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Comment by mft_ | Hacker News Reader

Ooof, this makes me conflicted.

On the one hand, it's great to share empty supercharger capacity with all EVs, making EVs generally more attractive - and of course, more money for Tesla from charging maybe = even more superchargers.

On the other hand, the biggest challenges with an EV vs. ICE car are (obviously) range and charging. With this in mind, the supercharger network, and supercharger capacity generally being ample, probably rate pretty high when choosing a Tesla.

It mightn't take many instances of having to wait to charge due to non-Teslas filling up supercharger capacity for that USP to fade and the Tesla ownership experience to be significantly damaged.

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I mean, essentially what's happening here is that Tesla is exploring becoming the replacement of a Gas Station.

The benefit of not waiting by being a Tesla customer is a pretty high benefit, but could you imagine that same benefit with ICE vehicles? A gas station that you can't fuel at unless you have a specific brand of car?

This change was and is likely inevitable.

> The benefit of not waiting by being a Tesla customer is a pretty high benefit, but could you imagine that same benefit with ICE vehicles? A gas station that you can't fuel at unless you have a specific brand of car?

The best way Tesla can solve this is by building more of them. So you would have way more cars using the chargers but you would have physically more chargers so it would even out (in the best case scenario).

What has me wondering is, how will charge time affect the economics of these places? If you pull into just about any gas station now, you can fill your tank in 5-10minutes, more or less depending on the pump but it's exponentially less time than even waiting for an EV to charge. With more folks stopped in these places for longer, I wonder how the economics of these places will evolve.

I think this has been explored quite extensively here on HN and other places. The viewpoint a few years ago was that you could transform what it means to be a refueling station. Like chargers in places that gas stations can't be.

I didn't have to imagine as, for a while, Tesla owners have had the best of both worlds: access to most 3rd party chargers out there, plus private access to the supercharger network.

Hence the conflict: the head is all in favour of breaking down those walls, but the heart likes being private members' clubs, when it's looking outwards from inside them :)

I'm not a frequent user of superchargers. So far I have had one experience where I had to wait about 25 minutes before a stall became available (a Tesla-only supercharger with quite a lot of capacity too). It is unusual enough that it doesn't damage my ownership experience... petrol stations have queues too when they're busy.

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