Tesla owners in California uneasy as Supercharging costs are on a constant rise
teslaoracle.com
teslaoracle.com
Hot new company appears. It offers great value and undercuts the old guard. As they grow in market share their rate of growth starts to slow as do their investor returns. They start to focus on locking people into their ecosystem with integrations instead of acquisitions. Then once it's hard to leave, they jack up the price. The captive audience has to keep paying despite diminishing, but non-zero, value to them. Eventually prices become too much and they are undercut by the next startup a generation later. The cycle continues.
Tesla will lock up most of the supercharger market, become indispensable and then eventually charge like it. See also cloud and streaming services.
I wish companies could be happy to reach a stable equilibrium where profits and prices are both steady but that doesn't seem to be possible under the growth model.
So no it’s not all a conspiracy to price gouge people. Regardless most people charge at home for significantly less and start each day with 300 miles of range.
This (or some other) baseline should be used. A $/gallon price should be displayed per this figure, for electricity, in all signage & at the pump.
I think there deserve to be a lot of super pissed off angry electric car drivers, who rightfully see & understand they are paying an equivalent of like $8/gallon for gas. Electricity costs should be on par per dollar with energy delivery costs of gas. But we accept shitty infrastructure & dont even realize how sickeningly maddeningly cheap car drivers are handed energy. Absolutely uncool, unacceptable.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care much: I rarely use these networks except on occasional long trips, so the extra $6-8 per 200 miles driven isn’t a killer. But hopefully this is not the first sign of Tesla exercising its vendor lock-in to juice profits. The supercharger network is currently the best selling point for the car.
It seems that thrifty trick is often overlooked in the discussions.
It’s not just that you can fill up at home, it’s that realistically you have to. And as you mentioned some people just can’t. Something like 10% of Teslas get flipped because people buy them with no way to fill up at home and then don’t want to live with the alternative (and who can blame them).
300 miles of advertised range may mean that most people filling up at home almost never go to a supercharger, but if you don’t have that option, you’re probably going to be quickly thinking that’s not even half as much as you want.
Electric pickups are coming, and they are going to disappoint a lot of people, and won’t work for tons more. Currently some trucks (Ram 1500) have 1000 mile range. That’s not for no reason. They will still sell like hot cakes, and many businesses owners will trip over themselves in the rush to get several and love the economics, but it’s not going to be for everyone.
Teslas could too.
If people want to drive much further than that average, as they own average, then 220v charging overnight would easily suffice, if available to them.
I for one am glad to learn about the price increases from this article, because I probably wouldn't have thought to check before my next trip.
* Unfortunately this is difficult, since Tesla is probably the only reliable source for its own cost information and they fired their PR department. https://electrek.co/2021/04/28/elon-musk-no-new-tesla-pr-dep...
As well as with heroin and the heroin-dealers: "The first hit is always free."
Once you have that electric car, you have no choice but to use electricity, no matter what the current rate for it happens to be. (Ditto for petrol and diesel, of course.)