Tesla to open some superchargers to other vehicles
wsj.com
wsj.com
The consistency of non-Tesla chargers is pretty poor and really puts a damper in the potential growth of the EV market. We went through an annoying charging fiasco at a chargepoint station that I'm not sure how non-technical people would get past. Additionally, the next day the EA station we needed to goto ended up being completely down!
Though take this with a grain of salt, as I have no firsthand experience with other connector types.
I ran into this! Some recent MY's of Dodge Ram trucks had a weird angle with their filler neck and the pump nozzle[1] would get well and truly stuck. I had a 2018 Ram 1500 provided by work, and quickly learned what local gas stations were decent and which ones I had to avoid, lest I spend a few minutes really reefing on the nozzle to get it to come loose, worrying i'll break something the whole time.
[1]Vapor reclamation style pump nozzles, that is. Plain old straight nozzles were fine.
See:
https://www.classaction.org/media/kingston-v-fca-us-llc.pdf
"Specifically, Defendant’s defective fuel tank filler necks1 (the “Filler Neck Defect”) cause standard gas-station nozzles—which work perfectly well with other vehicles—to become lodged in the opening to Dodge Ram fuel tanks, forcing Dodge Ram owners to either physically wrench the gas nozzle free, contact their roadside assistance provider (if they have one) to have the nozzle dislodged, or even call their local fire department for help."
I mean, in 2012 there were people claiming that there was nothing wrong with Micro-USB and that the Lightning connector was just silly and incompatible. They weren't "wrong" exactly, but... no, they were basically wrong. Apple provided a vastly better charging experience.
But in the USB case, the industry recognized that fact and cloned the important features into the still-not-perfect-but-really-very-much-improved C plug. With CCS, everyone is still sitting around with their heads in the same hole they dug a decade ago when they rejected Tesla[1].
It's just a bad product and a bad standard. It just is.
[1] And also CHAdeMO, itself superior to CCS. Really this was the real reason for CCS, it was an attempt by western auto manufacturers to preempt the threat they perceived from Nissan. As it happens the threat was more real than they knew, but they had the wrong villain in mind.
Seriously, just go to youtube and find videos of people plugging in their cars. Watch them fumble with a CCS connector for 5+ seconds, using two hands, almost every time. Plugging in a Tesla is instant, and one-handed. CHAdeMO is in between.
Obviously it would be better still if you could share the connectors for both purposes like Tesla does.
In ths US, this AC charging, Level 2, is handled by J1772. So for a car in the US with CHAdeMO, I'll have a J1772 plug, and then this whole other CHAdeMO connector which is again the same size as the J1772 connector.
Or, I just add two pins at the bottom of the J1772 plug, and call it CCS.
And yeah, maybe it would have been better for it to be like the Tesla connector and have the same pins used for HVDC and AC power. But in a large family of makers using the plug it seems pretty risky reusing pins for HVDC and high amperage AC systems. Tesla can manage it because for Tesla only Tesla makes Tesla, but in a much larger network who knows what might happen.
And I repeat: for a CCS[1] car, you have a J-1772 connector, and a DC connector both on the car and both taking up space. And it's worse, because they're glued together! Going back to my USB example, imagine if USB-C worked by having a USB3 and USB2 connector side by side, and you couldn't charge your phone or connect your mouse without using both.
It's literally that bad, and I genuinely can't imagine why you think otherwise. Have you ever actually plugged a Tesla in?
[1] Strictly CCS Combo 1 as deployed in North America. Europeans get an IEC connector glued on instead. Which brings up the other bit of CCS madness: it's not even one standard, it's two completely incompatible plug designs with the same name!
Tesla has had five different plug designs on its cars. It's apparently not the problem you think it is.
https://picolio.auto123.com/art-images/156317/chademo_connec...
vs
https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/PYwkW/s3/european-ccs-type...
Which is a more compact solution to a whole charging system on the car?
For CCS vs CHAdeMO, I'd take CCS every time. I don't want to have two completely separate plugs, I'd prefer just one plug. If you can't look at these two pictures above and understand what I'm talking about, I don't know what to tell you.
I've plugged in Teslas. I've plugged in CCS. I've handled CHAdeMO cables, which were roughly the same size and flexibility as the CCS ones on the stalls. I do agree Tesla connectors were the easiest to work with, but Tesla continuing to put it behind their patent pledge means nobody else is going to really use it. I do wish they would have actually opened it up or licensed it under some normal kind of licensing terms, but they didn't, so we're left with the standard the rest of the market came up with.
As for CCS being different in the US vs Europe, I guess I'll have an issue if I drive my EV across the Atlantic Ocean. I'm not planning on making that road trip anytime soon, so I don't think that'll be an issue for me. If I move to Europe, I'd probably just sell my car and buy something over there rather than deal with import duties and getting it compliant to EU standards and what not, and vice-versa.
I do somewhat care about the space needed for two charging outlets versus one. It's a much larger door to open. It's a larger moving part susceptible to a larger area of impact potentially breaking it. Larger door means probably more complicated hinge management. Two connectors instead of just one means more wires, more communications, more pins to potentially break or get dirty, etc. Adding CCS to J1772 adds two pins, adding CHAdeMO adds like 10.
CHAdeMO could never charge at the rates CCS can. CHAdeMO's old plug has also been dropped for CHAdeMO 3.0. CHAdeMO 3.0 is a new plug and port design.
CCS didn’t support higher power until around 2017/18
They probably should have brought CHAdeMO 3.0 forward sooner:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaoJi
Japan and China will probably standardise on CHAdeMO 3.0. Though it would be much better if Japan switched to CCS type 2 combo so all the right-hand drive countries are on the same charging standard.
CCS lacked V2H/V2G support for a long time while CHAdeMO supports.
This is low-effort sniping. The upthread point was that at the moment the standardization process was happening, both CHAdeMO and Tesla presented superior technologies to what the committee ended up picking. And CCS is still suffering with those limitations in comparison with Tesla's much trimmer device (CHAdeMO hasn't kept up as well, it's true).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_WjeH3I8p8
It doesn't matter how "superior" you think they are. They didn't solve the business case and were dead on arrival because of that.
Tesla should have made its solution open for adoption so a real competing standard could have existed.
I understand that they would want to initially restrict their charging network to just Teslas, but that could be enforced through the software/service.
Surely it would be in Tesla's interest to allow Tesla owners to have the greatest flexibility as well as potentially opening things up to others in the future? (I know there is an optional adapter for Tesla owners to use to connect to non-Tesla chargers, but it always nicer/better/more-convenient to not have to use adapters)
Perhaps they were worried about the quality and safety of others producing a subpar equivalent/variant that might have led to incidents that tarnish Tesla's name and reputation? Similar to a few years back when there was a lot of controversy around USB-C chargers and how some deviate from the standard and could potentially damage your phone/device.
I know a few years ago Tesla "opened" up a lot of patents other auto-manufactures could use for "free". I'd be surprised if there wasn't anything related to charging (including connectors) included in these "open" patents?
Its kind of like the GPL, but imagine if the license was if you included GPL code in just one codebase you had to open source every bit of code your company had ever made.
A comprehensive approach would have been to create a standard for the charger, plus open source implementation of both the car and the charger software, including the software for automated payment. Also libraries for phones abs to integrate (or for others to integrate with the Tesla app).
Establish a conference for charger testing, these exist for the CCS standard. Maybe even a certification program.
They could have made home charger and the destination charger just work with any cars. And then made deals with specific auto makers for access to Superchargers. Or have program where they allow access at extra cost.
> Perhaps they were worried about the quality and safety of others producing a subpar equivalent/variant that might have led to incidents that tarnish Tesla's name and reputation?
Maybe.
If you want my opinion. Its simply not how Musk thinks, thinking in terms of Open Standards and Open Source or even Partnerships just isn't an Musk thing Musk does. And everybody else is to busy doing what Musk wants to do. I think it one of the biggest weaknesses in Musk
Maintaining a standard, having open software and partners and so on, is management effort Tesla just isn't interested in it seems to me.
- evgo is usually pretty reliable - chargepoint was ok too, but they seemed to be 99% level 2 chargers - Blink was the WORST. Everything was broken all the time.
This might have been the business model.
evgo had their own chargers.
I'm uncertain, but chargepoint seemed to be a mix of public and private.
blink seemed to manager private chargers, which might be why they were always broken - they might have had no agency in fixing the chargers.
This is all significantly magnified by small battery size/range.
Since then things have probably gotten a little better, but honestly telsa is SO much better - plentiful charger locations, seems to be a minimum of 8 chargers per locaion, well-integrated navigation, and very reliable.
They just don't get UX. I want it to be like a petrol station - card reader, pre-authorise my card, plug in, walk off.
If the charger is literally located at a petrol station then I should be able to pay cash inside and have them authorise the amount I paid.
Instead it's like some endless web of bullshit apps and signing up and doing online payments or whatever.
There is no reason at all to require a smartphone for this shit.
I don't get the trend towards just making things less convenient for the end user. It feels like a gamble that people will just put up with it anyway, ignoring the fact that lots of us will just nope out. I would never buy a non-Tesla EV until this is fixed.
Tesla isn’t the only villian. The credit card payment systems are routinely broken — tap to pay, chip and swipe all fail in different ways (especially with EVgo)
This should be all or nothing — 99.9% uptime on compatibility with standard cars and payment methods, fleet wide, or you get zero dollars.
Unreliable is worse than unsupported, and the interoperability clauses of the law apparently don’t mandate reliability.
Yes Tesla should be paid if they're being forced to subsidize their competitors. The entire point of Tesla's charging system is that it's non-profit making. It's based on the idea that it's acts as a value-add to Tesla vehicles. If Tesla is going to allow access to competitors, then yes Tesla needs to be paid for that access, or charge differential rates between Tesla and non-Tesla vehicles.
The way Tesla gets paid is by users paying for the charge. It isn't complicated.
Are you making the argument that non-Teslas should be charged more than Tesla users. I'm fine with that but I think that wouldn't be allowed under this new provision.
In Europe, Tesla charges Tesla drivers less for charging and other drivers more. Tesla also has membership pricing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y33AArvMUQ
Other charging networks also have brand specific deals and membership pricing.
Okay but this is a theoretical statement and doesn't really jive with the current existing environment. This is a goal, not a method to achieve it.
There is no mystery here. This is not theoretical. It's the practical reality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_WjeH3I8p8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPIhazPcY64
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI5EnOo05BE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=theiiFWydmo
Once again Tesla continues to push its proprietary systems instead of adopting the standards everyone else uses.
And it will, presumably, require Tesla to retrofit some kind of user interface to the charging stall. That seems a bit stupid when every car that can connect has a screen that could easily do the job.
And lastly, did this open system exist when Tesla started building their charging network?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15118
Volkswagon, Ford, Mercedes, Lucid, and Rivian have all standardized on this to negotiate payment. Electrify America and a few others have already implemented this standard in their chargers.
The vast majority of times I've had to charge at a public charger, plug and charge negotiated the payment without issue. I do not drive a Tesla.
> And it will, presumably, require Tesla to retrofit some kind of user interface to the charging stall. That seems a bit stupid when every car that can connect has a screen that could easily do the job.
If they supported the industry standard instead of only their proprietary standard, they wouldn't need to.
The billions of dollars that are available aren't only to Tesla.
Tesla actually reliably accepts and processes credit card payments without issues, unlike the anecdotes provided by others here with other charging networks and there is no reason to think that Tesla would no longer reliably accept payments given that they intentionally accept payments from all major credit card processors.
Why would they not allow 3rd-party cars to charge? They may have some prioritization scheme for Tesla vehicles, but other than that I'm just not following what you are saying here.
Tesla isn't allowing my car to charge. They have a proprietary plug and a proprietary payment protocol. So if I drove my car to a Tesla stall in the US right now, it would not charge as it is not a Tesla. Why would they not, well, because for the past few years they've used their proprietary network as a marketing advantage.
So yeah, why wouldn't they? Why don't they today? It's the same question and it's the same answer.
Why would they not allow 3rd-party cars to charge, today, months after their original date they set to allow 3rd party cars to charge?
There's lots of state level grants available to apply for today, so we're already in the "billions available for public EV charging" future state.
Sure… Except that that’s physically impossible. Search YouTube for “arc flash”.
Sure that's anecdotal, but I read a few (more than 1 each) reviews on the Harley Davidson Livewire, Ford Mach-E, and Ford f150 lightning. All had charging issues during their review.
After owning a EV for years, my only range anxiety is caused by having to use non-Tesla chargers.
For example, the chip reader pins on the EVgo’s are corroded around here, so you need to wiggle the credit card in the reader and hope it manages to handshake with the embedded smart card. (If it is a Visa or Master Card.) If AMEX or Discover, they require you to swipe the mag strip, which would be useful if the mag strip reader didn’t spuriously decline payment.
There is also an rfid reader labeled “present phone”, but it doesn’t work with apple pay, the EVgo app (android or ios) or the rfid tags in any of my credit cards.
It sounds like you've had a lot of issues with charging your i3.
A single stall being out can mean someone waiting 15+ minutes, but some stations are so busy that it could easily lead to a line of cars.
Additionally since level 3 chargers are pivotal to road trips, people aren't casually stopping by them 'to top up', they usually are down to <50 miles of range when they stop, meaning continuing on may actually be impossible depending location of next charging station.
Having one working charger at a highway-adjacent station could mean literally hours of waiting on a busy day, especially if you're waiting for a 50kW vehicle. Even if you get lucky most of the time, just the possibility of a multi-hour wait time would make most drives impractical.
Drivers with disabilities that prevent them from operating a gas pump by themselves can call an attendant at the station, but Tesla chargers has nobody on site.
There are established PoS vendors that have figured out payments completely. Did they roll their own?
For example, in the US, Francis Energy quickchargers require a Francis Energy RFID card or use of their app.
Some gas station pump terminals will allow you to pump your debit card’s available balance and no more. No charger I have come across can do this, billing some arbitrary amount like $40 that is eventually replaced with the correct expense, if not outright requiring credit. Forget paying with cash, even for quick chargers located at gas stations.
Among other things, it requires 97% uptime, CCS connectors, 150 kW minimum for every plug (power sharing allowed for capacity above that), payment via contactless credit/debit payment and either toll free phone number or SMS short code, must have a customer service system to report charger outages.
BTW, Tesla has already created the technology they'll use for charging. It's called "Magic Dock" which is believed to a system where through the phone app you either unlock a connector that has CCS on the end of it, or you unlock the inner Tesla connector. By default it's the Tesla connector and you use the Tesla app to tell it that a non-Tesla car has arrived. Here's some industry speculation: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/here-s-how-tesla-s-magic-...
Keep in mind for European posters: this is not the European CCS. It's CCS type 1, which is quite a lot worse than CCS type 2 in Europe.
Also, dongles to plug Teslas into CCS exist, and come with new Teslas, so there is no reason to build any more Tesla-only charging station wires.
Also are you measuring vehicle sales or vehicle ownership? Anything over 50% production and Tesla vehicle ownership percentage continues to grow versus any other vehicle, EV or otherwise.
> Market consensus has them at 11% by end of 2024.
I laughed when I saw that number. Who is claiming that? Because that's certainly not consensus.
I can only find things from mid-2022 and that predates Tesla's price drop.
They dropped from > 70 to 63 last year, and missed sales estimates for Q4.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-share-ev-market-droppin...
Also, their competition is ridiculously strong. Want a luxury EV with a nice interior? There are many options, and most have physical controls and a touch screen. Want a truck? Cybertruck will likely be fifth to market. Van or off road vehicle? You aren’t getting a tesla.
Want hands free self driving on the freeway? Wait 18 months for a GMC. (Cruise is getting 10,000x more miles per disengagement than Tesla).
Inexpensive long range vehicle? Chevy Bolt.
Ecobox? Leaf, used volt, or similar.
It doesn’t really matter if they are targeting the whole market if they can’t hold a big percentage of their niche. It is unclear if they can even dominate midrange or luxury sedans at this point.
Yes they missed sales estimates, but it was still a substantial growth in sales Year over Year and Quarter over Quarter.
> Also, their competition is ridiculously strong. Want a luxury EV with a nice interior? There are many options, and most have physical controls and a touch screen. Want a truck? Cybertruck will likely be fifth to market. Van or off road vehicle? You aren’t getting a tesla.
That's your opinion and any vehicle with near insignificant sales can basically be ignored. There's very few other than Tesla.
> Want hands free self driving on the freeway? Wait 18 months for a GMC. (Cruise is getting 10,000x more miles per disengagement than Tesla).
Note: Not actually hands free given the extreme limitation in areas where it's allowed and it's disengagement without warning.
> Inexpensive long range vehicle? Chevy Bolt.
Chevy Bolt owners on EV subreddits constantly complain about slow charging speeds and it's incompatibility with real fast charging. This makes it not a long range vehicle.
> Ecobox? Leaf, used volt, or similar.
Leaf isn't an "ecobox". Volt isn't an EV unless you get the comparatively popular EV version. Not to mention the low production numbers of Volt.
These adapters do not come with new Teslas.
> In pursuit of our mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, today we are opening our EV connector design to the world.
Which would you rather have, 150kW max per port, 300kW max total and 6 DCFCs or the same power limit and only 2 DCFCs?
Recently took a few long-ish trips in the EU, non-Tesla chargers are utter garbage. None of them just accept a credit/debit (EC) card, there are 20 different networks and you need to create an account with each of them, assuming of course their signup system isn't down today, or just the entire network. Having to randomly re-log because they kick you out of the app when they encounter any unexpected server reply or timeout, etc.
And this is just the app+payment garbage. The charger themselves.... 30% of them don't work, 10% don't exist at all, 10% are inaccessible (inside a private garage, inside private premises, etc), the rest are understandably crowded and you end up waiting a lot. The Aldi and Lidl (supermarket chains) chargers are actually the least bad, and once they stopped being free the crazy overcrowding also stopped. I just avoid all others at this point.
So, do Tesla chargers in Europe have a card reader on them? Or do they also not "just accept a credit/debit (EC) card"? Could someone just go to a Tesla charger without having any kind of Tesla account and start charging?
Sounds like Tesla is a lot like those other charging networks, huh.
It's definitely not like that everywhere in Europe, but there are countries that seem to be getting it right.
and yet this law is going to incentivize you to actually open up your chargers so that I can charge my Hyundai there. Works for me
— Siri's response when I asked her "Tell me a joke" last night.
It’s no surprise that he is resistant.
It needs to happen, though. Like you I’m glad and incentives are being provided.
For many years now Tesla offered other car makers to use Tesla's superchargers as long as they chip in some of the cost of building it.
It was a fair offer that no car maker took.
The Fed offers a fair deal: free money under the condition of chargers being open to all.
Tesla was always willing to open supercharging to others under fair terms so it's incorrect to label Musk as "resistant" to this. If he was "resistant", Tesla wouldn't take the deal.
Because the patent pledge was a bit of a joke. It amounted to "You can use Tesla's patents, as long as you agree not to assert any patent or other IP against any company for making EVs or related equipment."
So you don't just have to let Tesla use your patents in exchange for you using theirs, you have to give them away to every competitor, whether or not those competitors are sharing their own patents. It's not surprising that no one has taken them up on this.
What the government is doing is anti-competitive, not Tesla.
The CCS standardization has been ongoing for over a decade. Even so: if Tesla had fully opened NACS even as late as five years ago there's some chance it could have become the dominant standard in North America. Tesla waiting until late 2022 to submit NACS as a standard isn't consistent with being "wrecked by competitors": it's more like a harmful troll. Now NACS is either going to be another dead legacy standard or (worse) North America will end up with two incompatible zombie standards for a long time, and many people (including Tesla owners like myself) will have to use annoying and unsafe adapters.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/opening-north-american-charging-s...
While they published some schematics on their website for the connector, there's still patents and other proprietary bits to actually communicate and get the charging infrastructure to work. Without that associated IP, the schematics are effectively useless.
This isn't a huge deal for a company like Aptera, they're probably going to use a good bit of Tesla's IP in other situations for their EV and don't have large teams constantly cranking out IP. But companies like Ford, VW, Stallantis, etc., they've got like a combined billion dollars worth of IP they'd be turning over to all their competitors. A big win for Tesla and smaller companies like Aptera, but not necessarily a big win for the legacy companies to essentially write down all that IP value.
If they had just asked for normal kind of licensing, I imagine there probably could have been more support for the connector years ago. But they put it behind the patent pledge to try and eliminate intellectual property rights in the automotive industry assuming it would be a juicy enough carrot for everyone to chase. Turns out, it wasn't.
I get why car makers don't want to do charging - it takes capital, it takes away focus and historically it's not what they do.
But customers do not car what's easy of convenient for the business.
Tesla saw the chicken and egg problem and solved. It was risky (especially for a company that, at the time, was loosing money) and costly but they saw the obvious truth: without wide spread, convenient network of chargers people will not buy EV cars.
They also publicly declared that if any other car makers wants access, all they have to do is to chip in some of the cost.
That was more than fair and consistent with their goal of accelerating transition to sustainable energy. They were not hoarding the superchargers, just looking for a fair deal.
No car maker took them up on the offer, despite that being the right thing to do for their customers and to grow EV market overall.
I don't see why competitors should now benefit from the hard work and billions of dollars that Tesla invested into their supercharger network.
The feds are giving companies free money so it's fair that they require open access and it's the deal Tesla always thought would be fair, which is why they took it.
No, Tesla continues their patent licensing deal. If you agree to never sue Tesla or any other company which uses Tesla's IP for infringing on your IP, they'll agree to never sue you for using their IP.
So say GM wants to use the Tesla connector on the Bolt. They have to agree to let Tesla use all of their IP. But not only that, they have to also agree to not sue any other company that also uses Tesla's IP if they infringe on GM's IP.
So say Ford also uses the Tesla connector, and then copies many of GM's designs. GM cannot enforce any of their IP against Ford without being in violation of Tesla's licensing deal, which opens them up to getting sued by Tesla for having the Tesla connector.
This isn't just the car makers though, this is anyone wanting to use Tesla's IP. So say Delta (a manufacturer of EV charging equipment) wants to offer Tesla connectors on their DC fast chargers. They have to follow the same thing, and allow Tesla to then copy any of their IP. But not just Tesla, they have to let Sema also copy any of their IP if Sema also starts to use Tesla connectors.
Tesla's licensing deal was a Trojan horse trying to nullify intellectual property rights in the automotive industry, and pretty much none of the bigger players wanted to give up all their IP.
Both can simultaneously be true. The carmakers have sat on their hands, and Tesla is arguably anti-competitive with it's charging network.
He is free to repay all the government subsidies and funding he has received if they are unwanted.
Our stops were in the 15 minute range, often as the last person returned after a snack or bathroom break we had enough to drive enough 50-75% of range (180 to 270 miles). Not bad for driving since the stops were every 3 to 4.5 hours.
Charging often is most time efficient to charge fairly often since charging is much faster when the battery is in the bottom 50% than the top 50%.
Keep in mind charging is much nicer than filling. No pulling out a credit card, no typing in your zip code, no skipping the car wash, no selecting a fuel type, no "delays" while watching a loud ad, no trying to find the mute button, no getting sprayed with stinky gas tinged air (not all states reclaim the vapor), no hitting a mute button again because it timed out, etc.
Just grab charger, hit button to open the charge port, and plug in.
What?! That's just so primitive it's hard to understand.
I have noticed that driving an EV makes you much more aware of the smell of gas cars. Even in traffic I notice smelly cars much more often.
Most assume it will basically be accomplished by exclusively building out new locations with the new "magic dock" CCS adapter.
Even this is fine with me given that Tesla not only has far more stations than CCS competition in US, but they are also building out new stations more rapidly too.. so the lead only grows. Also note that every Tesla location is 8+ stalls, often up to 16 stalls, and I'd say the average location is now 12 stalls.. and they all work 99.9% of the time. EA/evGo/etc CCS networks tend to install pathetic 4 stall stations that have perpetually 1 or more stalls out of service.
3500 chargers / 12 charger average location = under 300 locations, vs total existing ~1700 current locations.
For those complaining about Tesla gaming this or something, I'd point more of a finger at the CCS networks who are installing the minimally compliant (4 stall) locations at an alarmingly slow rate. They are leaving money on the table, and giving customers a bad experience. Happy to see Tesla come in and give them a run for the money.
Given you've said "stations" separately from "stalls", this is not true.
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html#/fi...
6,134 results for DC Fast CCS chargers, 1,841 results for DC Fast Tesla.
There are more Tesla stalls, but there are fewer locations.
Checking the ones on the map near me, and it includes a bunch of CCS stations I've never seen actually working, stuff in government parking lots not available to public, and lots and lots of dealer special chargers which are of limited access..
If you were able to filter on "150kW+ L3 charging" the 6k number would probably drop to 2-3k maybe best case. Which would result in something like 2.5k stations x 4 stalls => 10k CCS stalls, vs 1.8k Tesla stations x 12 stalls = 22k stalls.
I'm definitely not arguing CCS has more stalls, as I do agree most CCS deployments are like 2-4 stalls while the average Tesla one is like 8 and its somewhat common to find stations with 10+.
In the end, you said there are more "stations", and made a clear delineation of "stations" vs "stalls". This is incorrect, there are more CCS stations than Tesla. There are probably way more Tesla stalls, I'm pretty sure.
Or you can use a site with more advanced filters like https://www.plugshare.com
Total 25 CCS stalls with 120kW+ charging vs 118 Tesla stalls on the same route
From experience I also know the Tesla stalls will be 99.9% up whereas the CCS ones will be 75-90% on any given date.
"25 stalls in 85mi" might to a non-EV owner sound like fine, quite a lot, but think about that as like.. only having 3 gas stations within a 2 hour drive, in the most congested, population dense area of the US.
Not great.
However, there's probably more than 4x the number of Teslas versus CCS cars on the road today in the US. What's the ratio of Tesla cars/Tesla stalls vs CCS cars/CCS stalls on that route currently? If there's 118 Tesla stalls that are constantly in use versus 25 which are rarely used, which is going to be easier to find a place to charge right away?
So counting the stalls seems to be a bit of a misnomer to me at this point. Maybe if CCS cars was a similar number on the roads, but in the end as a CCS user I care more about there being more locations and uptime than having more stalls that sit empty all the time.
The ratio of cars:chargers is probably pretty good, or maybe even better for CCS, in a perverse way because Tesla has such a sales lead.
Unfortunately CCS networks in the Northeast tend to install themselves well off the highway in back corners of giant shopping center or mall parking lots.
Route I used to take on my Tesla without leaving the highway, or only needing to leave the highway for 1 mile, instead require large detours for CCS.
NJTP for example has been a mess for CCS by compare, though it should be better, eventually, with the EvGo partnership. I95/Rt15 through CT is similarly very bad.
In the end though I do expect for CCS to just become pretty ubiquitous. You won't need many big 10+ stall stations, because there will be so many smaller 2-4 stall stations all over the place.There aren't yet the customers to support that amount of infrastructure today though, but as more EVs come to market and Teslas at least having CCS adapters it'll become more of a thing.
http://fastcharger.info/charts
~1,200 of those listed were 150kW+. Another 300 or so are 100kW+. So 1,500 of those being in the same ballpark as average Tesla charging speeds.
The supercharge.info states there are ~1,900 open Tesla locations in North America.
https://supercharge.info/charts
Of that, some percentage of those are 120kW and 72kW. They're not all 250kW chargers. I can't sort by kW on that site's data and I'm not interested enough to skim/export it to find the exact number, but just eyeballing several pages makes me thing probably 5-10% of those as <250kW. Its not like all superchargers on the road are 250kW chargers.
So by your own data sets you've shared, for "open" chargers, there are more CCS locations than Tesla.
Early Model S were not CCS if I recall correctly.
Congratulations; you’ve just broken the system (even though it was well-meaning).
Like is your position really that nobody that invests in infrastructure should be allowed to profit from its investment?
Ultimately, Tesla is asking for even more federal funding in this space... and I can assume they will hopefully try to get even more of that money
But your argument seems to be that Tesla shouldn't get anything or shouldn't even allowed to have private infrastructure.
> Ultimately, Tesla is asking for even more federal funding in this space
I think Tesla would prefer to be any federal funding in this space.
To me that sounds like a nightmare, but I guess to each their own.
You don't need to make 30 examples, your point is not hard to understand.
And you are arguing with a straw-men, I never argued that this is the best world.
Nor do I think an 'unregulated' market would lead to what you suggest, as we already see in the electric charging station market. Almost all non-Tesla stations are shared. And Tesla long term would likely do so eventually to, even without govenrment intensive.
> Every time an auto manufacturing company got merged or went defunct, we'd just close down all those old legacy gas stations
At this point you are just making idiotic argument. Like seriously? Have you ever heard of liquidation and reallocation of resources.
If a major network of industry exists that comes up for sale, like the other would bid on it and a modify it for their standard.
Do you think Tesla keeping their network proprietary for long ultimately increased or decreased overall EV sales in the past few years? Do you think more or fewer Bolts and Leafs would have been sold if they would have been able to use a true open standard of Tesla chargers?
Imagine how many consumers worries would be alleviated if Tesla allowed all cars to charge on their network today. Wouldn't that be great? Which is more harmful to consumers: a proprietary network or an open one?
Imagine if Ford bought out all the prime gas station locations along highway corridors and made them Ford only gas stations. A true win for consumers.
Maybe we shouldn't allow single corporations to control important infrastructure with proprietary standards?
Now the government is investing its own money and this simply rewards companies like Toyota who have done nothing and will profit the most. Specially because its of foreign company, that makes it even worse.
So by all means, create infrastructure for everybody, but take into account how the market got to the point it is.
And in fact, the reality is bundling is not inherently illegal. If it was illegal 99% of all companies above 50 people would do something illegal.
1. Came up, no directions on what app I should use to pay for charging, a couple feet away found that I should download PlugShare. Downloaded PlugShare, setup my info, allows for Apple Pay, nice. Says it needs to do a $30 pre-auth in order to get started. Fine.
2. Plugged my car in, I barely get 30A from the plug, whatever. Leave it plugged in for 4 hours. Come back, unplug. No way to stop the charging or my session in the app. I just leave it there thinking perhaps it'll reset session. A couple minutes later, someone else starts using my session...
3. 9 hours later, I get a notification that charging has finally stopped and I was charged for the amount. :(
As long as coal is powering the electricity in the cars, what exactly is helping the environment?
On top of that, because of the efficiency of my car and the plants running, I get the equivalent energy usage of about 100MPG for an ICE.
The break even emissions on my car including manufacturing given this kind of mix is within a few years. If I drive the car for 5+ years (most likely), it'll be way lower emissions than my ICE driving for 5+ years. Meanwhile in the next 5+ years, chances are the mix of renewables will increase. Maybe even nuclear. Chances are the coal plants will close soon though.
1) I am jealous you live somewhere where nuclear is an option. In most states in the US, nuclear power is decreasing.
2) Natural gas isn't any better than coal.
3) Coal won't go away as long as conservatives are in power in the house - they love coal.
4) I think ICE vs Electric greatly depends on how much you use your car. I drive maybe once or twice a week, only city - I am going to be constantly having to charge my car since the battery will go dead if you leave it unplugged in cold weather (Michigan). A tank of gas lasts me for like 3 months. There is no way EV would be better for the environment.
Doesn't matter what politicians think. As long as they don't start giving coal away or pure subsidies for it, if coal keeps being more expensive than natural gas, its share will keep going down. The force of the market decides.
And, yes, natural gas while it has its issues is still better than coal. Even with the leakages, which theoretically could be fixed. Coal causes a bigger nuclear issue than nuclear power plants. There's so many ways in which natural gas is better than coal, but I do agree natural gas still has climate change impacts and is ultimately non-renewable and not sustainable for much longer timescales.
As for your car, you may not drive it many miles. But you're going to sell it eventually I'd imagine. And then that person is going to probably drive an average usage on it. So that car is probably still going to end up hitting its break even point unless you only end up driving it 10,000mi and then crush it after you're done with it.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2021.07.28/main.svg
The electric car you buy today will steadily get greener over it's lifetime. The gas car will not.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/natural-gas-...
Even in San Francisco, which has pretty clean air (being right by the bay), it was really remarkable during the early, lock-down part of the pandemic how much nicer the air was without the car emissions. Especially noticable when biking.
As for the recent ice storm, my EV had no problems charging here in Texas.
And what if you were one of the unfortunate people who lost power for 5 days and had an EV? If it wasn't charged enough to go to a charging station that might have power...what do you do?
I am honestly curious: how in the world did gas pumps freeze? Are gas pumps actually built differently in the north?
Pumps need power to, you know, pump. They don't just magically dispense gas and handle payments. Most gas stations around me could not operate and were closed as they did not have electricity to operate.
> And what if you were one of the unfortunate people who lost power for 5 days and had an EV? If it wasn't charged enough to go to a charging station that might have power...what do you do?
Lots of people didn't have gas in their cars, or they ran out, and, well, the gas pumps didn't have power, so they couldn't pump the gas, so their cars were dead. If they didn't have enough gas to drive far enough to a station that did have power, wouldn't they be in the same situation as that EV owner?
In the end my experience in that winter storm would have been the same if I had a gas car or an electric. I'd only have the range I had when the lights went out. I don't store a lot of gas at home, not any amount that would make an appreciable difference in range.
Pointing to things like that winter storm as some example of day to day life is extreme. It was a pretty big outlier, one that I agree Texas (and the rest of the US, see NY 2022) needs to be ready to happen more often. But acting like that's just normal day to day life is a bit absurd. What if the city gets flooded every day from massive hurricanes like with Katrina? EVs sure wouldn't be great then! What of the town has massive tornadoes ripping through like Joplin? EVs sure wouldn't be helpful in that environment!
If over the next 5 years every single family home in Texas swapped an ICE for an EV, the "grid" would probably absorb it without much issue. There's already so much spare capacity prices go negative most evenings.
Sadly only Tesla knows the totals, but I'd be surprised if supercharging is (on average) 1/20th of the home charging.
Around 1/3rd of the Tesla owners I know have solar panels, although many of those are in California and they changed the rates to be 1/4th or less of what they were, so they no longer contribute to the grid, but instead time shift with batteries.
The power production folks are lobbying for lower rates, which lowers the amount of solar that enters the grid, which increases demand for electricity, which makes more profit for the power companies. Sad.
But most networks still require use of an app, which is so annoying.
They have a short note in the article, but I agree a better callout that this is about U.S. chargers would enhance clarity.
I can't wait till the open up, because right now when we go to our local target, there are four non-tesla chargers, always full (sometimes with Teslas!) and 20-30 Tesla chargers that are mostly empty.
That said, I'm an outlier - plenty of others have had many issues and it needs fixing. Tesla opening Superchargers is a good step, but EA and other networks need some serious pressure to improve, now.
This is already happening in the UK and Europe. Using the Tesla app, you can see which superchargers are now public.