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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

Tesla has ~2,000 charging stations (with 20,000 chargers).

The stations seems to cost a few hundred thousand dollars.

So they have a lead, but it's roughly a billion dollars (or maybe 2) to build out something similar, that isn't going to take decades.

There are tens of thousands of places that might install a couple high power chargers (restaurants and similar). Doesn't take that many of them to add a lot of capacity, even if it isn't spaced out quite as well.

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I follow the development of the stations pretty closely. It is much much much harder than you think it is. Some stations take well over a year from permitting to lighting them up. Tesla has also made deals with a lot of businesses and states to put them on highway rest stops. The other charging stations are spotty at best. I live one mile from the Electrify America HQ. Even the station at their HQ is iffy and I had issues with payments on it.

Also Tesla has two full production lines for the station gear. One in Shanghai and one in Buffalo NY. Electrify America is a hodgepodge of 4 different suppliers gear.

Tesla has made approximately 2000 deals. Years aren't decades, and the cost just isn't high enough that it will drag out.

It's sort of neutral that there's more than one manufacturer of the other chargers, if the chargers work well with vehicles it doesn't matter if they come from 15 factories or 2.

Tesla clearly has a lead. My point is that it is unlikely to be durable.

The lead remains durable in the medium term because Tesla can remain doggedly single-minded. Whereas established automakers have monumental scale investments in their present-day supply chains which can't easily be write off.

Long term? While I don't feel confident hazarding a guess when the ICE–EV inflection point will occur, I expect that inflection point to be marked by a series of corporate collapses as the transition (or indeed the failure to transition) ultimately bankrupts them.

No there are issues with the EA chargers being from different vendors. This article is really good and gets into it:

https://insideevs.com/news/389891/exclusive-interview-electr...

“Electrify America currently uses units made by ABB, BTC, Signet, and Efacec. Every time they have a software or hardware update, it has to be done on all four brands, and they don't always all work the same afterward. Fitezek has to work out the kinks with all four partners and they all respond on different timelines. I could see that this was clearly a pain point for him.”

It's not impossible, it just takes planning and multiple technical steps. Until the last 6 months, no other cars had plug in and charge (with your car telling the charger the credit card number and/or car id)! You had to sign in to an app or scan your card on the charger itself.

Telsa also is the only car manu. was access to enough batteries to ship car in en masse. All the the companies making evs are significantly limited by batteries. Finally teslas have much better energy efficiency/mile. 800v charging and car systems is one area tesla is behind (they are 400v).

That other vehicles are getting plug and charge is a sign of the lead eroding. They only have to figure it out the one time.

I would expect battery production capacity to be somewhat lumpy (with big shifts when new mines or factories open). That can take a long time and I haven't looked at where things are, but it also means that there can be a very sudden shift.

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