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I’m personally pissed at this news, Tesla long ago offered to share their charging port spec with other car manufacturers, and they all told them to pound sand. Nearly a decade later, Congress literally forces Tesla to open up their network because it’s so superior to the competition.

If a Ford F150e takes up two hours charging in a stall that’s designed to charge a Tesla in 15 minutes, there’s gonna be huge delays in certain areas.

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Tesla also actually bothered to put out an actual standard in NACS with spec sheets, 1000V compatibility, and using CCS communication and billing protocols.

The previous "offer" was a patent sharing agreement that I really doubt any major automaker would accept and find themselves beholden to Tesla for their charging connector in perpetuity.

Nobody has forced Tesla to do anything. They don't have to open up anything if they don't want to bid for the public funds for building EV chargers along interstates.

I always felt like other makes could negotiate a better deal than that if they found it valuable to do so. It turns out that apparently they can.

It probably helps that Tesla is a mature company now, and such an agreement would likely involve patent sharing on both sides.

My understanding is the NACS spec Tesla released last year replaces the old patent sharing agreement for using Tesla’s connector.

So they didn’t get any bites until they actually bothered to make it an interoperable standard that didn’t require patent sharing.

That could be true, tbh. The fact that this agreement only mentioned Ford made me wonder if there's a period of exclusivity for the supercharger aspect of it.

Its also possible that Tesla is just opening NACS->CCS via adapter to everyone. Given the mentioned stall counts, it'd at least be limited to V3 stations, though.

It sounds like part of the deal with Ford is also plug-and-charge compatibility where the charging is billed to your Ford account automatically.

The current superchargers with the "magic dock" captive CCS adapter require using the Tesla app to initiate charging and handle billing.

I didn't hear that, but that would be useful. Plug and charge makes a big difference.

Other car manufacturers told tesla to pound sand because the conditions of using any of the “open” tesla patents meant you had to forfeit any patent claims against tesla. Which isn’t really sharing your patents, it’s just a negotiation/PR stunt.

It's suicide to have a one-direction patent sharing agreement. The whole idea of patents these days is defensive patents to avoid mutual destruction. That's why patent trolls (companies that buy and hold patents, but don't actual make anything) are so bad for the industry.

A middle ground where "charging related patents" and included, but suspension or whatever still isn't covered by the agreement.

Honestly the agreement that Tesla offered looked a lot like the patent pledges we see in software. Don't sue us, we won't sue you.

But it wasn't palatable, because Tesla didn't look like a meaningful threat to sue anyone back then. :)

It is also written such that if you, your affiliates, or related companies:

* sue anyone over anything EV patent related, or have a stake in someone who does,

* if you ever challenged, or had stake in a challenge to any patent Tesla currently holds, or buys in the future,

* or if you marketed or sold anything that imitates the design or appearance of a Tesla product, or provided any material assistance to someone else who did.

then you are forever excluded from the pledge.

Tesla summaries this as:

What this pledge means is that as long as someone uses our patents for electric vehicles and doesn’t do bad things, such as knocking off our products or using our patents and then suing us for intellectual property infringement, they should have no fear of Tesla asserting its patents against them.

but the actual legal definition goes way above "such as knocking off our products or using our patents and then suing us for intellectual property infringement".

It also has no time bounding, so that patent spat from the 1900s that Ford had probably counts.

Yes, I remember the wording being overly vague. But at the time Tesla was pushing it, they were pretty desperate for $$. I bet if someone had really helped build the supercharger network, they'd have been amenable to changes.

Looking at the way things played out, its obvious that they wouldn't faced competitive pressure due to this.

For the same reasons, the existing industry didn't bother. It was a long time before Ford took EVs seriously.

Congress didn’t compel this. They passed tax incentives to make it desirable.

That's literally what compel means (as opposed to require or mandate).

To the one person who decided to down vote what I just said, consider the meaning of “compelling”.

I have a non-Tesla EV and the Ford and Rivian trucks that have now hit the market have ruined public charging. As you say, they hog the space for literally hours when everyone else needs 20mins. I finally gave in and purchased a home charger despite still having a special deal on free public charging.

In an efficient world, charging costs would have significant time factor to account for opportunity costs. The supercharger network already charges an idle fee if the charger is busy and you don't leave your space when fully charged. The same idea could apply for charging slowly.

You might also end up waiting for a Cybertruck to charge.

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