietary network. This is the *only reason* why. Sure, things were different 10 years ago when CCS was barely even on paper. As it stands in the market where I live there's many more CCS chargers around than Superchargers, and many more J1772 cables (going by data from https://www.plugshare.com/ ). And yet articles like this tell everyone that this is not the case, that if you buy a non-Tesla you're not going to be able to have any luck charging it out in the world, so no point in buying anything that's not a Tesla.
> It's a straw man because no one is saying "it's preferable for consumers for Tesla to have a proprietary connector". And it's not Tesla's desire for a proprietary network to support its EV sales that causes fast charging to be a disaster in the US for non-Teslas.
By buying a Tesla you're supporting the notion that proprietary connections are good. You're choosing to buy a car with a proprietary connector. You agree earlier that Tesla wouldn't move to an industry standard unless they were forced by regulators, and yet you also think they're not purposefully pushing their proprietary connector for vendor lock-in reasons. It seems you're trying to argue it both ways; that clearly it would be better for the consumer to have an industry standard connector and yet its a good thing for Tesla to continue to push their proprietary one continuing to split the market. You're supporting a proprietary connector and pushing for that in the market while suggesting that nobody is pushing for proprietary connectors. How is what I'm saying a straw man?
I do agree fast charging is a disaster due to poor investment by the incumbent auto industry. They were hoping the 3rd party market for DC fast chargers would grow faster. A lot of 3rd parties have been slow to roll it out due to not having as much capital and not having as much of a market to cater to, as a good percentage of electrics being made and sold today in the US are Teslas. But, don't you think if Tesla supported CCS2 we'd see a ton more third party CCS2 chargers spring up? Currently third parties are completely unable to build Tesla charging stations. You can buy a Tesla charger and freely offer it to your customers (and try and shoo away moochers), but you cannot build your own to sell electricity. There isn't a 3rd party market for Tesla chargers, all Tesla chargers exist to push the Tesla brand and push vendor lock in. Sure, you can use an adapter to plug in a J1772, but you'll never be able to use a CCS2 cable for fast charging and we're really talking about fast charging here. On top of that, I've known a few Tesla owners who were unaware they could use an adapter to plug in to J1772 ports; they saw the cables were different and assumed it didn't work.
An answer to the vendor lock-in exists today. Tesla can switch at any time. Continuing to support Tesla is continuing to support vendor lock-in. But they won't, because then articles like TFA won't scare people away from looking at anything other than a Tesla.
You continue to say this, but your evidence is nonexistent for this claim. Standards exist, Tesla doesn't use them for <reasons>, therefore if you buy a Tesla you disagree that standards are good.
I bought a Tesla, I agree standards are good, I wish Tesla would use a standard connector. They don't, because of vendor lock-in. We agree.
We agree that a standardized port is both good and possible. You keep arguing with me like I'm arguing against you on this point, I am not. That is the straw man.
Also:
> yet you also think they're not purposefully pushing their proprietary connector for vendor lock-in reasons
No, I know that they are doing this for lock-in reasons. That was literally in my prior post, perhaps you missed it.
What I AM saying is that the claim that eliminating vendor lock-in will make DC fast charging better for everyone is false. You're right that I care more about fast charging and increased adoption more than standards, because I think we will eventually have standards and it will all be fine.
I don't think that mandating standards now will make fast charging better, which is the thing I care about. I argued strongly for this and you did not refute any of it, instead continuing to argue that those who buy Teslas must not care about standards and are supporting vendor lock-in. Even if true (and I disagree), it's irrelevant.
If you care about standards more than about EV adoption, fast charging proliferation (which I think is a prereq for adoption), then sure, I disagree with you. I think the latter are net better for humanity than avoiding a fragmented charging ecosystem.
You seem to think that a fragmented ecosystem is what will suppress adoption, but I think you are wrong -- I think taking away the incentives of those who are deploying fast charging at scale (i.e., Tesla, for vendor lock-in) will do much more harm than good: in that world, no one will be financially incentivized to build fast charging without market intervention, which perhaps you support but are not arguing for.
And I think present-day vendor lock-in is a small price to pay for 10-years-from-now higher EV adoption.
>> By buying a Tesla you're supporting the notion that proprietary connections are good.
> You continue to say this, but your evidence is nonexistent for this claim. Standards exist, Tesla doesn't use them for <reasons>, therefore if you buy a Tesla you disagree that standards are good.
> And I think present-day vendor lock-in is a small price to pay for 10-years-from-now higher EV adoption.
You're literally making the argument that you're suggesting nobody is making. That ultimately its better for consumers if Tesla has a proprietary connector. Your reason for that line of thinking is because you assume if Tesla didn't have a proprietary connector there would be no market for fast charging at all, or that it would have been massively delayed. You even acknolwedge at some point in time in the future maybe we'll have a standard connector, but clearly there's some reason why it can't be done now and we shouldn't really be demanding for a standard. It took a few comments to draw that out, but as you can see clearly some people are making such an argument as that's ultimately the root of your postiion.
I disagree with that basic premise. Look at the massive amount of J1772 chargers out there in the wild. They're mostly J1772 chargers because when they were built several years ago CCS2 didn't exist except on paper and J1772 was seen as the industry standard connector in the US market. Now that CCS2 is a real standard and is on real cars driving on real roads, CCS2 chargers are starting to exist. Imagine a world where Tesla did open the connector back when CCS2 was just a spec on paper. Anybody in this market could have built a DC fast charger. Any other car company could have built a Supercharger compatible car, so there would have been more on the market. With such a wider possible market at both ends, do you think there would be more or less widely compatible fast charging stations? Note that Tesla could still have made up for other companies piggybacking on their initial investment of the chargers, as the earlier Teslas had free charging. I imagine the free charging wouldn't have applied to a Ford or VW or Nissan at a Tesla station. Or do the massively anti-consumer move of not allowing other brands to charge at their stations. So boom, there's the whole argument of "but why would Telsa want to invest if not for the vendor lock-in?"
If third parties could have manufactured Tesla/Superchargers or cars, I imagine there would be a lot more Tesla/Supercharger compatible chargers in the wild today.
I think you may be confusing an argument about a connector standards with an argument about proprietary networks. I'm saying the connector is basically irrelevant, and not the reason that Tesla's network is proprietary; I'm agreeing that that standards are better than nonstandards for all consumers today, and in the future. A standard connector would make the transition to shared, nonproprietary networks less expensive in the future, but this is basically noise as Tesla's transition from its proprietary connector to CCS2 in Europe shows.
Forcing Tesla to use the CCS standard in the US is a basically irrelevant move unless you also force Tesla to share its fast charging network. So, let's ignore the connector for a moment and focus on the network.
> Imagine a world where Tesla did open the connector back when CCS2 was just a spec on paper. Anybody in this market could have built a DC fast charger. Any other car company could have built a Supercharger compatible car, so there would have been more on the market. With such a wider possible market at both ends, do you think there would be more or less widely compatible fast charging stations? Note that Tesla could still have made up for other companies piggybacking on their initial investment of the chargers, as the earlier Teslas had free charging. I imagine the free charging wouldn't have applied to a Ford or VW or Nissan at a Tesla station. Or do the massively anti-consumer move of not allowing other brands to charge at their stations.
Except Tesla tried exactly this, to make its network shared in the past [0], in part to encourage cost-sharing and all those other good things, and other automakers were not interested. Why wouldn't the other automakers take up Tesla on their offer to share capital costs and join the largest-at-the-time fast charging network?
Because, again, in 2014 (and probably still today), the problem was not an incompatible connector, for which there could be adapters aplenty—it's that legacy manufacturers don't care about EVs, and don't want to spend money on fast charging as a result. Tesla still has a patent reciprocity offer for anyone who wants to support the supercharger connector—but the connector difference is a red herring.
Why would Tesla opening up its network to other vehicles have led to a larger fast charging station network? You are stating this as though it's obvious, but it implies that the only thing stopping anyone else from building fast chargers is that they couldn't use the Tesla connector—which makes no sense.
What has stopped every other manufacturer from building, or partnering, or funding, a fast charger network? Why did VW have to be forced to fund Electrify America because of Dieselgate?
Do you think that if VW honestly thought its future were EVs, and that the reason VW EVs weren't more popular is the lack of a fast charging network, that they would be behaving as they are now? Of course not—they would be building/funding fast chargers as quickly as possible. Instead, they are being dragged kicking and screaming into the EV future by regulation and by the market. They are not building a fast charging network because they do not care about selling EVs.
So, does Tesla benefit from vendor lock-in from the supercharger network and its proprietary connector? Sure. Would there be a larger more compatible network of fast chargers available today if Tesla had made their connector open from the start (i.e., 2011 instead of 2014)? If so, barely—Tesla was, for years, by FAR the largest fast charger network. Nothing prevented other networks from charging Teslas for a fee (and indeed they do now), but they still didn't build.
The reason is not the connector. It's the incentives—we don't have a wide, compatible fast charger network in the US not because Tesla selfishly had a proprietary network, but because no one else wanted to build a large network, and no one else wanted to pay Tesla to share theirs, because prior to 2019, no legacy automaker thought EVs were the future.
Forcing Tesla to open its network today without requiring a cost-sharing on capital expenditures would reduce Tesla's incentive to make its supercharger network larger, because there wouldn't be a competitive advantage anymore. You would have to also incentivize the industry to build fast charging as a whole, and provide capital to do it, and the EA example shows that this is easier said than done.
Hopefully this helps explain how I can support standards and wish everyone used the same plug, but also be ok with temporary vendor lock-in (via the network, not the connector) so that there's incentive for both Tesla and others to build more fast chargers. These are not mutually incompatible.
[0] https://insideevs.com/news/322223/tesla-to-make-supercharger...
CCS type 1 (J1772) and type 2 (aka "Mennekes" used in Europe) are not compatible? Both are described in IEC 62196-2 so I am not sure which other connectors could be compatible here.
> And yes, Elon could easily say "Tesla is moving all production to CCS2, all future Teslas manufactured after today will be CCS2, all Supercharger stations will be retrofitted with CCS2 cables"
This already happened in the European Union FWIW.
> You cannot charge any non-Tesla car from a Tesla connector
> [...] at a Supercharger station.
But I repeat myself.
If Tesla chargers continue to be only exclusive to one brand and take so much space in the parking lots on the motorway, not as much.
Ionity has a different pricing model for cars made by brands member of Ionity and other brands.
I mean, Android and iOS both connect to other devices over standardized NFC, Bluetooth, WiFi, and mobile data network protocols, but good luck using an Apple Watch or Airpods or Airdrop with a Samsung phone. Your Samsung phone's text messages will never be shared onto your Macbook Pro's iMessage, and your iCloud backups will never be visible in your Google account. Standardized connectors don't mean anything if the vendor controls all sides of the software stack and wants the pieces to only work with that vendor's products.
Tesla for better or for worse pursues Apple-like vertical integration to control the UX of every part of owning the car, from sales to nav to charging. While standardized connectors would be nice, it would mostly be nice for Tesla owners in that they wouldn't need a dongle to connect to public charging networks.
(Maybe you're arguing that Tesla should be forced to provide Supercharger access at no additional cost to non-Tesla owners. I am not certain I agree with the "no additional cost" part, since Tesla had to shoulder the capital burden of building the network in the first place. But the connectors are the least important part of that anyway; non-Tesla owners could worst case use dongles, if Tesla were forced to provide access to the Supercharger network, just as Tesla owners use dongles to connect to public charging networks today. Dongles are stupid, yes, but they're less important than Tesla just providing access in the first place.)
As far as home charging goes, personally I just use a standard 240V dryer outlet in my garage to charge; I plug the cord that came with my Model 3 into the outlet, and the other end of the cord (that has the proprietary connector) into the car. Any electric car would work with that setup, so the proprietary connector at the end of the cable doesn't impact me much; if I got a different electric car, I'm sure it would come with its own charging cable anyway that could be plugged into the 240V outlet.
Even though the plug is standard, you actually can't charge a non Tesla on a Tesla charger because the charger only accepts Tesla. Recently it has been possible to charge cars from other brands for free during a few days in Germany, some say it was a bug, some other say it was a trial.
Also unless it has changed recently, in the Tesla ecosystem the car is connected to internet and reporting the consumption to the paiement system, not the charger. This is not standard and Tesla would have to put some 4G/5G network equipment in their chargers if they have to support cars from other brands.
They may be required at some point in Europe.
The Nissan Leaf uses a Chademo plug which is another standard, more common in Japan and it's very unlikely to charge on a Tesla charger ever, unless someone hacks an adapter.
If I had an electric car I'd try to figure out the auth protocol, surely software-wise it's possible to pretend that a Tesla is plugged in (worst case is that there's a cryptographically secure key exchange, and someone would have to extract the key from a Tesla).
Hah, an adapter that pretends to be a Tesla that plugs between the supercharger and your car, that would fit in a cyberpunk-ish 2021.
In Europe, where there is only one DCFC standard, Tesla uses a standard connector but only allows Tesla cars to charge at superchargers (there is no way for drivers of other cars to pay or be billed for use of the station).
In the USA, where both CCS and Chademo are standards, Tesla uses their own proprietary connector (which is substantially more ergonomic than either CCS or Chademo). Tesla sells a Chademo adapter and a third party sells a CCS adapter, so Tesla cars can use third-party DCFC stations.
In both cases, only Tesla cars can use Tesla Superchargers.
On the other hand, the "user experience" of every Type-3 charger I've seen is terrible. The chargers are often in inconvenient places, the super thick cables are very short, and then you've got to try a couple of times to get the charger and the car to talk to each other and get the payment sorted out. Tesla wins on this hands down, and it's not even close.
Oddly enough, the Type-2 experience isn't nearly as bad. Other than requiring 6+ hours to charge...
Tesla Model 3 base model: 170kW
So not really the same league at all.
Even now the legacy companies are held up by few EV models, bad range, bad software, bad dealership experience, and bad charging networks.
Tesla may be overvalued, but I have little faith the existing companies will survive this transition.
It feels like they’re all RIM when the iPhone launched, mocking it and then suddenly talking about how the competition is getting a little heated.
If Apple also gets in its even more hopeless for legacy companies.
It’s also wild none of them took Tesla up on the offer to use their superchargers - I think it would have been worth nearly any price.
Only until recently, classic manufacturers didn't actually want to sell EVs. They only built them to get down their fleet-overall-CO2-value so they can also build another SUV (which are selling like hot cakes and have a huge margin of profit compared to EVs due to tried and tested technology) and still adhere to the limit.
Now the first "legacy" manufacturers slowly start to make "proper" EVs for somewhat normal prices. However, they rely on power companies to build (compatible) charging stations. And those power companies are very reluctant because they're waiting for more EV customers to hit the streets before building more charging points. Add to that different standards (CCS, CHAdeMO) and nobody feeling responsible to quickly repair broken stations and we have the current situation.
Something that shouldn't be forgotten: Tesla early on asked other car manufacturers if they wanted "in" on their charging network. But they all refused. (Might change slowly, though. [1])
[1] https://www.electrive.com/2020/12/22/tesla-superchargers-alr...
The worst problem is actually paying for the juice. You cannot use credit or debit cards or even cash. No. You have to sign up with a charging network that sends you a charging card for something between 5 and 25 EUR/month. With that card you then have the privilege to get juice for somewhere between 30 (normal household price in .de) and 300 ct/kWh. But not everywhere, just on the charging outlets in the network. Your chance to have the right card is about 1 in 5 or so. Oh, and billing is unreliable, sometimes/often the card doesn't work because the charger has connectivity problems. And there are even chargers where there is no proper energy meter involved, so they just bill by the minute...
It's either Tesla or charging at home, the rest is nonviable in Germany.
There are weird resellers abound - some have apps that work, some have crashy pieces of crap. Some have clear pricing models, others have weird "memberships" and surprise bills. The same charging station can cost wildly different amounts to different people.
It reminds me of the bad old days of American long-distance service. Really difficult to actually pick the right provider.
There are a lot of EV chargers in Germany but they're such a bizarre experience. And they're not cheap! It costs ~15eur to fully charge a car here in Berlin.
This is the problem. Nobody asked _me_, the consumer.
In reality this should be strictly regulated. Just as there are no manufacturer-specific gas stations, there shouldn't be manufacturer specific chargers either.
If somebody builds a charger network, they should make it possible for anybody to charge there (of course, the prices can be different for each customer).
This is in essence what Ionity does in Europe. I'm surprised that the EU regulations have not caught up with this yet.
Tesla built this in spite of all the attacks against them, at this point it should be their competitive advantage.
I’m sure the others will try and complain that it’s unfair to customers now though that they’re screwed.
I.e., the charging stations would be credit-market-funded and just take e.g. a percentage of revenue to satisfy the investors. Well, sounds like it should instead be shares and just dividends payed out from any actual ROI, but that's not much of a difference.
Using spot pricing could both include load-variable fees to the network operators, as well as paying for more expensive electricity sources when the supply is tight.
This additional profit from squeezed networks would fund both power plants and distribution infrastructure.
It could easily be combined with a futures market, where you e.g. let your car's navigation system search for a route to the destination with stops that fit within the car's range and suitable locations. You'd reserve a spot at the charger, along with buying futures for electricity at the expected time intervals. If you stop for longer than you would technically need, you could buy futures with delivery terms that only prescribe delivery during the period at a maximum instantaneous rate. If the market maker that sold you that variable-rate future delays the charging too much, they might end up having to pay high prices to fulfill their obligations to you.
But all that is what futures markets are made for: shifting uncertainty and volatility of only partially-predictable goods to financial investors that take some fee in the form of gains, in exchange for absorbing risk.
It was on the Fully Charged YouTube Show, about 2 years ago or so.
It's very hard for large companies to change direction (car companies have a 100 years of momentum behind them). They tend to do so by buying niche players - small car and technology companies that have proven (or nearly proven) themselves.
I don't think Tesla is going to be bought up but I wouldn't discount the legacy car and oil companies from surviving. If gas station companies start installing charging stations at every one of their stations the market may look very different.
The predictions about battery tech improvements were reasonable ones and publicly made (arguably easy to accept).
Legacy companies could fix this in theory, but in practice they wasted ten years and aren’t making the moves necessary today. I’d bet against them.
Hydrogen fuel cells are not a stupid option. Charging is here the stupid option. When 50000 houses need each 20KWh each night at almost the same time they will destroy the local power lines which were not designed for this.
> The predictions about battery tech improvements were reasonable ones and publicly made (arguably easy to accept).
Well battery improvements shall have come earlier (in 100 years there was almost no improvement). Even now the dream of having your battery to save your solar power is still mostly a dream.
> Legacy companies could fix this in theory, but in practice they wasted ten years and aren’t making the moves necessary today. I’d bet against them.
Legacy companies want profits which are rising, to please the stakeholders.
What, you think a grid used to cool homes at 5pm can’t charge vehicles from 9pm-5am? Are you bloody serious?
How are RIM or Palm’s profits these days?
I don’t agree about hydrogen and I think the EV market has proved the point by now.
Apple is working with Hyundai AFAIK.
It’d be a longer comment, but there are really bad incentives and the dealership owners have a lot of local political power. There are a lot of bad laws they’ve put in place to help themselves.
In the end they harm legacy car manufacturers by blocking EV adoption and hurting the brand at the customer interaction level.
Something along the lines of hard to get someone to understand something when their livelihood depends on not understanding it.
Should be interesting to see what happens - I’ll never buy from a dealership again (and today there’s no non-tesla option for anything that’s not a strict city car).
I’m curious what Apple might do. The other companies seem hopeless.
They were quite will to wait for government to build out the charging network or have others do so. Heck I am still surprised Tesla's system hasn't been forced open. Both New York and California have had politicians float that idea before by different means; one requiring all stations to accept credit cards and the other jacking up electricity rates for stations not support all brands.
Still think it may be in Tesla's best interest to eventually sell off their charging network. As a Tesla owner it really getting to the point state side that buying one may be a negative as the only connector they offer is their own; they really should put one on both sides of each type or offer that.
It comes with an adapter, this isn’t an issue for owners.
I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, but forcing them to open their system would really bother me. They built this out in spite of everything while legacy did nothing.
If legacy wants compatibility they should have to pay for it.
They are to tangled in their supplier systems, to many jobs life and die with legacy vehicles. The truth is, they can build a EV, but they cant sell EVs, supply and maintain their company structure while doing so. Which boils down to- they cant.
We should have ONE standard for ALL cars. Can you imagine going to Shell only with your Buick? Your next car is a Hyundai... sorry mate... this one only gets gas from bp. How about a Mercedes... oh that one only gets gas at dealerships. But if you have a BMW Chevron will be the place to fill you up!
It's preposterous and I hate Tesla for establishing this mess by building their own (technically advanced!) charging network.
Tesla fought against the legacy companies mocking them and most of the press lying about them for ten years. They pulled off a miracle and succeeded in spite of all that and now legacy companies that did nothing want to legislate their own mistake away? Fuck that.
If legacy car companies want to use the network tesla built they can pay them for the privilege.
The irony is I think tesla did offer them access under better terms and they refused (either out of spite or stupidity, I’m not sure).
There’s no way we would have the EV transition we have now (this early) without Tesla. I think there’s no way a government standard would have worked for building this up (one did exist, and I’d argue it didn’t work).
I’m not so sure. At least from a European perspective it looks like traditional car makers have caught up and even overtaken Tesla in the low price segment (VW eUp)
Some companies can still see the writing on the wall and adapt though. When the iPhone launched Google immediately scrapped their blackberry like phone design and went all in on their v2 screen based UI. At the same time Ballmer laughed at Apple and the Palm CEO was saying even dumber stuff.
I suppose it's frustrating to see it in the comments here too. I think people are just generally bad at seeing this kind of thing even when it's right in front of them, even when in theory they're the best type of person to notice.
I suppose that what I’m trying to illustrate here is that the overall level of optimization of the charging experience might just remain unique to Tesla, enabling them to scale their user base more efficiently than competitive, non-integrated solutions.
While digging in to how their network is built, I found out it seem their infrastructure is from AddEnergie, a Quebec company that's also the provider for the eCharge (New Brunswick) and the BC Hydro EV. They have their own consumer brand for home chargers and public charging network across Canada called FLO. They seem to be growing fast (closed their series C last year), their product seems to be pretty good, so it doesn't have to be all terrible.
The Tesla standard is so high that if your customers have to use app, you've already failed.
The dealerships of Nissan, however, are terrible and don't care about EVs. I've come close to impulsively buying a Tesla from their website a few times, but the ridiculous fee for a paint job gives me a really bad impression that it's junk luxury (and I think that's unfortunately how most ordinary people view EVs).
[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a33670482/nio-swappable-ba...
Edit, added link: [2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/enthusiasts/it-costs-nearly-...
First, it's a logistics problem. Tesla has like 20,000 SuperChargers. If I'm driving on a road trip, I need to stop at a SuperCharger and there's let's say a dozen spots. In some locations those spots are full, others might be half empty and so forth. How will NIO supply the hardware to do these battery swaps? Will there be a dozen battery swap stations spread out similar to the SuperCharger network? Who will deliver the batteries? How many do you need? What happens if you show up and NIO ran out of batteries to swap? Will this actually be cheaper than the SuperCharger network for me?
I think it makes more sense to swap the batteries out from a manufacturing standpoint, but much less so for road trips. You can see NIO already shifting away from this with increased range.
If you could just swap out the batteries why even bother working on range (NIO touting 600km+ cars IIRC)? I guess that could further limit how many swap stations you need (they could be more spread out), but the problem is you end up spreading them just a long main routes. I need a SuperCharger/battery swap location in places like Marquette, Michigan or Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
And as a Tesla owner and road trip driver... I really don't mind waiting like 20 minutes for the battery to charge. It encourages me to take breaks I otherwise wouldn't have taken which are probably more healthy. Destination charging or a SuperCharger within a 20 minute drive of my destination are more of concerns for me now that I own an EV, but it just means the trip has to be planned out a little more.
I like NIO's ambitions and like the battery as a service prospect, but much more for hey I want to swap out my old battery for a new one to extend the life of my car.
They even have a charging van you can order to your location if there isn't a charger nearby. It's just a van with a huge battery in the back :D
A company named Better Place got a ton of VC funding to set up a battery swapping service for electric cars, and flamed out spectacularly.
Perhaps NIO can succeed where Tesla and Better Place failed, but I'm doubtful. OTOH, Shanghai is probably a great place to start.
A car battery can definitely carry its own anti tamper mechanism and an LTE modem to report issues. Besides... a car battery isn't actually worth 15k$ to a thief. Not much to part out (PCBs are custom, casing ain't gonna fetch much in terms of scrap metal, and there's not much of a market for used li-ion 18650's with the exception of ecig hobbyists so swapping them out for lower quality isn't worth the effort), if it's an exclusively rent model there is no market for a stolen pack.
Wear and tear also isn't that much of an issue as Tesla proved.
Who? Why?
They usually weigh your truck, unload it, weigh it again and pay you the difference. They often won't see what they're buying, as long as it's magnetic.
I knew that Tesla is all integrated, you don't even realize you are paying. But I naively expected competition to work like a gas station: insert your credit card to start charging, or, if there is a counter, you can also go there and pay cash.
But no, it doesn't work like that. There are competing standards, you have to download apps and all of that nonsense.
And why should automakers deal with charging stations? Automakers have to come up with a standard plug, and it looks like we are almost there with CCS2. Now it is up to the charging stations to provide a better experience. Gas cars and electric appliances do it right, why does it have to be worse for electric cars?
There's still a gap, but its much smaller now and EA is even ahead in some areas.
IMO, more important than catching up to Tesla's headstart in total number of chargers, is just to have reliable station information before you arrive. This doesn't have to work on every network-- just enough of them to trust the system. I won't say it's trivial, but it should be fairly easy to work towards. Each network needs to have a way of exposing charger status, and the vehicles need the software to query them. Again, they don't need to support every single possible charger vendor, but the more the better.
The user won't (usually) care if they are unaware of a few chargers they could have used, but they want data on the ones they plan to use, and they want that data to be accurate.
I've done ~40-50 sessions with them and I never got stranded, but I've had to move the car to the next charger like half the time. Good thing they're putting 4 to 8 stalls at each station.
The good thing is that they appear to be collecting data in real time and seem to have really direct insight into which manufacturers are consistently producing the highest reliability.
In particular, the Mach-E seems to be struggling with low charge rates. However, that review is a press vehicle and was technically preproduction. I have yet to see someone knowledgeable going through the details with an actual customer delivered vehicle.
However, despite those issues, they were still able set the electric cannonball record in the Taycan, beating the previous record (set by the same guys in a Tesla Model 3) by nearly an hour!
That's because the Taycan charges much faster on EA's 350 kW chargers than a Tesla does on a typical Tesla supercharger. (It might be a different story if Tesla had more of the new faster "V3" superchargers, but there are only a few of those on the Cannonball route).
[1] https://supercharge.info/changes [2] https://supercharge.info/map
Toyota wanted someone else to pay for the infrastructure.
California has 27 hydrogen stations up today.[1] There's not much interest in building more.
Some of you guys are seriously stuck in the 2010s. Hydrogen is coming a big way and the old talking points are outdated.
Two people engage in a "charging race" to see who can charge the most in 15 minutes. The contenders, a Tesla Model Y and the 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E.
The non-Tesla experience is almost comically sad.
Right now, after watching that video, went to the Ford site to order Mach-E (not really order, mainly to get config and price). Fail. Right on the first step there - on attempt to choose a dealer (minor point here is why i have to choose one now?) - webpage produces "Internal Error" and couldn't proceed further. The traditional car makers just don't get it. That is why Tesla is a $T company.
These are all nice small touches. The biggest mess the EV folks have made is having 5 different types of poorly designed chargers and plugs and current capacity. Having one type of plug and making them all fast will go a long way to better EV adoption. The oil companies have done much better and this is a shame.
There are some really choice UI travesties on display in some of the non-Tesla chargers.
* Buttons that appear on screen and pulsate enticingly, but even though it's a touch screen, you discover later that you were supposed to press the corresponding hardware button below the screen, not the button shown on the screen, but there's no instruction to that effect.
* Laggy buttons that seem to not respond, then react later and draw a new button in the same place, with a different action, just as your finger comes down and taps intending to try again with the button that just disappeared.
* The UI leads you through an entire flow (Electrify America) on the hardware, and then at the end it says "please unplug and start over then plug in again" where other stations are "please plug in first and then start on the UI".
* Or you have an account already with a linked credit card and you swipe your phone, and the station shows on the screen that it recognizes your account, and you go through the entire flow and it says at the end: "Sorry, this station can only be enabled through the app." Please use the app to start the charging. Dude, I just swiped my phone and it has the app right here and the screen told me to proceed on the charger station screen.
To be fair, once you get through this rigamarole a couple times and learn the quirks, most people can use the system, and these third party chargers have sometimes been really useful. But yeah one is thankful to have more options than just those bad ones.
By contrast, Tesla charging is you take the plug off the holder and plug it in. Done.
Still it's nice to have the other chargers around. Like free slow charging at Target… if I spend 30 minutes there, I get 12 miles or so, sure, I'll take it.
When choosing an EV you should look at the Venn diagram of what chargers will be available to you, and choose one that has the best options… Tesla is firmly on top in such a comparison, with essentially a superset of almost all charger types and locations open for use. Would love to see them start selling a Tesla CCS adapter too but that would be almost an embarrassment of options.
It was very inexpensive ~ $7500 @ 4 years old. Part was the subsidies that brought the new price down, part was fear about the batteries. You can't buy many cars with ~ all the options after 4 years for 1/4 of list price.
It was charged at home and mostly just used around town. It was perfect for ~ 25 miles of daily driving.
I did take it on longer journeys and charge on the way, but think 30 miles from home, not 200 miles. It took careful planning and a little faith in "plan B"
I had to get accounts with 3 charging providers:
- chargepoint - their model seems to be they sell the chargers and run them for the property owner. Many companies run private chargers for their employees this way. They do mostly L2 chargers at malls, restaurants, etc. THey don't have many fast L3 chargers on their network. They are very well run and their chargers are reliable.
- evgo - they own the chargers and install them. They usually put 2 fast L3 chargers + a row of slower ~6kw L2 chargers at places like whole foods and walmart. They are very reliable, and good for trips. Sometimes you will have to wait for someone to finish charging.
- blink - frankly, they suck. I haven't had much problem with their slower L2 chargers, but finding an L3 charger was like playing fallout scrounging bombed out infrastructure. Seriously, their chargers were always broken and undependable. They're owned by the property owners but somehow never fixed.
I haven't used my accounts in 2 years, and things might have changed. I know there are a few more entrants now.
Telsa meanwhile makes travel like a "normal car" possible via LOTS of overlapping details:
- large batteries - travel radius is larger
- charging station location - usually within radius
- charging station sizing - most stations have a LOT of chargers
- fast charging - you travel more and sit less, also less contention for chargers
- navigation - nav system will plan your route for you, including charging
Note that there is also a "secondary" tesla network of slow(er) chargers that doesn't get mentioned much. Hotels and other places have installed these "destination chargers" that tesla has provided for free. Slower usually means 6kw, but I've heard some do higher rates like 18kw.
This really is a night and day difference for people who don't have a charging port at home/work or have to use their cars for long distances. It makes the experience that better, as opposed to having to go to the mall or a shopping center, some of who actually offer free charging in some cases near wholefoods and other upscale shops, and rely on old charging systems that keep you there for hours instead of the 30 min top up you can get on a P95D that is rather convenient on the coasts.
I already put my deposit for a Cybertruck but I want to my mom to get a Tesla too so we will be driving to the next SpaceX launch in Vandenburg next month with a FSD and see what she thinks and finally moves away from ICE.
I was always a proponent of EV vehicles but what really did me it for me was how quick Tesla rolled out its Supercharging network, that was such an undervalued component in their overall valuation.
Having worked in the autos Industry it dawned on me somewhere between 2015 or so that Tesla isn't as much a car company as it is a power company and that their MVP were cars but would gradually transition more and more toward infrastructure for power generations stations, Chamath made the same observation around the same time and echoed his view earlier this year about it, too.
It was not possible to pay with a credit card directly without installing an app. All charging stations offered sms payments but the rate was 20-25% higher than paying with an app. So by the end of the trip I ended up with 4 different apps. Even after installing the app and entering credit card details the experience was bad. One has to enter the charger code which at one place was 4 digits even when there were only 2 chargers. Then sometimes charging required 2-3 attempts to press the start button in the phone. At one time I could not start charging in the phone and called the support. They rebooted the charger, but it still did not help. Eventually they claimed incompatibility with my phone and started charging themselves.
6 months ago I did 750km trip in a rented Tesla. Charging just worked with no need for phone or entering anything and I just received the final bill from the renting company with all the details.
As they say, your mileage may vary.
There are a total of three (3) Tesla charger stations in all of Ireland. That's one location per 2.3 million people.
For any locals wondering: Ballacolla, Birdhill, Castlebellingham.
I see a fair number of Teslas around town, but I have to imagine they all just charge at home. I know of a single charging station in the area and it supports either one or two cars from what I remember.
Charging at home should be both more convenient and cheaper than making a weekly trip to a local charger (people without off-street parking might have no alternative, though).
Electric Highway (Ecotricity) has a high rate of broken chargers. When you find one, they seem to charge a minimum fee of £12 regardless of how much you use.
Most chargers are slow. Either 7kw or 11kw is common; 20kw is considered rapid in some places.
The fragmentation of networks means you need at least four crap apps just to get around and then you’ll probably need to install a new app if you’re going somewhere new.
What you call convenient locations are a mixed blessing. Spaces for chargers are often ICEd in my experience because they’re in busy car parks.
I just want to pull up, plug in, and tap my credit card. The charge networks seem to go out of their way to make using the service painful.
That's exactly the way that all Polar rapid chargers work, and there's a lot of them scattered around now. The rate is lower if you join as a member though.
Pull into charge, plug in the car, start charging.
Here's the competition.
Pull into charge, plug in the car, Maybe swipe a credit if you are lucky and start charging. Likely, you need to install a 3rd party app first then you need to feed that app your CC information and then you need to tell that app a station number to activate. You better hope there's good internet because if there's not you might not be able to charge.
Further, for stations that do take a credit card or tap and pay. It's like 50/50 on whether or not it will actually go through. Usually it takes a crazy long time to actually validate the card number before charging (Like, I've waited 10 minutes before for a charge to start!).
Using a Supercharger is even easier and more seamless than refueling with gas. Other EV chargers are generally much worse than gas. I hope they get there eventually, but right now it is a night and day difference in my experience.
What I really care about is how much time I'm interacting with the charge equipment. It sucks to be standing outside in the freezing cold waiting for your card to maybe get accepted only to find out that for some dumb reason the machine decides to decline it (forcing you to use an app which you likely don't have).
There's no reason all EV charging can't be a better experience than gas charging. There's already a data line established when you plug in (Both CCS and Chademo have data lines) so it should be beyond trivial for there to be a standard payment scheme (It should have existed from the start).
That depends completely on the charger. "Normal" DC charging stations are 50kW around here.
HVDC chargers go up to 350kW, but not many cars can utilise all of that, most cap out at 75-100kW.
If you plan things out well, you generally don't end up waiting too long for fast charging.
Most of the reports I've seen are drivers of the e-Tron, Bolt and Setec CCS (for Tesla) adapter. They often report needing to put pressure on the handle while the station is handshaking with the car to avoid spurious ground isolation faults and/or communication errors. I don't recall reading anything similar with Teslas at Superchargers.
Given that this happens across manufacturers, I'm inclined to think that it is either a design flaw with CCS or a not-clearly-specified part of the CCS spec.
Look up nearest charge station on chargepoint. Pull into charge, ICE car is parked there. Wait indefinitely or look for another charge.
EA chargers also put you in a price tier based on how much energy your car can _accept_, meaning we were paying the 75kWh price for 30kWh of actual acceptance.
Fortunately after talking to support for several minutes they rebooted all of the chargers and one of them charged at a more reasonable speed (but still not the full 75kWh we wanted), and they comped the charge at that machine.
This is in Texas, by the way.
Particularly regarding the app. Do I complain that I need to install Sonos and Prime Music and Apple Play once to do what I want?
Also, you seem to have only picked on part of the inconvenience given that this exists:
> Like, I've waited 10 minutes before for a charge to start!
Putting a hard dependence on someone having a smart phone, and reliable internet in order to get gas or charge their car is a ludicrous step backwards in user experience compared to either the (described) Tesla experience or filling your car with gas.
Fair point on the need to be online to use the service. However, not unusual these days.
Your last point? I have similar feelings towards Tesla putting a hard dependence on someone having a Tesla in order to charge up.
But anyhoo.
Then it's only a matter of time before gas station brands start requiring the same (or pricing a bunch more if you don't have it).
No, because there is no easily available alternative to this that gets rid of those pain points in you example. While for EVs, there is. Hence the whole disappointment.
It is much more difficult to accept inconveniences, when you have an option available that shows you that it is possible to perform the exact same functions, but without dealing with those inconveniences.
Seems like the same problem to me, but from two different ends of the spectrum.
It’s not just one time, it’s every time you do a larger road trip. That’s very much a case of death by a thousand cuts.
That ideal experience of just plugging in and immediately starting to charge is restricted to a particular car brand.
From that perspective, what a ridiculous situation which could be solved with cooperation but ... anyways, USB-C, Lion, etc etc ...
In conclusion, not just the independent charging networks are at fault here.
That being said, the Tesla charging network is far from perfect. Check to see how many US National Parks you can practically visit with a Tesla. Carlsbad Caverns? Nope. North Rim of the Grand Canyon? Barely.
I saw several Teslas around the park, and I think it's doable if you only want to visit say 1 or 2 locations, but without a Supercharger in the middle of the park, you will be limited and won't have the flexibility to see everything.
The resort in the middle of the park has 4 J1772 chargers, which would help if you were staying in the park overnight, but we were simply doing day trips.
The story for the north rim of the Grand Canyon is similar. In the Tesla, from Flagstaff, you must first drive to Page, AZ. Round trip 508 miles and 10 hours. In an internal combustion, its 422 miles and roughly 8.5 hours. When you arrive at the north rim in the Tesla, you can’t go anywhere else, and you must return the way you came.
Tesla should work on optimizing their National Park experience, as it’s the classic destination of an old fashioned American road trip.
The Chargepoint / third-party ones in Seattle have almost universally destroyed screens by vandals.
1) require a new app to be installed 2) require you to create an account and add your credit card info 3) are broken 4) work, but charge slower than they should
As opposed to superchargers, where you literally just plug the charger in and that's it, everything is handled for you.
I'd much rather have an app notify me than an automated phone call, I (and most people I know) probably wouldn't even pick it up.
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I can uninstall an app, I can't ungive someone my phone number.
The market is fragmented. Chargers are run by different companies. Very often you can't even use them, because they don't accept card payments, and expect you to have a membership, or at best use their custom shitty app.
There are a couple cars in the price range of the Model 3 that have better range, combined with the fact Tesla is known to exaggerate the range of their vehicles.
I mean, this whole article is about how Tesla invested in a charging infrastructure that is leaps and bounds above all competitors. The whole point is that Tesla decided that was a requirement before scaling up production and it is a key reason why people choose their EVs over the competition.
But if Elon was serious about what he said about climate, and wanting to turn the car industry electric, he should do exactly that, so that more people get electric cars, regardless of the brand.
After it's possible to do it and not lose everything in the process, then you can do the "let's team up with the competition that didn't thing of this themselves"-game. Because that is what it boils down to: before the whole Tesla and Musk thing it was not really a thing to have a good all-electric car experience. Heck, even a good software experience wasn't available (in any car). It takes quite a beating for the other car manufacturers the get off of their collective asses en start doing something new. (and no, creating a different design isn't new, they have been re-designing for decades - new would be a paradigm shift or beginnings of a shift)