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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

> I suspect that at least initially, Ford will add the Tesla connector alongside CCS/J1772 in its new generation of EVs. That would allow it to say, “Not only can you charge your EV at any charging site in the U.S., but . . . you can do it without carrying a single adapter."

That's not that impressive of a feature as a selling point, nor is it even accurate. Such a car still couldn't charge at a CHAdeMO charging station. (That's the beauty of standards; you have so many to choose from.)

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I think that the reality is the only major reason you wouldn’t use a Tesla charging station once you have access is because all stalls are occupied.

Pricing and charging speed may in some cases be a reason to choose an EA station but at least currently, it seems rare. I have an adapter for my M3 “just in case” but I have never even considered using it over several years of ownership.

Yeah; the article says that Ford is doing this mostly to force EA and EVgo either be competent or go out of business.

Biden tried to force them to be competent by adding availability requirements to the inflation reduction act, but, from what I've seen, it hasn't worked (yet).

Hopefully adding one decent charging station provider to the market will work a bit better, and force the others out of their current "good competitor" monopoly mode.

Or, maybe you'd use a CCS one because they're closer to you. There's several CCS locations within a few miles of me, all in shopping centers I'm likely to frequent. The nearest Tesla supercharger station is on its own off a highway over 12 miles away. The same is true for visiting family elsewhere, there's a few CCS locations really close and around shopping areas by but the Tesla one is on its own in an otherwise empty lot of the highway many miles away.

You're thinking about EVs like you do ICE. Charging stations are the exception, not the rule. EV owners generally charge at home and therefore don't need DC fast chargers close to home.

My partner has been driving from San Diego to Santa Barbara or LA several times this year for site visits. There might be a Supercharger stop if we forgot to set the car to charge to 100% the night before. Otherwise my partner can make the trip and just plug-in at home.

We drove out to the desert for an overnight camping trip and made it home without having to stop and charge. I realized when we were out there that our campsite had an RV outlet and I could have brought our travel charger and gotten free L2 charging all weekend.

Road trips are the only time we use Superchargers. According the Tesla App it's 4% of the time.

> EV owners generally charge at home and therefore don't need DC fast chargers close to home.

I do when I don't have a private garage to wire up a charger. I do when I'm visiting family who don't have chargers in their homes or good setups for me to plug in a mobile charger. I do when I'm visiting someplace that isn't immediately adjacent to the highway.

I agree, the vast majority of my charging is done at home. But it's not all my charging sessions, and I'm not everybody.

Well akshually... I don't believe there's a single chademo station anywhere without CCS at the same site.

There are 16 CHAdeMO charging points in the US.[1] Most of them on the New York Thruway between Albany and Buffalo. There are two in San Francisco and two in Marin County. That's it.

[1] https://www.chademo.com/#map

While there aren't many, there's definitely more than 16. There's like a dozen still online in DFW alone, looking around on Plugshare. Practically every big Nissan dealership has one, and if there's an older EVgo station nearby it probably still has one Chademo connector.

But, for the most part if there's a Chademo plug there's one or more CCS. A Chademo only dispenser is practically a unicorn these days.

> There are 16 CHAdeMO charging points in the US

You are wrong by a factor of over one hundred.

> That's it.

Yeah, except for the thousands of chademo charge points outside of your microscopic awareness. https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1139-june...

How are you getting 16 from that map? Did your browser fail to load the data?

Sorry. There's a lot of breakage on that map page, including "403 Unauthorised: a valid access key is required to access the geoplugin API over SSL" Firefox is filtering out much hostile code. Yet the CHAdemo map for Europe looks fine. Only the US is sparse.

Plugshare, which is crowd-sourced, shows far more CHAdemo chargers.

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