It's ridiculously wasteful to force every carmaker to build their own charging stations. Here regulators may have to step in to force them to find a standard and a charging market.
Some heavy-handed top-down inter-organisational group with top-down design-by-committee ideas is going to be a shitshow too, so now the question becomes: what IS a good solution going to look like?
The entire EV market is already propped by governments and this has taken us to a place of extremely heavy, extremely battery-heavy, performance-oriented vehicles. That is the complete opposite of what an EV vehicle that is good for the environment would be. We should not be incentivizing this further by encouraging government to now subsidize a charging network.
So Tesla spend billions of their own money building out infrastructure when the competition was literally laughing at them... and now that it's paid off and EVs are starting to go mainstream we should force them to share that infra with everyone else?
That's a giant bullshit sandwich right there.
You mean the same subsidies which currently give Tesla's GM-come-lately competitors a $10k pricing advantage on new car purchases?
Maybe that's the solution. Every time a competing car is sold, Tesla gets the subsidy instead of the maker. Then Tesla can use it to continue building out the supercharger network which everyone benefits from.
GM, Ford, VW, Toyota... these are multi-billion dollar companies, several of which have received massive subsidies from the US government themselves. Forcing Tesla to subsidize their myopic competitors as sort of perverted corporate tort in the US is crap.
Moving out of the Bay Area California makes a ton of sense for a manufacturer. I'm just happy they are keeping manufacturing in the US.
Again costs are socialized and profits privatized.
You say it's obvious, but I'd though EVs were subsidized at the time of launch and Tesla has burned through all of their subsidies.
Manufactures, Amazon, Walmart etc are all glad to be subsidized and avoid taxes in other regions.
This is intact what happened, the waste majority is standardized and that mostly without regulation.
Market forces are driving standardization. Tesla however is special because they have in incredibly dominate position in the market and they don't have to relay on 3rd parties creating charging stations.
They can offer their costumers a premium experience and support their own growth. Eventually once charging is more universally available Tesla can simply expand to allow others to charge there and make a lot of money.
Tesla has invested huge amount of money and this is their reward. Not sure why regulation needs to come in and force everybody to do things. Specially when early on a lot of things were not very clear. Also, government regulation defined API standards for payments are usually terrible.
What if Tesla ends up with more or less a monopoly?
> Tesla can simply expand to allow others to charge there and make a lot of money.
But will they?
I agree that it's fair that Tesla gets return on their investment. But if we end up with a situation where infrastructure is disjointed or where it's infeasible for anyone else to launch any competetition then Tesla have gained a market position that might be "fair" to them but unfair to everyone else.
Tesla has "Open Sourced" their designs.
> But will they?
I don't know if Tesla will allow others to use their supercharger network, but anyone can use their designs for building a charging station for Teslas.
> But will they?
Yes, eventually it will be a financial make sense, but that is to 5-10 years away.
> But if we end up with a situation where infrastructure is disjointed or where it's infeasible for anyone else to launch any competetition then Tesla have gained a market position that might be "fair" to them but unfair to everyone else.
But this isn't the case. And will not be the case. So I don't get why you are making that argument.
The amount of "waste" amounts the the plastic used to display said logo and some rubber and copper. The actual electricity itself and the infrastructure used to deliver that electricity is already standardized and shared among not only all electric car companies, but everyone in the area period.
If companies can share infrastructure, then they all will benefit from each other improving their own networks. Ford adding stations that can be used by other EVs will further improve the quality of life for all EVs.
That said, I think that in many cases they should share space. For example on a crowded downtown street, there should be standardized charging stations that can accommodate multiple types of cars. It would be annoying to have one parking spot for Tesla, another for GM, another for Ford. But that's not a question of waste or resourcefulness and I don't think that needs a government to step in to regulate either.
Tesla's, along with pretty much all electric cars, support standardized charging as a matter of convenience to the user.