Tesla retreat from EV charging leaves growth of U.S. network in doubt
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Basic US standards:
- At least four charging stations per location.
- At least 150KW per charger.
- 97% uptime.
- May not require a membership. Must accept credit cards. May not charge more without a membership. Must display price per KwH before charging. Phone-based and car-based payment interfaces allowed but must not be required of the customer.
- States getting funding must have a charging station every 50 miles along Interstate highways.
- Must support CCS connector. Other connectors optional.
This is not fully compatible with Tesla's business model, which may be a problem for Tesla.
[1] https://tritiumcharging.com/what-is-nevi-and-how-will-it-hel...
Cries in European. It'd solve some of my absolute pet peeves with charging: no membership, no over charging without membership AND display price BEFORE charging.
The "bill shock" experience is real here. It happens I pay 2x the average price at random locations without any possibility to see that before I'm finished.
- ALMOST all highways with a fast charger every $reasonable_amount_of_km
- very few accept direct payments BUT with terrible UIs (like you know how much you paid but not how much energy you have charged (yes, really, many visualize the amount paid after energy counters get zeroed/disappeared from the display)
- many do demand crapplications that are a pain to use, buggy as hell, sometimes in places where the phone get no network, and of course no local AP to use the sole charging app locally, many allow charging, then the sole way to stop is stop from the car side and so on
In Italy is even worse, first because of the prices, then because of the scarcity of charging points, thirdly because many apps are not meant to be "international", i.e. I'm Italian, but I live in France, so I have french residence and payments cards etc, well, I keep getting errors, because if I'm Italian then I must offer an Italian bank card, an Italian ID and address and so on, otherwise I need to be French...
At least in terms of uptime they tend to works well in both countries all the time. But do not try to go southern or eastern in the EU, there you get almost no chargers at all. Also DO count outside highways all roaming tariffs, take a look at https://chargemap.com/map to understand. With certain roaming combination you might end up paying 10kWh like 20€ instead of 2€.
This is the proof we need PUBLIC infra, not private one. The public have the money and the interest to be everywhere (not only where they earn more) and be standard, open to anyone offering a good service. The private sector is good to pick innovation and find ways to spread it, but to really spread it it's the public that must step in.
Although the 50 miles part seems unnecessarily close.
I've never read a set of rules which sounded as level headed as these, especially when talking about something helping with climate change.
Elon actually has the numbers. And the profit to expenditure did not add up. The team wasn’t adapting in a useful manor, hence this is the outcome.
This is as plausible as all the other opinions out there. In short we don’t know the half of it. What we do know is that ev sales have taken a dive. A network that grows faster then ev adoption might not be that useful, considering the bigger the network the bigger the upkeep.
Also, Tesla only build that network because no one else was. (Check some past articles, this was clearly said). Evs have now been adopted to a point that other companies are getting into the game. Especially : gas stations.
Last: home charging for daily commute will be more important. Most people will only go to a Super Charger on trips. Like 5% of the usage of the vehicle?
There is more to this then flashy headlines.
Elon is a good business man, who denies that, hasn’t grasped what he was able to achieve so far.
Is he behaving like a 140 character idiot? Absolutely, but this is not new. His long form talks on the other hand often are very reasonable.
who knows... perhaps he should be held accountable to the other 80% of investors and be forced to explain his moves?, it's no longer his company and yet he still behaves like it.
Also a PR firm to avoid all these controversies would help a lot. He's a few really bad tweets from getting boycotted, or a few bad decisions from tanking tesla.
Supercharger network is definitely a reason why I went for a Tesla and i'm definitely left wondering what's going on and how this will affect long trips.
Edit: as noted by others, no real effect in europe due to availability of other options and drive to have chargers almost everywhere, so perhaps it is a good decision to focus on cars: https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/article/f...
They have opened up superchargers for other cars, so they would get subsidies if they wanted.
It seems like they do not want to compete in charging network market.
It would also not provide any benefit for them if everyone can use them and there are others building them.
They were useful to kick start EV adoption.
Shame though since it could have been spun up as a separate company and sold off.
"A record 1.2 million U.S. vehicle buyers chose to go electric last year, according to estimates from Kelley Blue Book, a Cox Automotive company. More specifically, 1,189,051 new electric vehicles (EVs) were put into service as the slow shift to an electrified future continued unabated. In 2023, the EV share of the total U.S. vehicle market was 7.6%, according to Kelley Blue Book estimates. That is up from 5.9% in 2022.
EV sales in the fourth quarter set a record for both volume and share: 317,168 and 8.1%, respectively. And while records were set, the oft-reported slowdown is real. Q4 EV sales increased year over year by 40% – a strong result by any measure, except when compared to the growth the industry saw in previous quarters. The market posted a 49% gain in Q3, and EV sales were up 52% year over year in Q4 2022. By volume, EV sales in Q4 were higher than in Q3 by roughly 5,000 units. The EV market in the U.S. is still growing, but not growing as fast."
https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q4-2023-ev-sales/
Sure, if you want to limit your customer base to people who own their own standalone homes and don't live in apartments or condos where they have to park on the street or in a shared lot/garage...
Then again, limiting the potential customer base is Elon's entire strategy for Tesla these days.
Long story short, I think EVs with current battery tech is practically limited to those who can charge where they live (be it apartment parking garage or at their house)
They wont be able to charge their EVs with current offerings.
And I dont think that putting a charging station every 5m on the city sidewalks will ever happen or will be feasible.
If you commute 150 miles a week to work, and do another 50 miles on the weekend, you're at 200 miles a week. You can do 230 miles at 80% in a model 3 which means one charge a week covers you pretty well for most weeks. That's 15-20 minutes of charge time at a level 3 charger. I mean, you could do that while eating a Big Mac and fries, assuming an available charger.
If you really do live right in the city where you work and park on the street, your commute is probably more like 50-75 miles a week so you only really need to charge once every few weeks, or you can charge more frequently and much more briefly.
The time when this is difficult isn't city streets, it's distant apartment buildings in suburbia commuting into the city. The people with 400 or 500 miles a week of commute and no home charging. For them, it's 30-40 minutes of charging across two stops compared to 8-10 minutes at the gas station. In that world, one might have to plan a mid-week dinner out or twice a week shopping or something like that to get a "free" charge or two where waiting around isn't an issue.
He’s the no. 1 reason I’m thinking about Model 3, even though I park on the street.
EV sales are in fact growing in all major regions in the world:
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/quarterly-ele...
However, what we do know is the transition being existential for some actors - and even countries. If Russian propaganda about Ukraine is bad, EVs are much worse, since they are actually an existential threat.
And this assumption is driven by news articles and earning calls.
This is just (just) my opinion, to have a not so gloom and doom look on the matter.
Fact, for me at least, is, that we don’t have all the data. So I assume that there might be more to it, cost wise.
There is a catch-22 in that without a charging network as saturated as the gas station network, there won't be EV adoption.
Europe's aiming for a baseline of 400 kW chargers on the TEN-T routes by 2026 and 600 kW by 2028:
https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/article/f...
400 kW chargers are already being deployed.
The only reason public EV charging stations exist is because of government subsidy.
Tesla -- despite selling more EVs last year than every US automaker combined -- got only 17% of the NVEI grants.
Tesla isn't going to build public infrastructure on its own dime. It will build cars, and let the other eager players built the infra instead.
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But somehow forecasted slowdown of a player with than less than one-fifth of the grant money is causing existential doubt?
Anyone concerned that Ford is going to build fewer gas stations?
Shell is now into charging stations. They figure that if it has a big hose that fuels a car, that's their business. If Tesla doesn't want to be in the charger business, they could sell the business to Shell.
That's IF people are using the charger. If they aren't, then the fees for reserved power will eat you alive.
Anyway, if they want to stop building, that's fine, but there's better ways to do it. This kind of mess really isn't that unexpected from Tesla, but it reinforces that changes will come with no warning, which isn't what I'm looking for in a company that makes a product that should last 20-30 years (and potentially much longer)
how much warning should they have given?
The right way to do this, even if there's no notice, is to realise a big change is going to make a lot of noise and communicate what the plan is, and have a transition plan. "We believe the charging industry has become self-sufficient [put some buzzwords here], so we're pausing new deployments; sites that have broken ground will continue construction. If you have questions about your site, please contact your rep/some vp?. Maintenance will continue at our current standard of X% availability, with N day repairs for most issues. Our chargers will/will not be available for others to install." Add some congratulatory BS about how you developed the charging industry and now it's ready to be set free. If you really want to fire everyone in the team, I guess that's fine, but don't do it right away. Have them wind down the sites not started over a week or two, and consolidate down the project planning to a smaller number of people. If people would quit instead, offer retention tied to milestones.
I have a friend running an EV charging company (not in the US). He makes plenty of money.
But his company also provides lots of value adds during charging, including onsite dining.
Although I imagine America's asinine rules, zoning laws, and permitting processes, may be preventing truly innovative players from entering the market.
(Given that most US cities cannot even provide quick breakfast dining options aside from bagels, muffins, or fast food, this shouldn't be a surprise...)
China has so many breakfast options (street vendors selling various fried dishes, and congee stalls, are two of my favorites) to the extent that Chinese who visit America are surprised by how absolute shit the choices are in the US for breakfast.
In Seattle, my choices if I don't want to sit down, are boring breakfast sandwiches or a sugar filled muffin.
Oddly enough I didn't find much in the way of breakfast foods in Tokyo, it seems they don't have a big breakfast street food culture.
Read the wild email Tesla is sending to suppliers amid Supercharger chaos
It's already happening in Europe, and in fact, it's a bit of an issue that the Tesla route planner prioritizes Supercharger stations over other operators.
The next task is absolutely to solve the 1st mile.
Tesla Is Pulling Back from EV Charging, and People Are Freaking Out
the most challenging is the "deployment" / installation of it and turning it more (price) efficient which I guess would be done by different department hence firing
https://twitter.com/itskyleconner/status/1775014705222070331
Alpitronic and Kempower make the best chargers. Alpitronic and Kempower chargers are slowly getting to North America:
It was useful while introducing a new product to the market, but now there's plenty of alternatives, standardization, competition and advancements everywhere.
Maybe makes more sense to divest
In general: the faster the hardware can physically charge the battery, the more important temperature becomes.
A lot of the charger companies seem to think it’s a cheap and easy business. Make a charger, throw it in a parking lot, and get income forever. I think they need to do better, especially with how long some people need to spend at the chargers. Gas stations have attendants. If something is wrong there is someone there to fix basic things or schedule someone to come out to fix more complex things. And they can hang a sign up when something isn’t working. Charging stations need this, as far as I can tell. A lot of them are put in parking lots of existing stores. I think one option would be to partner with the store, so they can have someone on staff who trains on the charger maintenance and takes care of some of those things. Maybe it’s not their full time job, but they get an extra percentage for taking on those extra responsibilities, which is paid for by the charging companies.
There is also the question of future development to make the systems better. Tesla’s charger won the war. One would expect the winner to continue development so it can keep getting better and faster. Range anxiety and the time it takes to charge are still some of the big things in consumers minds that will prevent them from buying an EV. Solving those problems are a marriage between the battery and charging tech. A company in control of both parts of that would have a huge advantage when it comes to being first to market with those improvements.