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Comment by rcMgD2BwE72F | Hacker News Reader

>Either way it's just surprising they didn't help design the standard and work to make it better.

Oh so you have a good deal to learn. You should start with

- Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006 film)

- Revenge of the Electric Car (2011 follow up)

Let me tell you that when Tesla entered the market as a serious player, the rest of the industry did not intend to let Tesla have their say nor to collaborate with them. Tesla had to make their own (better) design and find their way through. They could not wait for standardization when the rest of the industry was fighting tooth and nails against the transition to EV.

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> Let me tell you that when Tesla entered the market as a serious player, the rest of the industry did not intend to let Tesla have their say nor to collaborate with them. Tesla had to make their own (better) design and find their way through. They could not wait for standardization when the rest of the industry was fighting tooth and nails against the transition to EV.

Supercharger came before CCS. It's always easy to create a proprietary standard; mostly because you don't have to debug incompatibilities between different interpretations of a standard. (Or deal with different company's opinions about what's important.)

Tesla has always been a member of the CCS consortium. As far as why they haven't adopted CCS in the US, I haven't seen an official answer; but we can look at the slow rollout of Tesla + CCS in the EU: It takes longer to debug equipment built to open standards than equipment built to a proprietary standard.

One thing to note is that CCS supports faster charging rates than Supercharger. It supports higher voltages and higher current. This is much more important than a thinner handle.

“Who Killed the Electric Car?” was a hit piece that has not aged well as GM has embraced EVs and is on their way to being a major EV manufacturer.

How has it not aged well? It documents what happened when GM killed the EV1 by interviewing the former people involved with the program. (Some of which went on to Tesla.)

It is mainly brought up today to claim that GM is somehow opposed to EVs. The actual story becomes secondary. I’ve seen this in countless discussions of EVs.

But here it was brought up to provide context for why Tesla had to go it alone in creating a charging network and connector. And to provide some useful context when digesting what amounts to a GM press release from The Verge. If you're not aware of GM's past with electric cars, you might afford them too much trust in the present. Not to say they deserve exclusively disdain, but they need to continue to (re)earn trust by actually executing rather than talking.

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