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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Tesla doesn't break out the details, but I think it's generally understood among investors that they just break even on Supercharger. Their profit comes from their cars, and the Supercharger network was a competitive advantage to get people to buy the cars.

I think they opened up the Supercharger network to ensure that the US didn't establish CCS as the standard and overtake Superchargers, such that Teslas have a competitive dis -advantage, but I don't think they're particularly thrilled to have all these other companies using their chargers.

People seem to think they're raking it in with the Superchargers, but distributing electricity is a low margin business. Same with gas stations where the money mostly comes from the convenience store part of it and such.

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Gas is lower margin than the other things in a convenience store, but they sell enough more gas than anything else that much of the money is there. I haven't checked in 10 years, but at one time I did read the share holders information from a convenience store and for that brand it was about 1/3 gas, 1/3 tobacco, 1/3 everything else. Tobacco is very high margin but very few people buy it. The everything is is a nice high margin, and most people buy, but they don't buy every trip. Gas is what gets people in the doors and often is all people get.

> they just break even on Supercharger

So far, sure, but that can change. When most customers are non Teslas, it makes no sense to keep prices low.

This goes both ways -- historically the other charging networks were J1772 or CCS (with a few CHAdeMO to support Nissan Leafs), but now Electrify America, EVgo, etc. have been retrofitting or newly installing a mix of CCS and NACS cables onto their L3 chargers. This increases the available charger footprint for Teslas as well.

Where I’m located, Supercharger prices are ~4x business electric rates. That’s something like $15 profit per charge. No idea on infrastructure costs or usage though.

Business electric service often has a demand charge in addition to the usage rates; superchargers could easily incur a lot of cost on that element.

Tesla’s entire business revolves around batteries. They have a huge opportunity to install batteries onsite that spread usage over times when high demand charges don’t apply. There’s some loss in that, but still could make sense if demand charges are really high. I’ve been waiting to see Tesla roll something like this out, but presumably it’s not pressing right now.

Tesla chargers are CCS. It's just that in the US they use a different plug, in Europe Tesla chargers uses CCS-2 connectors.

> Tesla chargers are CCS.

This is misleading and not entirely true.

Older Tesla chargers did not use CCS to communicate. My 2019 Model 3 doesn't support CCS at all. When I plug into a Supercharger, it's not using CCS to communicate with the charger, it's using Tesla's proprietary CAN bus protocol. Teslas made before 2021 need an ECU retrofit to support CCS.

Pretty much all the old Teslas in Norway have been retrofitted to allow them to connect to CCS only chargers as far as I can tell. Had mine (2015 S 70D) done years ago when it became clear that future Tesla chargers would be CCS only.

Almost no Teslas were manufactured pre-2019 vs post-2019.

I think between 15 and 20% were build pre-2019. The number of non-CCS is actually on the higher end of this, as component shortages caused quite a few to be built without CCS support in 2020.

Can confirm. My 2020 MX does not have CCS capabilities.

OK, so less than 20%. In five years it’ll probably be closer to <5-10%.

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