Rivian is opening its charging network to other EVs
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
Rivian started before the plan to use superchargers was even envisioned, so today some of those holes that Rivian was filling aren't so important because tesla superchargers are nearby.
Rivian has done a great job keeping their chargers working, have the software be reliable, just running a good service. Many and maybe most DCFC charger networks (DCFC meaning high power CCS chargers not including Tesla superchargers) really have struggled to match the uptime and reliability tesla SC. Tesla's magic ability it: (1) fix them when they break, quickly. (2) don't just build 4 chargers in a spot, it's almost the same cost to build 8 or 10. (3) string them together along main travel routes to make it possible to travel.
The entire rest of the the charging industry basically fails at those 3 things. Most of them can't manage to fix a broken charger, sometimes in months. One major reason is they often don't have standardized hardware so there might not be a spare hardware to fix something there.
EA is a pathetic failure because its a hodgepodge of outsourced components (so very difficult to iterate) running on some shitty outsourced windows based software.
Look at a lot of the reviews of the ID series, like the recent ID.Buzz.
say no more
Some downsides: snow/ice can block the headlights, the windshield wiper and washer fluid sprayer are bad, the range isn't good compared to competitors.
I think my next vehicle, will be at a minimum plug in hybrid, and maybe full BEV, ironically, replacing our dual electric tank hot water heaters allows for us to install a charger.
So unless my eyes are lying, no, I dont think I have been.
Like any good UI, the basic uses are easy to get, but there are other features there to be discovered in each button. It’s really well done.
Telsa and rivian have a vested interest in keeping the chargers working. Their sales depend on the chargers working. Even a little bad press is a multiplier against sales.
They also have significant engineering effort throughout the charging ecosystem, from the batteries, on-board infrastructure, standards, mapping, strategic coverage for sales and more. Lots of engineering support and problems solved quickyly
Meanwhile I kind of suspect 3rd party charging systems are probably like 3rd-party public telephones or atms -- a rent-seeking opportunity from someone who will not shell out for quick detection and fixing of broken chargers.
I noticed this years ago - chaging a non-tesla EV was a crapshoot. evgo was expensive and pretty reliable, but only ever had two fast chargers. blink was always broken - completely undependable ev chargers. chargepoint seemed ok, but only had l2/slower chargers.
There is basically no downside to these folks letting chargers be offline for a while.
I don't know, how often would you stop at a gas station if their pumps weren't reliable? Many 3rd party chargers are selling electricity at a mark-up.
I suppose it would be different if chargers were run by electric utilities or were there to goose the sales of convenience stores.
From wikipedia: (Electrify America) is a subsidiary of Volkswagen Group of America, established in late 2016 by the automaker as part of its efforts to offset emissions in the wake of the Volkswagen emissions scandal. Volkswagen, as part of its settlement following the "Dieselgate" emissions scandal, invested $2 billion in creating Electrify America.
But break two of them? Yeah, there might be an occasional line, but your fee drops to $5k and you still produce the same revenue. TBH, some of these stations likely have better ROI when a stall or two are broken.
High utilization sites are completely different, of course.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/02/28/2023-03...
Sure their margin might be better than a razor-thin gas station margin but for the time being it's a miserable business. Unless there's another incentive, like selling cars.
So yeah. Like the poster said, there is no incentive for 3rd party EV chargers to be dependable.
Likely though this market is going to need some regulation/standardization.
In the end though, the demand is sporadic. Supercharger use is only for a minority of use cases (road trips) for a small segment of EV users. I've had my Polestar2 for 3 months and have yet to use one. It will never carry the same revenue possibilities as gas stations, esp as battery sizes go up.
Not only will batteries get bigger, but chargers will get faster. Most of my stops now are 10-15min so often there's not really a need for any side-questing. Tesla recently added a supercharger-specific leaderboard for their in-car Mario Kart clone, which is super cool. I think we'll see some growth there for that kind of thing, but the market is obviously much lower than gas stations/etc
And the charger had a traditional credit card terminal on it. I didn't need any special app. Plug in, tap my payment, and it was charging.
I was doing a road trip through Ontario and stumbled upon a set of rest stops called onRoutes. These were pretty neat. A food court with a quick convenience store with a gas station and nice restrooms, right off the highway. They had a number of DCFC's which usually seemed in good working order, but this road trip was with an ICE so I can't speak to actual uptime. I did see a lot of cars charging, on my trip, so they seemed good.
More stops need to be like that for the 250kW+ stops on major highways. They were so easy and nice to go though.
For more highway-adjacent sit-down restaurants and areas (think Cracker Barrel kind of stops and those highway exits with lots of sit-down restaurants) I think it makes more sense to have those ~50kW chargers be the norm, maybe a few higher power ones. Have a dozen or so ~50kW chargers that'll have your car to 80-90% in an hour or so, four+ 250kW+ chargers for those quickly getting through, and a bunch of 9.6kW AC chargers for those stopping for a few hours.
As much as I dislike Musk personally, I will probably buy the NACS adapter and just use Tesla stations.
North America is a long way behind Europe in EV charging infrastructure:
https://evboosters.com/ev-charging-news/europe-surpasses-900...
And both are behind China:
https://evboosters.com/ev-charging-news/the-state-of-public-...
Europe and China have charging standards that everyone can build to. There is more investment, more charge point operators, more charger manufacturers, and more chargers simply because companies can deploy chargers that will work with all cars.
Eventually North America will achieve standardization by building to CCS chargers with the J3400 plug but that will be a slow and gradual process. There will be many adapters and retrofits in the meantime.
https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/article/f...
So you won't have to sign up for anything else.
But there are also services like ChargePoint which unify the payment systems for numerous networks (certainly including Eon and Shell).
This only makes sense if supply of chargers outstrips demand; otherwise, they're leaving money on the table by not fixing them.
I wonder what's the financial arrangements between the charging system owners and the owners of the parking lots where they're installed.
Their CEO alienated 50% of their customer base with politics. This is going to be one of the most interesting case studies in brand management and advertising history.
But you are probably correct. I think making the infrastructure act funding contingent on reliability metrics is pretty key.
You know, if the money doesn't get yanked by the administration in a month.
So what is the incentive for operational gas pumps: Oh right, the convenience store (even more important for EVs who have to idle longer) and brand name.
It seems gas stations get 70% of the profits from the conveience stores.
EV charging stations are pretty standalone. They could probably do the mcdonalds thing - become real-estate companies. Leasing surrounding land to convenience stores could be a good model.
The mass market is 1/3 right wing, 1/3 left wing, 1/3 centrist roughly.
The 1/3 right wing are the pickup truck buyers. Like a rock ... Strong as I can be.
The 1/3 left wing is now pretty much a no.
The 1/3 centrist is probably price driven. Tesla is still too expensive for them, and if they want a Tesla, I would say they are buying a used one.
Tesla has two cars: a sedan, a crossover, in small and medium. They don't have real pickups, work trucks, station wagons, sports cars, roadsters, delivery vans, real SUVs, city cars/kei cars, or minivans. The cybertruck is a sideshow, the robotaxi is years away given Tesla's roadmap with mundane manufacturing scaling, to say nothing of the AI advance it requires and the alien nature of it to the larger buying public.
Tesla failed to utilize its name brand in ebikes, motorcycles, scooters, or even other battery/motor devices like hand tools, lawn tools, snowblowers, riding mowers. Obviously no heavy equipment aside from some pilot Semis. No RVs.
The Solar business is meh. The grid business likely will be outcompeted by sodium ion/lfp/other schemes. Home storage is slow uptake, and again they'll probably be outcompeted in price.
Tesla has no more tech advantage. Their EV drivetrain may be a percent or two more efficient, but likely not enough to matter. NMC cylindrical cells are about to be economically noncompetitive with 150 wh/kg sodium ion and 200-225 wh/kg LFP, and denser stuff is on the 3 year roadmap. The battery day 4680 tech is basically undelivered or won't scale.
I just don't see the growth path for this company anymore barring miraculous AI combined with miraculous execution combined with miraculous domestic battery supply. About the only thing I can see floating the company it terms of real sales figures would be the Semi, but it sure looks like a soft launch to me that is still a year away, and something that will need either sulfur chemistries, solid state, or dirt cheap high density LFP/Sodium Ion to be economically viable.
Self driving is in fact the growth plan. You’re not paying attention if you’re calling it miraculous, which is fine, more money for investors.
Scania has already delivered plenty of heavy goods EVs here in Norway. Delivery companies like the Post office, DHL, ASKO are investing heavily in large EVs but most of that is going to either Swedish Scania. Chinese SAIC is also selling well for urban delivery vehicles.
Scania sell electric articulated lorries with gross trailer weight up to 75 tonne. The range at 64 tonne is 375 km. https://www.scania.com/no/no/home/products/trucks/battery-el...
Their problem is that their valuation had the market predicting that they would generate a MAJORITY of all profit in US automotive manufacturing - they were worth more than every other player combined. This was grossly unrealistic. So expect a down round. Whether they survive that drop to... What... 5-10% of their former value? Depends on what sort of explicit and implicit dental they have accrued to scale.
Tesla said they'd have amazing new 4680 batteries but that didn't really succeed, a reason why the ct has lower range than planned is the new higher density batteries didn't arrive.
Tesla has one advantage left, they can make their cars at mass quantities and make a profit. Most of the western auto companies can't do that, unless they charge very high prices.
The disaster in US automotive is that the manufacturers thought they could increase prices, and discovered that, instead, unsold cars are piling up. Tesla's oversupply can be seen from space.[2] Stellantis overdid price increases so much that the CEO was canned.
The US currently has 3 million unsold new cars.[3] One wonders how many will still start.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/teslas-china-sales-fall-a...
[2] https://jalopnik.com/so-many-unsold-teslas-are-piling-up-tha...
The Internet says 50% of US buyers are identified democrats, YMMV for internet stats. That number doesn't seem stupid -- EVs are progressive, environmentalist, anti-establishment.
Tesla's stock is a huge bubble. It's worth the next 10 car companies combined! Yes there's a ton of AI speculation in there, but fundamentally the company's stock is about geometric growth in sales.
The most important customer to a car company is their current ones, since those have a very high chance of being loyal to the brand when they buy again.
Tesla is a company that does almost no advertising. Maybe that's because the press gives them enough hype, but I suspect there is a huge degree of passionate advocacy. I should know, I ... was ... a strong advocate for Tesla. I still am for EVs, but they were one and the same with Tesla for 20 years.
A subtle thing happened with the Tesla owners I know. They went from advocating for their car, to rationalizing it, within the span of six months. I don't think it is a stretch to say that Tesla owners were passionate advocates for their vehicles. All progressive, environmentalist people I know are now hell-nos.
Point is, Tesla is stock bubble. Their sales are already down this year, and I'm picking up the popcorn to see what happens in Q3/Q4. The trade war will probably make Tesla a noncompetitive product in China. So US sales are going to get MORE important, not less.
People are actively selling their Teslas. Sure, it's on the used market, what does that matter? I don't have stats, but how many sales of new Teslas will a robust used market (which also has Hertz dumping cars onto the market) cannibalize? I'd say each used Tesla is half of a new one.
Point is, I don't see Tesla as a stock that can rationalize bad sales. They don't have a brand-spanking new car for a new mass market: the Cybertruck is explicitly a miss from the pickup truck market. The Semi still can't seem to scale production. The robotaxi is, face it, two years away and a fundamental leap in AI from working.
Trump is going to be on television reminding every democrat who helped him vocally, publicly, monetarily, possibly illegally get him in office, and will join an agency that will target progressive government systematically and with high visibility.
All it takes is, what, 1/3 of the 50% democrats of their potential customer base to say "hell no" and that's ... 16% drop in sales. Ever seen a company lose 16% of sales?
Good luck with that stock, folks.
Superchargers are not just a bullet point, having them or not is a dividing line between "it just works" and "life is miserable" for EV owners. And only a small subset of them are open to non-Teslas for who knows how long.
I would put money on the opposite, and on people moving to other brands.
Prices will be higher for non Teslas and will require inconvenient steps and even membership plans to get a slight price break. And there will be fewer features. When the chargers are even ready. A few are, but don’t be fooled to think that means bad times are in the past for non-Tesla EVs.
As to other chargers being built, sure, but scale and ubiquity is what matters. Not having one fast charger at the odd Four Seasons resort. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Do you have a source for that? Tesla is not even in the top 10 largest auto manufacturers, but the larger ones have way more models so I suppose it is possible Model Y is the best selling car (though it certainly isnt in the US).
They produced 1.5 million. Their sales are down, they have no new models releasing, they have competition on all fronts, they likely will lose the Chinese market in the trade war. They need to sell 20 million vehicles to justify their stock.
If Tesla has a kuckass sub 10000$ sodium ion city car (aka the car for 1-3 billion people)... But they have luxury vehicles and that's it.
Fully auto drive is a convergent evolution of infrastructure problem. It is ten years away. Army of Indians won't cut it.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-08-22/tesla-reputat...
For a consumer to buy an EV is one that involves other brand factors: politics/environmentalism was a large component of initial buyers. Tesla's inception was around the time of Michael Moore's who killed the electric car.
The core demographic of the electric vehicle in America is still Urban.
You look and you see one person.
Tesla is building a moat. They are defending their market share, preventing subsidies aiding competitors, keeping China out of the US market. That's not trailblazing, its not innovative.
Tesla needs to jettison their CEO. He's toxic and destructive to the mission of the company, or at least the mission it used to have.
I don't see that the mission of Tesla is any different from when it started. What's the new mission?
Pay phones used to actually make money and get maintained by the phone company! A lot of money. And a lot of regulation. Outside of the hood, they started reducing the maintenance expenses in the mid 90s when receiving calls was pretty much banned.
Chargers are worse than ATMs, they are yet another real estate tax scheme. The actual function of charging is often not a serious consideration.
Also, urban apartment buildings weren’t always wired and while traveling you didn’t always have phones in motels. My grandfather had a bar whose clientele was mostly from a shipyard. When they’d furlough the workers for a retooling or something, he’d close the place and work as musician in a resort town for a few weeks - he’d send a postcard with a pay phone for folks to call at a certain time window.
I would think the incentive is aligned because then your not making money but you still have land rent or property taxes to pay but not generating any revenue to cover it.
Is it just because it’s so much power that there’s weird components in there?
At face value, plugs are in general pretty solid! Like how many times in your life has a plug in your house just stopped working.
But to your actual point: I have a feeling they’re just badly engineered. Tesla ones are so much more reliable than third parties. I’m not sure if that’s because they break less or are fixed faster, and I suspect it’s some of both, but the difference is very large.
But a key issue seems to be that EA went crazy and made their chargers out of lots of different components in a panic to get started, analogous to the PC world where there are huge numbers of different parts configurations, and even if you have only 6 major charger models, your fix it tech probably doesn't have parts of all 6. It seems obvious this was a bad strategy, but they wanted to get their chargers working as fast as possible. Instead they created a permanent bad quality reputation that may never be fixed for EA.
But it's not just EA, other companies seemed to have no plan for fixing their chargers when they break.
Profit is the incentive.
The only charging network I know that is publicly traded is Chargepoint, and they have never turned a profit. In fact, their losses have increased as revenue has gone up. But, they are not a perfect example since their chargers are independently operated with prices set by the operator (with prices anywhere from free to significantly in excess of retail electricity prices).
Maintenance doesn’t seem to be even half the issue for Tesla that it is for the rest but they could also just care more. I suspect it’s both.
DC fast chargers are >$100k to install in the US.
I'm sure careful people tried to make a plan but they all ended up being such a dumpster fire of failures and low quality with no visible plan to fix them it's hard to understand.
You'd think now that Tesla is under 50% of EV sales here (and under 20% globally) that this problem will be solved soon, but I really don't know.
Legitimately you are looking at >90% odds that all stalls will be working at full power.
Idk how they got it together but knock on wood.
Of note, right by the Shasta station was a large Supercharger bank, so the planning for this was probably done before the Rivian deal to use Tesla chargers and the free adapter program Rivian implemented. They may have kept that one anyway, considering the Shasta Area is probably underserved and fits Rivian's target market for their stations ("adventure" areas)
More Supercharging stations are adding "trailer compatible" spots, so this should become less of an issue over time. I would also bet that EV manufacturers will standardize on a port location similar to how gas vehicles have. (Early gas vehicles often put the fill hole in places like the dash or under the seat.)
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Rivian/comments/1f0wt4v/okay_is_the...
Lots of ICE vehicles have their gas inlets in a number of different spots. Some even have them behind the rear license plate! And yet people don't seem to have an issue getting gas in their cars.
IMO having the vast majority of chargers at the head like that was a bad decision. Putting them on the side of the spots makes a ton of sense and really opens up a lot of flexibility.
No need. Just make the cables longer and the problem is solved. Even Tesla has put longer cables on their V4 chargers.
Here's a long cable on some EnBW Alpitronic chargers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK2shbCwDYM
I'm sure future charging stations will have some long cables for vehicles with odd port locations or trailers, but I don't know if every charger at a station will have a long cable. Considering the disadvantages of long cables, it makes a lot of sense for manufacturers to use one location for the charging port. That allows owners to use as many chargers as possible. And it would mean that anyone driving an EV wouldn't have to remember where the port is on their specific vehicle.
Every charger will have longer cables. Longer cables have been deployed on chargers from many manufacturers for years. It's not novel.
Tesla is generally behind the curve with charger development. Kempower and Alpitronic make the best chargers.
Sadly, the graveyard of failed companies is full of ones that made amazing products. Kempower's revenue has been going down over the past year, and they've burned through half of their cash reserves in the past few quarters. They've decreased headcount to reduce costs. I hope they pull out of this dive, as more competition is great for consumers. But it really is the case that fancier chargers are significantly more expensive. So much so that it's hard to make them profitable.
Or Tesla could have placed the dispensers to the sides of even some of the spaces and alleviated the issue.
But Tesla envisioned only the few Tesla models to ever charge at Tesla chargers, so they designed them with tight tolerances.
There's a standards group at SAE working on making US charger payment compatibility work.[1] BP Pulse, General Motors, Ford, ChargePoint, Electrify America, Tesla, Toyota, and Rivian are on board.
It's good to see more higher-powered chargers. When and if solid state batteries with 9 minute charge times ship in volume, they'll need big chargers. QuantumState and ProLogium announced "breakthroughs" again this week. They do that a lot.
Samples of solid state batteries do exist. It's quantity production that's hard. Ehang, the flying car company, demonstrated a 48 minute flight using prototype solid state batteries recently.[2]
As I've said before, I think the future is one for one replacement of gasoline pumps with fast chargers. Once charge times drop below 10 minutes, a charging station doesn't have to look like a parking lot.
[1] https://www.sae.org/news/2024/12/sae-itc-plug-and-charge-fra...
Similarly, Tesla chargers in the New York area were the first to receive Magic Docks because their Energy manufacturing facility is there including the engineering aspects of it.
Silicon Valley has one of the highest density of EV chargers in the world, why would Rivian need to build more?
Their goal appears to be covering areas poorly served to expand the places EV owners can go. This seems much more valuable than adding another plug to an already well served urban area.
High speed chargers can cost >$200k installed.
A gas pump costs about $25k installed.
If the average person spends 4 minutes at a pump, that comes out to:
The time value of a slot at a super charger can be >$5 for each charge.
The time value of a slot at a gas pump is ~$0.07 per fill up.
The economics of a charging business are awful. High CapEx, few cars, not many of them need chargers since they can charge at home.
The economics of a gas station were not terrible.
There's a reason you don't see immigrants from all over the world coming to the US to open charging stations the way you saw them opening gas stations.
And that's the reason you have charging monopolies.
These numbers seem skewed to me. I think you're quoting prices for gas pumps with just the pump, not any storage infrastructure like underground tanks, stores, employees. Then you're quoting the cost high speed chargers without any kind of electrical infrastructure to support them, which would be expensive, but more analogous to including the cost of all the other infrastructure for gas stations as well.
The infrastructure for high speed chargers is a lot of metal, which unlike a store, does not contribute extra money in addition to the pump.
Now you have a reason for someone to sit and spend money, and likely enough as EVs hit critical mass to justify costs. There are things to work out on speed of food vs charging times, potentially a queue and valet setup - but napkin maths it seems viable.
Employees are needed because most places require gas stations to be manned. Unless you're talking Bucee's they're not making much from selling a few drinks, they're just making marginal use of the building.
I have a PHEV, so using a charger out and about is silly, but I've only managed to use one pay charger, and it was a lot harder than a gas pump. Even the free ones are hard to use. With the PHEV, the charged amounts are rather low, so I understand the desire to push stored value accounts, but really there should have been colaboration and portability, and at least chargers should have clear information on how to make them start. Go to some website and here's my name on the website. I've seen some that do, but many that don't.
Gas pumps aren't always easy either. I've had several cars where you have to hold it right or the pump stops, but I've never had much trouble giving them money. Also had fun when VW sent out anti-misfueling inserts for my TDI and I got to learn which diesel pumps had unleaded gasoline sized nozzles and which had leaded gasoline sized nozzles; before the insert, the car would take either, after only the leaded fuel size.
Another UX offenders are QR codes on charging stalls and locking charging cables unless you will find that correct QR code so you can unlock your charging cable. Not that one, that will unlock charging cable in the stall next to you. For FFS why do I need to search for QR codes at a first place...
I can imagine a simple solution - take a cable, connect it to the car and start changing by tapping a contactless credit card reader next to your cable. But I never saw simple solutions, seems like every provider wants to torture its customers with half assed applications.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15118
2. https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/4/24312002/ev-plug-and-char...
The issue is that the ISO standard relies on TLS certificates, but manufacturers and charging networks have not yet agreed upon a standard set of CAs. Tesla wants to update the standard to remove the TLS requirement, which would improve reliability and time to start charging. But signed metering receipts are broken in the existing standard, so that needs to be fixed before the TLS requirement can be removed.
1. See page 3 of https://efiling.energy.ca.gov/GetDocument.aspx?tn=256283
> Limited Security – by only validating SECC TLS cert is from a trusted issuer, one charger’s compromised private key compromises the entire region
And I like the simplification. Instead of relying on validating contracts, the charger provider will simply rely on signed "metering receipts" from the car. Each car has its own private key (presumably in some hardware-hardened storage), and the charging network can just associate the payment details with the public key of the car.
The provider can use the receipts as a proof that the car has indeed used the charging equipment. And the receipts are sent periodically during the charging process, so the charger can terminate the session if there's a discrepancy between the station's and the car's accounting.
Nice and neat.
Edit: and this also can easily work offline. The networks can just sync the list of approved public keys to chargers with the corresponding credit balances. It'll require account setup with each network, but if you have to do it once, it's not _too_ bad.
For example, Ford has this "Blue Oval" network concept, so any charger network that is a part of that would trust that without necessarily needing me to associate my individual car identity.
Honestly though I'm kind of a fan of just having a credit card reader on the dispenser. Its way easier if I want to choose a different payment method for a particular charge, and honestly it is not that much additional work to plug in, tap a credit card or phone, and then it starts charging. Its adding like 10-30 seconds to a 10min+ transaction.
> Its way easier if I want to choose a different payment method for a particular charge, and honestly it is not that much additional work to plug in, tap a credit card or phone, and then it starts charging. Its adding like 10-30 seconds to a 10min+ transaction.
Credit card readers are a PITA, and they need connectivity. More importantly, the ISO 15118 protocol can be used with wireless charging! Imagine just parking at a designated spot, clicking "confirm" on the car dash, and walking away. The car can even align itself with the charging coils.
EVV transactions can be done offline. It depends on the issuer if it's allowed.
I've seen people in BMW's and VW's pull up to an EA charger, try getting it to charge a few times, and have it fail every time. Then I see a Hyundai or a Ford pull up, and it works without issue.
We will come to think of stopping to fill up your car routinely as quaint as lamp lighters.
A pump is only 25k to install if you don’t include the infrastructure to support the pump (tank, canopy, fire suppression, filters, etc).all that costs more than 200k.
Let’s say 25k is the marginal cost for an extra pump. What is the marginal cost for an extra dispenser?
And yes, it’s 200k per dispenser including the infrastructure. It doesn’t scale as well as you think it does. I think Tesla has been quoted as around 50k per dispenser including infra though, so some of it is just poor efficiency in costs by other mfgs.
I see a report that has Tesla’s cost as 43k per installed dispenser. That is a fully load cost, not the marginal cost of dispenser but it is good enough.
Looking at listings for gas stations for sale (with a convenience store but no auto repair), I see about 150-300k per dispenser. That isn’t exactly apples to apples but suffice to say it isn’t exactly cheap and much closer to representing the cost than the cost of a pump (which is I assume cheaper than a dispenser).
If you look at a modern Electrify America unit, the dispenser is an extremely slim panel with a screen. It clearly isn't big enough to contain these power electronics.
Now transformer isn't a great name because it implies an AC-to-AC device which this is not. So I can see where the confusion comes from.
What is commonly talked about here are DC fast chargers, where the actual "charger" is an AC to DC cabinet on-site. Those chargers could be connected to one or many dispensers. The dispensers are the things with the cables that plug into the car, handle payment negotiation, and relay battery state to the charger in the cabinet. You could have multiple dispensers to chargers in this setup.
The technical English parlance here would be EVSE for the Level 2 chargers (the smart relay things), and dispensers for the pedestals with the cables for DC fast chargers (DCFCs).
DCFC electrics are absolutely insane.
I think charging stations have an asset that you have neglected to consider: a captive audience.
Yeah, there will always be people who plug in their car and then scroll for half an hour. But there are also people who would be interested in grabbing a bite to eat, walking around, spending money on something dumb, etc. Having a charging station be a place that you can spend money on human amenities in addition to charging improves the economics.
But instead our charging stations are like, three plugs in the back of a hotel parking lot.
It's almost as if there's an economic reason for that.
If Tesla bills customers 20 cents per kWh above market electricity rates, they'll make back the cost of the plug after 205,000kWh. A typical EV has a 70-100kWh battery, so that's 2,000-3,000 full charges. If it takes an hour to fully charge a car, then each plug will be profitable after 2-4 months assuming a 100% duty cycle. Actual duty cycles are much lower. If we assume the charger is active 15% of the time, then it will be profitable after 18-30 months. Again, these are all rather pessimistic estimates. Actual markups and duty cycles are higher, and actual charging times are shorter. If we assume a 20% duty cycle, 45 minute charging time, and a 30 cent per kWh markup, it only takes 8-10 months to become profitable. I didn't include maintenance costs, but those are much lower than gas stations because charging stations require no full time staff.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/04/14/teslas...
I noticed an explosion of EV charging stations where I live after the state government put incentives in to subsidize their build out. Other states have done it already and are doing it now.
They're going to see the pattern of "I can get the government to subsidize this" and will hold out for them going forward, is my best guess.
Tesla mass produces their charging stations in factories. Entire stations are assembled from modular units, mounted on a concrete slab, and shipped to the installation site on a flatbed.[1] These optimizations have gotten installation times down to 4 days.[2] Sources inside of Tesla have claimed their charging network is profitable, which is impressive considering that until recently, their network got no subsidies because it only supported charging Teslas.
Charging infrastructure is a public good so it ought to be the government's job to incentivize it, but Tesla's supercharger network works just as well.
I don't want to only be able to fuel my Hyundai at Hyundai-affiliated gas stations. And it'd be bullshit if I couldn't get gas from the Ford station because I'm in a Hyundai.
I get Tesla needed to jumpstart the industry, but if its going to actually work the charging industry needs to stand on its own and not rely on the automakers making their own networks.
Building 1000V cabinets is very very expensive, which is why Tesla is behind the curve and hasn’t done it yet.
EA cabinets are all 1000V. You are comparing apples and oranges.
And 400V is the past.
It’s not even that I’m against subsidies, to be clear, but they’re becoming pro forma and they aren’t terribly well thought out on setting goals.
So they get subsidized to be built where they were going to build the chargers anyway
Ish. I mean one thing the charging business has going for it is that after the initial investment the ongoing investment is basically 0. You don't have weekly fuel shipments or any real ongoing maintenance costs.
You also don't see immigrants all over charging stations because they are mostly unmanned. Usually placed in parking lots of retail stores.
That's not actually correct. You need to pay for reserved power in the grid, which can be significant amount regardless if you are using that power or not. So installing big DCFC charger where nobody is going to use it will eat you up on fees for reserved power.
tf is this supposed to mean
> There's a reason you don't see immigrants from all over the world coming to the US to open charging stations the way you saw them opening gas stations.
My guess is what they meant by this is the very visible minimarts on gas stations often manned by (presumed) immigrants.
As the other commenter said, AFAIK, the majority of a gas station's income comes from the convenience store, no? Profit margins on gas are really low - Google says it's around 2%.
* many prime charging station locations are where the gas stations currently are. The high installation costs and long charging times mean you’d lose money swapping them 1:1 right now, and most gas stations are already optimized to hold the max pumps per spot of land.
* it is challenging to find new locations not least because cities have found out that gas stations are pretty problematic uses of land when it comes to neighborhood desirability, traffic, etc. so many are loth to approve new charging locations.
And the convenience stores are the thing that makes the money at gas stations.
Because the gas is expensive, you need to hold inventory (and have a tank that needs to be insured and inspected and ...) and a lot of the profit is going to huge oil companies.
If you are running chargers, there is no inventory and the cost is whatever the electricty costs are.
I suspect that chargers could actually be a profit center as opposed to gas pumps which barely break even and sometimes go negative in profits.
I don’t know many people buying electric without having a home charger.
It's not easy to install your own in an apartment, but increasing numbers of apartments have chargers and most apartments could have them.
Energy delivered in the from electricity isn't that bad or slow when you compare it fully, including the generation infrastructure.
I personally think we will move towards swappable pre-charged batteries at charging stations, which will drop the "refuel" time to something comparable to (or less than) petrol.
Should this go down as chargers become more popular due to economies of scale? Or will they always be significantly more expensive than gas pumps?
The Model T was released in 1908 [1]. Standard Oil was broken up in 1911 [2], 6 years after Bowser added a hose attachment to his pumps [3].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil_Co._of_New_Jers...
Here's a Tesla V4 charger charging a Kia with contactless payment, no Tesla account and no Tesla app:
but yeah the current situation is currently bad, let me say something louder for the entrepreneurs in the back: undermaintained last resort fast-charging is one thing, but if you have a slow-charging network I'm not downloading your app
They have plans to install 3,500 stations across North America, but they have a ways to go to reach that level of density.
wealthy apartment dwellers that can't charge at home, being neglected by supercharging networks that believe its a last resort for long trips
Either stay in your vehicle, or grab a nice hot meal for an hour. Maybe vicinity of EV charging stations will revive the “strip mall”
Hyundai's eGMP platform will get you charged up in less than 20 minutes typically. Tesla and others are a little closer to 30 minutes per charge, right now.
But that could halve in 5 years, conceivably. Are you really going to invest in land on a 10+ year time frame when the tech is still evolving?
Nope.
CCS has to negotiate voltages with the attached vehicle. Unfortunately there isn't a standardized pack voltage and the range of what it can be is anywhere from 400 -> 900V.
That can mean new inverter hardware at a location to handle the varying range of voltages that come in. For a single manufacturer, it's easier as the cars and charging stations are more aligned on the supported voltages.
This is why Tesla is able to work with CCS, despite superchargers not supporting 800V.
The CCS spec supports up to 1000 volts. All chargers support variable voltages.
A car's pack voltage also changes continuously across the charge curve as the battery's state of charge increases. The pack is at its lowest voltage at 0% state of charge and at its highest at 100%.
Here's an example of four cars charging, three at 400 volts and one at 800 volts. You can see how the voltage and amperage change across the charge curve:
You have to register your vehicle through their app, which may also make this a bit more difficult.
Especially if they happen to be in a an area with no other chargers around.
Don’t even be fancy. Just buy a consumer grade charger with a 220 volt outlet and have the cashier charge $20/hour or something.
L2 AC chargers like you are mentioning would be a terrible fit for a gas station because they are too slow. In my car, which has a small battery, charging for a full hour is only like a 15% charge. No one wants to hang out at a gas station for several hours, and even if they did they arent going to go into the store to buy stuff more than once most likely.
I’d be willing to help a poor traveler once a week or so.
Someone should make a website like that where ev owners can list themselves for emergency charging.
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a40897680/ev-public-ch...
On the flip side. When there are few chargers you could be forced to charge at 60% battery!
https://insideevs.com/news/742106/tesla-supercharger-longer-...
https://electrek.co/2024/11/27/tesla-adds-longer-cables-and-...
That's a lot of power through an air cooled cable.
The V4 chargers have longer cables and solve the problem.
The depreciation of these EV vehicles are crazy...
There’s still so much fear on how long the battery will hold up, however all statistics are pointing at > 80% capacity for 10 years old / 200,000 miles.
Expectations for replacement costs in 2026-2027 are around $40/kWh, which will be around $3000 for replacing the typical Tesla battery.
...is that for refurbished packs? Source?
>$3000 for replacing the typical Tesla battery.
...anyone know how much labor is involved in swapping out a Tesla battery pack?
Those Model Ys that people bought for ~70k a couple of years ago? Those are makin' some headlines.
When I see them, I think of how broken-hearted I would be for my three year old kid if she were 'employed' in the slave labor industry of cobalt mining in the drc.
some EV batteries don't consume cobalt, I concede, but the industry and market and trade and slavery still is created and sustained by the EV industry. I could never.
I propose that you consider adding a >125cc scooter to your mobility toolkit. It's a convivial vehicle class.
This was written as someone that drives a gas powered car. Your comment reads like a meme being seeded on the internet by oil companies to muddy support for a transition away from fossil fuels.
Bonkers that ICE's are known to contribute to climate change globally and cause air quality issues at a local level, and people think it's cool to drive them around.
You're broken hearted for your hypothetical 3 year old in a hypothetical mine, but you don't see a problem with the same hypothetical 3 year old growing up in a world without clean air, with increasingly extreme weather events?
The elephant in the room that nobody is talking about is the connector.
There are SEVEN different competing charging connector types in North America. if i dont have an adapter, im either screwed into spending 3 hours at a charging station or im calling a tow truck. Until the USA adopts a reasonable national standard then all this electric car futurism is just branded nonsense and patent profiteering.
ICE automobiles have TWO standards for fuel, regular pump, and hi-flo nozzles with a wider diameter built to fit commercial trucks. they are free to use.
NACS is the industry consensus on the one true North American plug to rule them all going forward.
CHAdeMO is completely dead -- you'll sometimes see them, but they're being kept on life support if not outright decommissioned.
I do still see CHAdeMO at a lot of EA and EVgo stations (I usually charge at home, so my charging station experience is mostly limited to road trips)
(Which makes it absolute lunacy that Nissan is still selling the Leaf)
The J3400 plug is already deployed by other charge point operators. ChargePoint had J3400 plugs on their chargers 6 months ago:
In my experience, the two that really matter are J1772/CCS1 and NACS (Tesla). There's a scattering of CHADeMO, but I haven't yet seen a Level 3 DC charger that has CHADeMO only - the cabinet also has a CCS1 plug.
Most (all?) manufacturers will be moving to NACS in the next few years. Luckily, J1772/CCS1 and NACS are protocol-level compatible, so adaptors are relatively cheap and easy to make.
The remaining incompatibilities are commercial/business decisions (e.g. Telsa opening up the Supercharger network to other manufacturers).
EDIT to clarify: I'm combining J1772 and CCS1 because there aren't any cars that have one but not the other. CCS1 starts with J1772 and adds a couple extra pins for DC fast charging (Level 3).
I agree with you, though. Splitting it out is weird at this point. It'd be a bit like pointing at all the different grades of gasoline and saying filling gas cars is hard. 87 octane, 89 octane, 92 octane, e-85 (try explaining the difference between the 85% ethanol and octane to people for some real fun), race gas, 100LL, ethanol free in several octanes. And that's not even getting into oil viscosities. Of course, the real world isn't hard at all.
EV standards aren't really hard in the real world either, though there is a little learning curve.
Once you have access to superchargers you can just drive. I've driven across the country 3 times in a Tesla, now I have a different EV with a CCS plug and access to superchargers with an adapter, I'm free to go where I want.
The old superchargers (called v2) used the original protocol (CANbus) which is different than CCS's protocol. Newer Tesla superchargers speak the original proto and the ccs wire protocol. All new chargers uses the new protocol. Tesla is slowly replacing their chargers as they age out. At the same time this transition helps reserve a few chargers for teslas (the older v2 ones).
What this means is you use your incar app or a phone app to find chargers, and you only see the ones that you can use. This works for Rivian, Tesla, but also GM and Ford. It's a messy issue for sure, but it's turns out not to be an issue.
It's more a note for any apartment dwellers thinking "I see Tesla chargers all over town, I could buy a 2025 Equinox (or whatever) with NACS and swing through the one on next to my office when I need to. If it's a v3 or v4 that's true, if it's an older station it's still only for Teslas.
So if you buy a new EV thinking "I know where the nearest Tesla chargers are" you could be in for some disappointment. Check the map first: https://www.tesla.com/findus?filters=nacs_superchargers
It's a worse problem in some areas than others. For example, all 9 supercharger locations in South Dakota are Tesla Exclusive.
SAE is thankfully working on universal plug and charge standards which will be a huge help for the other problem - the mess of different apps for each charging network. Because just providing a credit card reader like every gas pump ever was too hard.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sae-industry-techno...
Please stop spreading misinformation.
Found the commenter that’s never actually owned an EV. 13 years of EV ownership and numerous road trips, and your hypotheticals have never happened to me. Yes, you’re technically correct, said by some to be the worst kind of correct. Because in day-to-day reality, there are basically two kinds of connector types.
Though if your day job, as listed in your profile, is changing brake pads, I could see how you don’t have a lot of contact with EVs. :-)
The world is switching to usb-c finally
Hint: it’s Tesla’s NACS
1 : https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/teslas-nacs-set-to-become-o...