I'm not an EV user, so I need some clarification. Is NACS actually a better connector? Or is it just more abundant at the moment? Technology Connections did a deep dive on CCS and it seems like it's a more flexible connector with a truly open standard. The argument for NACS I've seen is that it's a little sleeker (does this really matter all that much?) and it's already on Tesla's supercharger network.
The physical shape of Tesla/NACS is way better: it's more compact, and easier to plug in. The CCS connector OTOH is a lazy retrofit of a design-by-committee plug.
The wire protocol of CCS is a bit overengineered, but it's a standard, and it's a sunk cost (all cars, including current Teslas, are already compatible with it). So physical NACS + CCS protocol seems like the best of both.
It's also worth pointing out that the US uses CCS1, while Europe standardized on a slightly improved CCS2. So the US is alone in its (non)standard connector either way.
Not much of a practical problem until some other charging network builds out enough NACS chargers that a Tesla driver would try using anything other than a Supercharger.
Looks like the cutoff for this is vehicles before May 1, 2019.
I had the retrofit done on my 2018 MS. Have never once successfully charged at a non-Tesla charger. I'm not sure if it's me or the charging stations, which are somewhat known to be less reliable in general than Tesla's.
I got the $450 adapter for my 2016; There's one charger I really wanted to use and otherwise I think it'll waste space in my trunk. I still haven't used it at that charger but I did test it at a CCS1 charger; it worked though it was a terrible experience - the CCS1 plug is silly huge, the payment processing was terrible, and it charged pretty slowly.
I think they're retrofitting the existing supercharger network to speak both "NACS" (really CCS1) and the OG supercharger protocol. My car, with the retrofit, will be able to (HA! good luck believing it'll actually work) charge at an EA or other DC Fast charger setup, possibly. Non-updated OG S/X cars will just get an error (probably I will also, because these other DC Fast chargers simply don't have skin in the game -- they're malicious compliance).
L2 will be nice -- I'll not have to use the dongle to charge at public chargers.
I bought the adapter off the gray market when it was only being sold in Korea, and promptly ran to my local EA station to try it out. Of the four plugs, only two worked, and one of those was loose and would glitch out if I didn't hold it against the car by hand.
I haven't charged via CCS since. It lives in the car as an emergency backup, but frankly I wouldn't plan a road trip stop at a CCS station if you paid me.
CCS uses different wires for AC charging than for DC charging. This is why the CCS connector is so big. Tesla lets a single pair do double duty. That's why the NACS connector is sleeker.
CCS current spec/design can deliver up to 350kW (although few if any cars can take advantage of that today).
NACS claims it can provide up to 1MW (1000A @ 1000V). I think it will be a while before we see cars able to charge anywhere near this, but there is a trend right now of big EV pickups with massive batteries. Higher power chargers means faster charge times.
The only downside I see with NACS is you can’t level 2 charge using 3-phase power. This isn’t really an issue in North America because it’s super rare to see 3 phase power at someone’s home. In most of Europe homes do have 3-phase power and large loads like an EV are required to use it. This is one reason why Tesla uses CCS2 in Europe. The NACS connect doesn’t have the space for a 3rd power pin.
>In most of Europe homes do have 3-phase power and large loads like an EV are required to use it.
Yes and no, distribution is usually 3-phase so the 3 phases do arrive to the building, but in a number of countries in Europe inside the home only 1 phase is used and the amount of available power (by contract) is a fraction of what the US are used to (of course depending by country, but it is rare that a house has a contract in excess of 3 or 6 kW).
Most detached homes (the small subset that have a garage) won't likely be upgraded to more than 12 kW or so, still 1 phase, leaving not that much for charging.
Possibly larger buildings with common parking space may be able to take advantage of the 3-phases distribution, still, particularly in cities, the big problem (once the EV's will be more common) will be the low voltage distribution lines and the transformers/cabins from medium to low voltage.
EDIT: replaced "usually" with "in a number of countries in Europe" did not want to generalize
Please don't generalize "Europe" when you aren't sure. (Also goes for the GP.)
I have three-phase power in an 80m² apartment, as that's standard in Denmark.
I never saw three-phase power in a house or flat in Britain, but part of the terrible plumbing is 7-9kW electric showers. (Cheaper to install than a shower connected to hot water, landlord doesn't care about the price to run it.)
> Please don't generalize "Europe" when you aren't sure. (Also goes for the GP.) I have three-phase power in an 80m² apartment, as that's standard in Denmark.
Now now kids, play nicely. ;-)
I think the underlying question we should really be asking here is not willy-waving over whether you have a three-phase supply or not, but rather how large your main fuse is (there's a euphemism for you !).
I'm not familiar with Denmark, but I suspect even your fancy 80m² apartment with its three-phase supply will still only have a (relatively) tiny main fuse.
TL;DR you're still not going to have a supercharger at home any time soon.
40A on each phase, so 120A total — at least as I understand it [1]. I think that's plenty to charge a car, but good luck parking on the 4th floor. The oven and hob use all three phases. I think tumble driers used to, but they're now so efficient in the EU it's no longer worthwhile.
Several ordinary 3-phase sockets have been installed by parking spaces in the basement, and are rented by residents with EVs.
I hope I am wrong on that, but this is exactly one of the two largely unaddressed problems for a complete change to an EV fleet in countries like Germany. 1) Do you have enough power delivery available, especially with the push to electric heat-pump based heating. That seems to be a serious problem, I heard from some people that they are not allowed to connect their heat-pumps, even in newly constructed areas! Solvable, with political will, but I don't see the will. 2) Where will people charge who park on the streets. It seems there are technical solutions (electrified curbstones), but again, political will to change much infrastructure is required.
Homes in most of the US get 3-phase 240v (120 0 -120) at the panel and it's split into 120v for most of the outlets. Some outlets are 240v (oven, dryer).
So it's straightforward to get a 240V charger installed.
Three phase in Europe (and most of the world) means 220V @ 0°, 220V @ 120°, 220V @ 240°, 0V (neutral).
There is 220V between any phase and neutral, and 400V between any pair of phases. I'm not am electrical engineer, but I think the car charger would be using 400V in this case.
If you're ever in a datacentre or factory in Europe (including the UK), you will probably see fist-sized red plugs and sockets to provide about 60A at 220/400V.
Yes, though it is not used much anymore, in Italy most contracts are 3 kW, a number have been upgraded to 4.5 kW or to 6 kW, but that's it.
Due to the way contracts are currently made, there is a fixed amount you pay for the availability of power (no matter if you use it or not) so everyone is on the lower possible amount.
There is also a (relative) complication for new houses or (important) renewals, the electrical system needs to be designed, and while for systems up to 6 kW it is enough that the design is made by the technical representative of the installer/electrician, for larger power a project is needed by a certified electrical engineer, which has a cost.
But as said the real issue is that the local infrastructure is simply not dimensioned for the large increments of power that are (or will be) required by the diffusion of heat pumps and induction stoves, let alone the recharging of EV's.
I believe that the medium voltage (in Italy it is usually @12,000 or @20,000 volts) distribution can be enough or can be upgraded relatively easily, the issue is with the low voltage (the 380-400V) distribution lines and the transformers/electrical cabins in cities.
I've lived in north Italy for a while, the 3-phase 240v was uncommon but easily available if required. I guess the main issue are the southern parts of the country and the islands. Even then, most touristy housing locations were surprisingly modern in this regard though.
I would say in many places in Europe three phase power is normal inside the home. In fact electric stoves including induction usually rely on three phases.
I'm currently building a house in Germany and 34 kW was the smallest option and 86 kW the biggest option.
11 kW 3-phases is pretty much the standard for a Wallbox at your home.
In Italy I know there's usually only very few power like 3 kW
To note, the J1772 connector (the mainstream AC charging port in most cars in the US) also does not have 3 phase support. For commercial charging, the typical approach is to just use 2 phases of a 3 phase commercial supply for AC charging. This basically means commercial charging is limited to 208V (2 phases of 120V that are 120 deg out of phase).
So, there's no loss of function going from CCS in the US to NACS.
DC charging stations sometimes have batteries on site so that they can charge up from the grid and then deliver bursts of power from the batteries during charging. Apparently this is often worth it to avoid the high demand fees that utilities charge when you draw a lot of power at once.
I assume this will become more ubiquitous as charging speeds continue to increase.
(You're right that a megawatt is a high power draw in the context of normal household electricity usage, but keep in mind that if you can pump ten gallons of gas in a minute you're effectively drawing the equivalent of something like 20MW, so in the context of vehicle refueling it's not so crazy.)
> but keep in mind that if you can pump ten gallons of gas in a minute you're effectively drawing the equivalent of something like 20MW, so in the context of vehicle refueling it's not so crazy
If 15 Teslas pass through a stretch of road per minute with full 100kWh battery packs, you could also describe that as 90MW of current, but it's also not really.
Yes. One of the usual YT channels had this interesting picture. Gas mileage is miles per gallon. Or in this case, do it the European way: l/100km. The unit of that is an area. Typically a rather small one, ca 0.1mm^2.
That's the area of a trench you have to dig along your path if you want to supply your car from the trench instead of your gas tank.
When charging, the Tesla shows you a little miles per hour figure (how many miles of range you gain per hour of charging) and it can often reach 1000 or so on the super chargers I use frequently. It’s fun to calculate the miles per hour of gas (around 12,000).
This is true. Though the electric batteries do have the advantage of having already paid the "thermodynamics tax". Some of the energy in gas will go towards heat losses; energy that cannot be converted to movement.
But that thermodynamic tax is a negative in very cold climates where the electric vehicle will see a major change in total travel distance compared to ICE.
Heat pumps make it more efficient to convert the fuel to electricity at a big, efficient power plant, and then to heat, than to burn the fuel itself for heat in an internal combustion engine (or at home for that matter)
Yes, but note that this type of 'overall thinking' sometimes has interesting consequences. Eg overall globalization raises wages, but it decimated rural economies in the west and caused a lot of social harm leading to the rise of populism.
The odometer shock that will start hitting low wage earners forced to migrate to EV may have less important but similarly surprising unintended consequences.
The problem is obvious though, isn't it? Our current infrastructure simply cannot handle a ton of EV's all wanting to charge up all day long - as is done currently with gas stations all over the country.
It'll take decades to bring our infrastructure up to where it needs to be to support this - yet people act like we're already there. Some states still struggle just to keep the lights on during major parts of the year...
The load is spread out in a completely different way than gas, because 100% of gas cars get gas at a station, while 80% of people with EVs slow-charge at home (or work or whatever). Fast chargers are for road-trips only.
Obviously, if we're going to move to cleaner energy we will need infrastructure investment. Worrying that it's not already there makes no sense. The demand for improved electrical infrastructure will be a forcing function. There's no need to wait for it. But again, most charging isn't fast charging and likely never will be.
(Charging for apartments and stuff still has a bit of a way to go, so sometimes those people use fast chargers as part of their regular routine, but the solution to that is easy and underway: just put chargers in the apartment parking lot and/or on the streets.)
> Obviously, if we're going to move to cleaner energy
It is very unclear whether electric vehicles actually are more environmentally friendly. They sound great - but if you dig into where all the materials come from, it's shocking how externalized we've made that problem. It might be cleaner by time you get to drive it... but it's not cleaner to produce and operate, and in fact may be worse in some cases. Emissions aren't just from the tailpipe after all - yet that appears to be what most people focus on.
> Worrying that it's not already there makes no sense
It makes a lot of sense when the government (both state and federal) are pushing initiatives and incentives to force EV's into commonplace. Our infra just cannot handle it, even with trickle chargers like you've claimed. Which means it will be a net-worse experience for people, and they will resist future clean energy pushes as being disingenuous.
The major points have already been refuted by another poster. I want to just add that I can't comprehend how anyone could think taking a dump on all our lungs at every road is a good idea. In the future, people will look at it like the middle ages dumping all their human waste on the streets out their windows. In that same future, lung-related problems will nearly disappear as these toxic emissions cease to exist.
Centralizing dirty energy generation allows better regulation and control of it. It also allows converting that dirty energy to clean energy without any friction from consumers. You can power an EV using coal. You can also power it using nuclear or solar. What options to power a gasoline car do you have?
EVs also force the improvement of the power grid to be more resilient and modernized, instead of stagnant and lazy, to be sucked dry.
It is shocking how externalized the costs are with our reliance on oil -- technological stagnation, toxic fumes everywhere, literally heating of the entire planet, funding of backwards authoritarian governments, and the NOISE! Only a fool would support the continued usage of oil when EVs exist now.
> It is very unclear whether electric vehicles actually are more environmentally friendly.
No, it is extremely clear. Including manufacturing they are cleaner than gas cars. And they will get better over time as the grid greens and as batteries become made out of more recycled materials. The batteries are 99% recyclable into new batteries and so there is a point where new materials never need to come out of the ground. Also, if you only focus on the most pressing thing, greenhouse emissions, the story is even better.
> Our infra just cannot handle it
Yes it can. There have been ~zero issues with the grid as a result of EV adoption.
So previous commenters have presented some facts for you. But since human brains tend to reject facts when they don't match their world view, I am curious - have you changed your stance, or continue to believe what you said?
Majority of US homes do not have an abundance of 240v outlets - meaning your 40 hour charge is a non-starter for everyone but those in high income brackets and ability to modify their homes (ie. non-renters).
It's only the highest peaks of demand that cause problems for the grid. EV charging, on average, is one of the least time sensitive loads there is. People charge in the middle of the night when its cheap.
> People charge in the middle of the night when its cheap.
Why is it cheap in the middle of the night? Because there's near zero demand.
Fast forward 10 years and everyone has 1-2 EV's to charge each night. Is there zero demand still? No... and now it's expensive to charge at night.
People really need to be realistic about these things. Pretending these issues do not exist only harms EV adoption. People buy expensive EV's and find out it's a major PITA to keep it running, it's expensive to charge, it takes forever to charge, etc.
> People buy expensive EV's and find out it's a major PITA to keep it running, it's expensive to charge, it takes forever to charge, etc.
Very few people have done this. After people buy EVs, most of them learn how easy it is in comparison to ICE cars.
You're very optimistic if you think "everyone will have 1 or 2 EVs" in 10 years time. New ICE cars will still be available until at least 2035. Not accounting for non-new cars.
You'll never need that much power at home. Level 2 AC 240V 30-50A is fine for overnight charging.
The way Tesla Supercharging works is by using a large bank of batteries for the heavy bursts of power draw (>100kW) during the initial periods of charging when the battery is warm and at a low percent. The batteries at the station are backfilled with less current from the grid in the background during periods of low use. At least that is how I understand it.
but yeah, maybe trucks with huge batteries may be able to take advantage of it down the road.
I don't know about the NA, but that is definitively not the case for most superchargers (or any other brand of fast chargers, for that matter) in Europe. Batteries are expensive so this is only done in very special cases. I know they've used battery banks at some of the electrical ferries in Norway, simply because the cost of running new high-voltage power lines was deemed more expensive and the schedule of the ferries makes it very easy to model.
Power grids are quite large, so any fluctuations across the grid is going to be minimal. They are quite good at modeling these things, otherwise we'd have rolling blackouts quite often. For homes it's the last mile that's usually the biggest limiting factor.
But I agree with what you said, for /most/ people anything more than 2kW (so 240V/10A) is more than enough to charge up overnight. A perk with CCS2 is the support for 3-phase power delivery. With very simple wiring and some smart(-ish) electronics you can opportunistically deliver around 11kW to a single car, or divide it with other house appliances or other cars. It's fairly common with 400V TN-system in some parts of Europe, which makes the support of 3-phase in CCS2 very handy.
I don't think most NA superchargers have batteries either, though some definitely do, but I believe going forward they are likely to have "powerpacks" to support pickup and semi truck charging.
Most people don't drive 500km per day, the average is closer to 50 or so. So on average, you could easily top of your battery pack on 240V/10A circuit. That would be around 10kWh, which you'll do in 5 hours. Double the average and you'll still be topped up next morning.
Many people often travel regularly, like I do to visit family 150mi away. It would sure be nice to be able to charge while I'm at their house at a rate that would fill me back up. Range and charging speed matters, y'all shouldn't be just hand waving it away.
It's not being hand waved away. You're just constructing scenarios that most people owning an electric vehicle will agree is such a non-issue that it's not really worth debating. There are plenty of fast chargers to fill the gaps.
Many people travel regularly. Many people don't. That's how we ended up on the average being 50km.
> There are plenty of fast chargers to fill the gaps.
Definitely not on the route to where my family lives. I checked last year when I was looking at EV, there's like a single L2 charger at a hotel on the whole route. I expect it will be several more years before the millions of us with family in the country can reasonably buy an EV.
I don't think I've ever claimed that EVs are suitable for everyone right now or that the infrastructure is there to fully replace every single scenario. The point is still that most people can have most of their needs met by a simple wall plug for charging.
Chances are that you don't even need to charge on your 150 miles trip. Most modern BEVs will be able to take you anywhere from 300-350 miles on a single charge. In your scenario you could literally do a round trip and have a comfortable level of charge when you get home again.
As a new Model 3 owner, I've been looking into how to do this.
The solutions aren't particularly nice, there's the Quick220, a device which does all the safety checks of manually combining 2 circuits on opposite phases so you can actually get 12A at 240V. But it requires 2 circuits on opposite phases, neither with GFCI (which most outdoor outlets have).
Second option is a NEMA14-50 extension cable, which obviously carries it's own risks but if there's a dryer outlet on a 30A breaker, that gets you 24A at 240V.
But yes, either solution requires a bunch of bulky cords running out the door, and the assumption that the houses' electrical wiring was done properly and is in good condition.
So far the only less-invasive alternative is hoping they have a 20A circuit somewhere convenient, rather than just the kitchen plugs, then you can get an extra 33% charging speed (16A @ 120V) with the proper 5-20 adapter.
I think the more practical solution will be private plug-sharing, there's already a few apps and startups advertising I can earn money by allowing others to book my home charger, and a proper home install can do 11kw.
It could also be useful at homes to regulate power (assuming the grid connections/solar/batteries were all available), allowing you to charge faster when power is cheap, and pull way back (or even backfeed) when power is expensive.
But it's mainly to try to get EV fillups to be gas-station like. If you can recharge a Tesla to 80% in 5 minutes, you've won.
It is indeed totally insane, but this is what is being worked on, not necessairly for cars but trucks and semi trucks for example that have much larger batteries than a car. Already to achieve 250+ kW charging stations have to have huge cables and watercooled connectors, here's one such installation I saw some years ago https://i.imgur.com/BpG4QAa.jpg and an example of a cooled connector for 0.5 MW https://www.phoenixcontact.com/en-ca/products/dc-charging-ca...
I assume the next jump in power will come from voltage. A Model 3 pulls ~600A when charging at 250kW, because it's relatively low voltage. If they alter the charging design to accept 800 or 1000V we could see over half a MW without a change in cable design. But I'd guess at this point that would be moot because the cell charging rate is the real limit anyway.
Yes Porsche has started with this, they have ~800 V batteries, as you said batteries themselves are the practical limit at the moment but both larger batteries (as with trucks) and new battery technology can help to lift that limit. There are enough engineering challenges at 1000 A I don't think we will see higher currents than that for a while!
Migrating to higher voltage doesn't do anything to charge batteries faster. The only advantage is that you can decrease the size of the cabling since current goes down. On the other side though, you need to move all drive circuitry, motors, etc, to handle higher voltage architecture, which may end of costing more overall.
So, you add the complexity of having to have a way to switch between 400V and 800V safely, which costs some amount of money, and the only advantage then is the cabling from the battery to the charging port can be thinner? That really doesn't seem like much savings, and if anything might cost more. The run from the charging port to the battery should already be really short.
Electric cars are almost 4X as efficient as a gas car, so 1MW of electricy and 4MW of gasoline are roughly equivalent in miles added per minute.
OTOH the only batteries that can absorb 1MW of electricity are those in some Class 8 trucks, and Class 8 diesel trucks are usually filled with pumps a lot faster than a standard gas station pump.
It's a useful comparison for how long it takes to refuel a vehicle, but "moving a liquid storing chemical potential energy through a tube" and "move electricity through a wire [and re-store it as electro-chemical potential energy]" are two such radically different activities that it glosses over a lot to equate the two.
Actually NACS doesn't claim anything regarding current, see the spec[0]. It only claims 1000 volts, and the current is left implementation-defined citing that 900A with a non-liquid cooled inlet.
3-phase power is irrelevant when it comes to CCS. The point of the Combined Charging System is the "combined". It is the signalling pins in the upper part of the Mennekes or J1772 connector and the large DC connectors in the bottom part.
For slow charging, 3-phase power is relevant (the IEC Type 2 / Mennekes connector in this case).
Having used both, NACS is more compact, so both the port on the car and the end of the cable are significantly smaller than CCS. The cable itself is also lighter and more "usable" than CCS. At least at the newest V3 superchargers, the NACS cable is so much more flexible and easier to manage.
> the NACS cable is so much more flexible and easier to manage.
Nothing stops CCS from using smaller cables. Tesla tends to have cables which aren't rated for as long of lives with the plans on replacing them more often. Most CCS dispenser manufacturers chose beefier cables which were supposedly rated for longer lives, but environmental factors and people (ab)using the cables seems to lead to those cables not having anywhere near their rated lives.
I've seen some 50kW CCS chargers with downright flimsy cables, much smaller and thinner than most Tesla cables.
Tesla has thin cables at some superchargers. These are liquid cooled so they can get away with smaller wires. No idea if CCS1 chargers are using liquid cooling.
v4 are the new Superchargers, but they're mostly being installed in Europe where everything has been CCS for ages and Tesla needs the longer cable to support cars with ports in random corners.
Unless all these other manufacturers move their charging ports around in addition to switching connectors, the short cables on all the v3 Supercharger infrastructure is going to be an issue here for a while. If your port is in the wrong spot there's no way to reach without blocking two spaces.
If I compare it to USB-based connectors where USB-C never came along.
NACS is like a Lightning plug. From a practical/pragmatic perspective, it was clearly the best plug at the time it was created. It solved real user problems.
CCS a micro-USB 3.0 plug. Maybe you've never seen one[0], but they are a real thing. Let's take an awful plug (micro USB / J1772) and clumsily add a few more wires on to it to make it both more capable and even worse. It does what you need it to do, but nobody has ever thought it was good at it.
IMO then let's standardize on what the replacement to NACS/CCS should be. Personally, I don't see the big deal behind a larger connector, especially if it's a bit more future proof without requiring extremely clever engineering. I mean we've dealt with huge gasoline/diesel pump handles for nearly a century.
And for ultra-high performance applications (e.g. semi trucks, farm equipment, light aircraft) there is MCS. It has the support of Tesla, Scania, Volvo among others, making it near-certain to be a industry standard in Europe and North America.
CCS1 (the variant of CCS used in the US; basically J1772 + HVDC pins) has a lot of flaws that can't easily fixed in a backwards-compatible way:
1. It's gigantic, making it a lot harder to handle and plug in [0]
2. CCS1 has a mechanical latch on the handle side (as opposed to NACS, which puts an electronic latch in the vehicle side). This results in a few problems:
a. The CCS1 latch is is exposed and easily broken, allowing the vehicle to begin charging without being physically latched in (meaning it can be unplugged without pressing the lever to unlatch, while still carrying HVDC at hundreds of amps – there is protection against this but it's not great practice to rely on the control/ground pins being unplugged first, rather than making a latch that isn't so easily circumvented)
b. The latch is long and requires a lot of force to unlatch (this may just be my bad experiences speaking, but I've always needed to wiggle the connector a bit to relieve the friction.)
Unrelated to the physical connector, Tesla's charging network in the US is far larger and more reliable than everyone else's CCS1 networks combined, and the only way to use the network is NACS (at the moment, anyway. Magic Dock[1] is being added to some superchargers and will most likely be rolled out wider in the near future.)
I have had a colleague describe to me the lingering smell of ozone when he was able to unplug CCS1 while charging. The charger and car dutifully stopped charging and the charger nagged to Not Do That but it certainly left that ozone wafting...
While he thinks the Tesla physical connector is probably better, the CCS communications standard is better (AIUI). So once Telsa adopts that, it will probably be a good system.
Also: he's talking about CCS1, and not CCS2, which can do things like handle three-phase power.
Even in that video, Alec manages to slip in numerous disingenuous arguments, such as when he held up an adapter and suggested size parity between the (larger) female socket end of a complete NACS connector and the (smaller) male plug end of a AC-only J1772 connector.
More to the point, the debate isn't about NACS versus J1772, it's about NACS versus CCS1. If you compare CCS1 to NACS, the difference is substantial. This graphic is probably showing best case for NACS and the worst case for CCS1 but the connectors shown are dimensionally accurate:
Technically there was nothing stopping the use of CCS2 in the US, as the L2 and L3 pins would simply not be used at people's homes. But one-phase J1772 was already around, and it was decided to go with legacy compatibility.
I'm sure CCS2 exists in more commercial settings with heavy duty EVs, e.g., Volvo Trucks:
US power is really 240V with a neutral. It’s wired to most outlets and circuits as one 120V leg (against the neutral). But you can absolutely wire a 240V circuit using both legs and major appliances (air conditioners/heat pumps, electric driers) use 240V. My Tesla charger is on a 240V 60A circuit.
We don't have three phase but power coming into most panels in the United States has two 120V lines that are 180 degrees out of phase so that's enough to construct the 240.
NACS can be plugged in one handed by a child. CCS1 needs perfect alignment which can be a struggle for a large man using 2 hands in optimal conditions.
NACS cables are lighter and thinner, which really matters when it is cold and the cables harden.
Most people consider NACS to be a better connector, there are even CCS1 fans who admit that.
But in reality, they are all fine and it doesn't matter that much. What really matters is that there is a standard, whatever it is.
And it seems like NACS chargers will speak the CCS protocol, so those with CCS cars will just need a passive adapter to charge with NACS.
This is for North America, Europe is fine with CCS2, and NACS doesn't intent to change that. And compatibility is not that much of a problem since cars usually don't travel between Europe and North America, plus, for these rare cases, there are adapters.
AFAICT NACS (read, the "standard" and not Tesla's original release) speaks the same protocol as CCS, it just combines the AC and DC pins into, yes, a sleeker connector.
So no real "benefit", and it actually adds complexity into the car itself. But theoretically one could also make a NACS -> CCS adapter, so it wouldn't end up as a CHAdeMO situation.
EDIT: I forgot, the NACS connector is more or less self-aligning if you get it in the right general orientation, whereas CCS is pretty particular.
However, I suspect a big part of the reason why this flurry of announcements is happening now is that Tesla is upgrading their superchargers to be able to speak the CCS protocol over NACS.
Hmmm, we need a good name for the older Tesla plugs that aren't NACS compliant. When I said "current NACS", that's what I was referring to. I should have been more explicit.
Tesla vehicles built before ~2020 do not and can not speak CCS without a retrofit.
Yeah, October 2020 is the time they started adding CCS compatible ECU. Surprised it's not a software update, it's just a new protocol. Is there a voltage difference? Or is the ECU 3rd party?
At least with Tesla's exponential sales the number of people it affects will be smaller. 1 million out of 4 million I think
Yeah, there's a different controller inside the charge port. From what I've seen, it isn't a difficult upgrade and the part is unrestricted.
I've been estimating the % of affected cars as ~20% at this point and the % that is capable is steadily increasing.
Still an annoyance if you have one of the vehicles without support, but they are no worse off than before. The supercharger network has roughly doubled since then too.
> Older Tesla's require a retrofit to support CCS1.
This is needed because CCS1 requires special communication circuitry for the control data. All Teslas can speak CCS protocols.
The initial Supercharger support used different protocols. They were simple CAN-based, without any metering or billing. In fact, supercharging support was gated by a flag on the car's side.
I don't know if there are any studies on this but the perception amongst EV users that I'm aware of is that NACS is a very reliable system (low rate of charging stall breakdowns) compared to CCS chargers that seem to break down quite frequently. However, it is unclear if this is due to the technology difference between CCS and NACS or if it's just due to the poor implementation of CCS charger infrastructure.
1. Whenever I’ve been on road trips, Tesla chargers outnumber CCS chargers by at-least 5:1 and are in much more convenient locations
2. Tesla is much better about repairing their chargers. You’ll still find busted ones but because there are so many, it’s easy to go to the next stall. With CCS, there’s often not a next stall at all nearby.
If you watch YouTube review channels in Canada like The Straight Pipes, the number one issue they have with CCS EVs is that they can never find working charging stations.
I think it’s incentives. If Tesla chargers break and stay broken, then Tesla owners get mad. (And Tesla chargers seem to break or malfunction with some regularity — they’re not indestructible. But they get fixed, and there are always more than one or two chargers at a site.)
The third party chargers don’t seem to act like they have a reputation to uphold. Also, I’m not convinced they’re even really motivated to have people use their stations.
> The third party chargers don’t seem to act like they have a reputation to uphold. Also, I’m not convinced they’re even really motivated to have people use their stations.
They do care but technology is unforgiving. Tesla is many iterations into improving their station reliability, they are vertically integrated and their station are very simple. The production volume is far, far higher leading to improve quality.
The competitors like EA, in their effort to scale simply have 3-4 different providers put into the same box. Different hardware, different software and so on. And then also a NextGen version from all these providers.
Their stations are much more complex, with screens and so on. So the failure rate is far higher and repair is much more difficult.
I think you are underestimate the challenge of how difficult it is to role out such an infrastructure and maintain it specially when you are just a service provider, not an actual engineering company. Tesla just made it look easy and everybody expect that any other company could do the same, but they can't.
Like you said, the law of numbers.. if a Tesla stall is out theres usually 7 others to choose from. Any other network may have one or no alternatives (they're all broken sometimes).
Right, and Tesla is speedy to fix broken ones usually. And an occasional bad charger isn’t a huge deal (I talked to an electrician who was servicing one of them). Gas stations regularly have non-working pumps, and I suspect those are more expensive to fix.
The Tesla approach is really another level for charging compared to everyone else. And even the mobile chargers & Level 2 destination chargers are better.
I believe NACS can do everything CCS can do (same number of pins) but in a smaller and easier to handle format. As an EV users I much prefer the NACS connector over the CCS connector especially in the winter when the cables are much stiffer.
NACS doesn't have a standard for vehicle-to-home (or vehicle-to-grid) charging. When they opened up the standard, Tesla said that it was allowed, but they didn't specify any standard way to do it. So it might happen, but there's potential for incompatibilities between car manufacturers and charging systems.
Chademo supports bidirectional charging. But bidirectional charging means you basically need a DC fast charger, and those are like $10k. (Hard to find an actual number online besides Alibaba… it’s always an “inquire for price” email quote button… which tells you it’s gonna be like $10k.)
By far the easiest way to pull power from an EV is from the 12V subsystem. The DC-DC converter for EVs usually is like 2kW, so it’s substantial power. …although older Teslas make it hard to access this much as I think they were worried about people abusing free Supercharging… there’s a 12 Amp fuse for the cigarette lighter port and a 50 Amp fuse for the jump posts accessible in the front, even 12V and 12A is enough to power a fridge for weeks if you buffer it through one of those “solar generator” things. That’s what I did during a recent power outage for my 2013 Model S. My 2013 Nissan Leaf has a 12V battery that’s easier to access, and I could pull about 1.2kW from that (have to keep the car on so the high voltage battery is connected to the DC-DC converter, keeping the 12V subsystem charged) using a couple inverters.
As Tesla moves to replace the 12 volt subsystem with 48 volts, it would seem even more plausible to do V2L by routing outgoing power through the 48 volt system.
The Ford F150 Lightning does V2L through the 9.6kW of on-board inverters. Fairly sure it's not capable of sending that back through J1772 / CCS2 unless I'm mistaken?
This "EV power station" integrates inverter. Don't need additional inverter for other end. Installation is 300k from prev article, maybe discounted a bit when I get real quote.
Adopting NACS won't prevent Ford from supporting vehicle-to-grid, since they build both the truck and the charger, and the connector itself doesn't care what direction the electrons are flowing.
But it would be really nice if it was standardized for interoperability reasons.
The Ford F150 Lightning does V2L through the 9.6kW of on-board inverters. Fairly sure it's not capable of sending that back through J1772 / CCS2 unless I'm mistaken?
My perception is that CCS2 is better egineering than NACS but both are improvements over CCS1 so any alternate adoption is a market improvement. Having the pure "best design" is very rarely the deciding factor to market adoption.
So much better. Not to mention, same connector for AC (home) charging and DC fast charging (on the road at the super chargers). Whereas now with CCS you have a little cover over the fast charging pins you remove from your usual AC port to plug in the DC fast charging combo. So much nicer.
It's not just the connector. It's the whole charging experience. NACS + Supercharger network is 10x better than the alternatives both in speed of charging and ease of use.
I am an EV user. My connection is not Tesla compatible. I wish the government would prod manufacturers to create a common connection for all EVs the same way there is a common gas intake for all gas powered vehicles.
>I wish the government would prod manufacturers to create a common connection
That is exactly why this is happening. Tesla is expanding their network and opening it to more manufacturers in pursuit of a $7.5bn federal funding program.[0]
>the new rules, issued after nearly eight months of debate...seeks to give consumers unfettered access to a growing coast-to-coast network of EV charging stations, including Tesla's Superchargers.
>Companies that hope to tap $7.5 billion in federal funding for this network must also adopt the dominant U.S. standard for charging connectors, known as "Combined Charging System" or CCS; use standardized payment options; a single method of identification that works across all chargers; and work 97% of the time.
Interesting enough, Tesla is (currently) obliged to add CCS compatibility to their chargers for eligibility, but these manufacturers are adopting their connector regardless.
>The new rules would allow Tesla to keep its unique connectors, but it will have to add a permanently attached CCS connector or adapter that charges a CCS-compliant vehicle, similar to a gas pump that has a separate handle for gas versus diesel.
When the 350KW chargers are online and working, which is apparently not often, which is why this move to NACS is happening. Only Tesla is motivated to run a reliable network. The other problem with 350KW CCS chargers is that they are often clogged by slower charging cars that can't take advantage of the higher charging rate. Watch one of the "Out Of Spec [Motoring|Reviews|Podcast]" YouTube channels to see examples of this on their EV road trips.
This whole thing reminds me of the ancient unix story of the DoD test of TCP/IP implementations, where they were deciding between the BBN stack and the Berkley (BSD) stack. The result was something like, "The BBN stack starts off much faster, but it crashes often and the machines take so long to reboot, so on average, the BSD stack is faster". Kirk McKusick tells the story far better...
I think reliability is a lot more important than speed. I understand the benefits of the SuperChargers. But I was responding to a comment that said this:
> But will the CCS be as fast at charging ?
Of all the problems with CCS, speed isn't really one of them.
Tesla always gets credit for stuff they're about to do. And half the time they don't seem to end up doing it. Or hit their dates. Don't get me wrong. Tesla has some great chargers. But they're great on their actual merits.
Wait. It's a wash because CCS tech which has been out for like 5 years is comparable to some future Tesla project? Tesla the company who have consistently missed fantasy deadlines set by the edgelord-in-chief?
Not that you’re wrong about self driving, but they have been light years ahead of the competition in other areas. I don’t think it’s fair to say that have “missed some deadlines” and generalize to this, when they’ve been a major contributor to bringing electric vehicles to the masses.
> I don’t think it’s fair to say that have “missed some deadlines” and generalize to this, when they’ve been a major contributor to bringing electric vehicles to the masses.
It's absolutely fair. These are separate statements, and they're both true. Tesla has missed "some" (only some?) deadlines. And they've also brought EVs to the public. It's completely fair to say these because they're true.
The connector is open. Obviously the producer of the charging station can always determine the charge rate regardless of the connector, which is why most EA stations sit out there in a half broken state limited to 120kW.
> But will the CCS be as fast at charging ? It seems like Tesla could control a lot with their proprietary connector if it has a faster charge rate.
Tesla is supporting CCS because that's what the bureaucratic funding dictates, not because anyone believes CCS will succeed. They will (and should) do the bare minimum.
But to be clear, that's not what this news is about. This news is about Tesla's push to get other companies to sign onto their previously-proprietary, still-Tesla-controlled "NACS" standard, en route to pushing the government to change the rules to allow NACS-only chargers and remove the CCS restriction.
Sounds like “10 million stranded Americans per day” to me. I hope the actual document is more rigorous than the summary, but then we all know how these things tend to play out.
I've had EVs for 7+ years now and have plenty of experience with J1772, Chaedmo, and CCS. All I can say is thank heavens Tesla's connector is getting adopted! It is the only connector that seems like it was designed with the ease-of-use regular people expect - not what us early adopter EV people will put up with. This kind of friction does impede adoption too.
As someone who has only ever used J1772/CCS, can you explain a bit more? I mean, it's just a plug that I stick into my car - I find the newer US home AC electric outlets with the automatic "safety shutters" harder to plug into than a CCS connector, so I don't really understand what friction you're referring to.
One concrete thing that is better about the Tesla connector is that there are no moving parts that user needs to manipulate.
Tesla/NACs connector is just stick it in and it works... the car holds onto it until it is done or you tell it to let go.
I don't think I've ever seen a public J1772 connector that had a functional spring in the little thumbpress/lock/turn on thing which means if you don't know you need to stick a key or pen cap, or squeeze really hard to pry the little fucking plastic tab up to the lock position, it just won't work.
> I don't think I've ever seen a public J1772 connector that had a functional spring in the little thumbpress/lock/turn on thing which means if you don't know you need to stick a key or pen cap, or squeeze really hard to pry the little fucking plastic tab up to the lock position, it just won't work.
I'm still a little baffled that people have all these problems. I've owned an EV for the past 6 years, I charge at public charging stations all the time (primarily ChargePoint and EA), and while I've had tons of problems with the chargers themselves (e.g. the charger just not working) I have never had a problem just sticking the charging plug into the outlet in my car.
As someone else with 5+ years driving EVs with a CCS plug, they work for me, but I can see them being much more unwieldy for physically challenged folks. The Tesla connector is easier to manipulate and line up correctly with the charge port.
Ultimately it's going to boil down to money. Having DC and AC charging share the same conductors makes the plug cables cheaper. That adds up when deploying and maintaining a charger network.
They did. It was CCS. Everyone except Tesla was on board to using it, and it was widely viewed as the standard going forward, and even Tesla was retro-fitting its chargers with CCS ("Magic Dock"), and presumably would one day switch its cars over.
Then Tesla pulled a fast one on the morons at GM and Ford, who signed stupid deals that handed the future back to Tesla, and now the only question is whether Tesla consolidates the entire industry behind it (possible) or we end up in a world with a split between NACS and CCS (also possible, but probably less likely).
I don't think people can hear this loud enough. I own an EV with CCS, I'm glad the rest of the industry looks to be going NACS. CCS is in fact objectively terrible. CCS could only seem decent when it was following on something as truly atrocious as Chademo.
He is really into good engineering which has made him a huge fan of Tesla, especially since they took some of his recommendations and incorporated them into their manufacturing process.
It is fair to say he is biased, but at the same time I don't see why his assessment of NACS vs CSS is wrong.
It's better engineered and designed. It's that simple. Yes, the differences aren't mind-blowing, but who cares. As long as they properly open it up and standardize it as they are saying they will, then this is a perfectly good outcome. Most EVs and fast chargers in the US have Tesla/NACS ports anyway, so this is the easier lift to standardize.
It's not black and white: CCS supports 800V charging, NACS does not (yet). Higher voltage = lower current and lighter cables and less strain on the connectors.
Superchargers wete also lagging on liquid-cooled cables, which will be included in v4.
If it's possible for NACS to support 800V charging then that is not really a very meaningful advantage of CCS, is it? I think Tesla themselves will eventually switch to 800v at some point.
V3 Superchargers have liquid cooled cables, that's why they are thinner than V2 cables. V4 has even crazier liquid cooling, where the conductors are directly immersed in the coolant.
> sounds like goal-shifting, considering gp's rather absolute claim on NACS having superior design and engineering
CCS currently supports 800V. NACS is going to support 800V. The number of extant chargers with 800V capability is, to a reasonable approximation, the same for CCS and NACS. So NACS being able to support 800V rhetorically balances CCS being able to roll out 800V chargers (or any, period), at least in my mind.
Put another way, one solution is deployed and capable of upgrading. The other is also capable of upgrading, maybe comes upgraded already, but hasn't been deployed. The first strikes me as better engineered. (The latter may have superior design, but I have trouble buying that argument given NACS can be upgraded.)
Sure, but I don't know whether that would be a hardware revision or just a protocol thing how complicated it would be. Could be a software update for all I know. Is it the case that all currently deployed CCS chargers support 800v charging? If not, is it possible for an 800v architecture vehicle to charge at a 400v CCS charger?
Plus, if the concern is the port then I don't necessarily mind that fast charging companies will have to deploy new hardware, as long as the cars don't need to get retrofitted all the time or use adapters.
> Tesla pulled a fast one on the morons at GM and Ford
Consumers prefer NACS to CCS. And Electrify America failed, spectacularly, to deliver a working product. (As someone put it bluntly, NACS exists. CCS does not. You bet on the horse, not the unicorn.)
The auto industry is standardising around NACS because it will eventually force the standard into the open. That, in turn, enables antitrust questions about the Tesla/Supercharger tie-up. (In the meantime, everyone avoids the wastefulness of a meaningless standards battle.)
We should have some brand of car install both plugs (as I understand the smarts are in the car, the plug is basically a dumb electrical connection) and then after a year or two see which people are using.
There are many cars on the global market with two AC charging sockets but last time I checked, there are none with two DC charging sockets. Multiple DC charging sockets would be a severe safety risk without a beefy isolating mechanism, which adds weight and a non-trivial point of failure.
<<Tesla pulled a fast one on the morons at GM and Ford, who signed stupid deals that handed the future back to Tesla>>
It's always curious to see someone with such strong conviction that somehow they have an insight, without access to any of the information involved in negotiating this partnership, that the various folks at GM and Ford failed to see.
As far as I know, Tesla will still add CCS compatible adapters to the Supercharger network in the future, since it is a requirement for the EV network funding they're going after by opening up to additional manufacturers.
That's the plan as of right now, but the clear intent here is to push the government to change the rules to allow NACS-only chargers. If a few more automakers (Hyundai and VW being probably the most relevant) sign deals with Tesla to use NACS, it'd be impossible to argue that there's any reason to do a CCS buildout.
> FHWA Response: Commenters overwhelmingly supported the CCS connector standard and verified that the industry is moving to adopt CCS as a market standard; therefore, FHWA requires CCS Type 1 connectors for each DCFC port through this final rule. Although a few commenters preferred Tesla connectors, most of the Tesla products are proprietary and do not address the needs of the majority of EV makes and models available in the domestic market. However, on November 11, 2022, Tesla announced its “North American Charging Standard” (NACS), which makes its existing and previously proprietary Electric Vehicle charging port and connector available for broad and open public use, including to network operators and vehicle manufacturers. In the announcement, Tesla noted that charging providers were planning to offer NACS charging ports at public charging infrastructure. This rulemaking allows permanently attached non-proprietary connectors (such as NACS) to be provided on each charging port so long as each DCFC charging port has at least one permanently attached CCS Type 1 connector and is capable of charging a CCS-compliant vehicle.
Again, the CCS rule came out in February, and when the rule was being made it definitely did look like "the industry is moving to adopt CCS as a market standard", as prior to Nov 2022 there was no "North American Charging Standard", only Tesla's closed, proprietary tech.
I think the government would only allow NACS only if it becomes an open standard. The government can't mandate a connector that only one manufacturer can make when alternatives exist.
> Then Tesla pulled a fast one on the morons at GM and Ford
They're trying to sell expensive EVs, but people were buying Teslas instead because they can guarantee the chargers work and are in good locations.
I have a lot of strong criticisms of Tesla, but slowly investing billions into building a reliable charging network over the last 10 years is hardly a "fast one"
Seems like it’s happening without government intervention. It’s hard to imagine now that Ford, GM, and Tesla are on the same standard that the rest will not follow suit.
Are the chargers/ports on cars easy enough to swap out, or are we manufacturing ewaste?
If I were to buy a car with CCS today, and then in 2024, NACS wins, and all cars going forward have NACS, and all charging stations change to NACS as a result... In the year 2030, can I get the port upgraded, are the changing stations obligated to support CCS indefinitely, is there an adapter I can just keep in my car for NACS->CCS that actually works (NACS->CCS is currently not an option... will it become an option?), or is my CCS car just unchargeable?
I wouldn't imagine so; a short, rigid adapter could have very thick conductors which would have low resistance relative to flexible cable. And being a passive adapter, it would be easy to make very heat tolerant.
Correct, but that is necessary in order to get a relatively lightweight and flexible cable to carry huge loads. It’s not nearly as important for an adapter which is, for the DC pins at least, a solid bus bar encased in heat resistant plastics.
I was thinking that the contact resistance would create quite a bit of heat as well, and if there's nowhere to dissipate you can get quite hot. Even if a high temp plastic can take it, you might burn the person handling it.
> Are the chargers/ports on cars easy enough to swap out, or are we manufacturing ewaste?
I'm not sure those statements are mutually exclusive. All new manufacturing produces ewaste. CCS cars will still be chargeable in one form or another until the car itself dies.
So why is everyone fleeing the North American standards J1772/CCS1 in favor of Tesla's? What do these car companies stand to gain switching the charging port? They don't own charging networks.
While there is a lot of activity going on to build CCS chargers, the current state of the CCS charging network is not great. This is a competitive advantage for Tesla.
So GM and Ford wanted to sign deals to use Tesla's charger network to remove a competitive advantage that Tesla had. Tesla apparently agreed to that, but one condition is that GM and Ford had to agree to switch future vehicles over to Tesla's previously-proprietary (and still Tesla-controlled) "NACS" standards instead of CCS. GM and Ford agreed. Rivian appears to have followed suit after GM and Ford agreed.
Other automakers are now evaluating the landscape to see where things will fall. The best alternative was always going to be that we had a unified CCS standard future, but now that GM/Ford have made that impossible, they may decide that it's better to get some leverage by unifying on NACS rather than having a split-standard future.
Their agreements with Tesla are not public, so it's hard to tell what the benefits are. You say "everyone" is switching, but it's only American companies that have pledged to switch to NACS from CCS (so far), I don't think 3 for 3 is a coincidence.
Also unlikely to be coincidental is the fact that Tesla "opened up" its charging patents/specs to competitors [1] in 2014 - but only signed its first partner in 2023, a few months after billions of federal dollars were made available for interoperable charging networks.
1. IIRC, they included a mutual non-aggression clause for patents, and if a 100-year-old company with plenty of patents like Ford, you may balk at that. I'm speculating that Tesla has been offering much more generous terms than the 2014 offer
The major benefit to Tesla here is that it pushes most of the costs of unifying the continent on a single standard upon third party charging networks. Ford and GM have minimal exposure to that, so they don't care, and it saves Tesla a lot of future heartache.
And it's a sensible move if you care about e-waste, given that there are far more NACS vehicles and NACS charging stalls in than CCS1 vehicles and CCS1 charging stalls. (And that contrast becomes even more extreme if you assume that the thousands of unreliable CCS1 stalls would be getting scrapped anyway.)
Meanwhile Nissan and Mitsubishi are still selling brand new cars with CHAdeMO plugs. So much for it being a universal standard.
I don't doubt they'd like it to remain that way. Starving CCS charging networks of federal dollars that are be relied upon by Japanese, German and Korean manufacturers would be a win for US manufacturers; expanding a Tesla-moat into a US-manufacturer moat. Tesla gets federal dollars, control the standard and keeps its hungriest competitors at bay who most threaten its margins; Ford, GM and Rivian get access to a large network and protection from foreign competition by being invited into the fort.
Cartel-like behaviour is notoriously self-emergent.
Insidiously, this arrangement might even get the US government to look the other way if it is American car companies vs. everyone else despite the original assumption being that CCS networks would get most/all of the federal funds.
> Interoperability of EV charging infrastructure. The requirements relating to interoperability similarly address less visible standardization along the national EV charging network. The FHWA is working to establish a seamless national network of EV charging infrastructure that can communicate and operate on the same software platforms from one State to another. The FHWA establishes interoperability requirements through this final rule for charger-to-EV communication, charger-to-charger network communication, and charging network-to-charging network communication to ensure that chargers are capable of the communication necessary to perform smart charge management and Plug and Charge.
I bet it will. Why would you bother hampering the design of the charge port door by requiring it to be large enough to cover both J1772 and NACS? The adapter solution is much easier for Tesla and others. And the adapters are cheap.
Yeah, I'm beginning to think you're probably right. Although J1772 is a real standard, NACS is rapidly becoming a de facto "real" standard, and it completely subsumes the purpose of J1772 plus it works for DCFC. NACS is slightly less clunky than J1772 also.
That's basically the same story of how USB BC 1.2 (the old 'battery charging' standard that allowed 5V-1.5A out of USB plugs) came to exist. Vendors were making custom protocols that allowed higher currents than the measly 500mA USB permitted, and eventually the USB-IF threw up their hands and essentially incorporated these industry-made solutions into the USB BC1.2 standard. It wouldn't surprise me if SAE releases some new standard that happens to be NACS...
Volkswagen owns Electrify America the only competitor at scale to Tesla's supercharging network. they uses CCS and VW is one of the largest car manufacturers in the world. i think they can stand on their own. time will tell though.
Go check out some car forums for folks that depend on EA (like Lucid). I've never had an issue with EA, but the general consensus seems to be that EA reliability is abysmal, with stations frequently being down (though reviews seem to be on an uptrend starting in 2023, so perhaps it was a pandemic related issue).
As another commenter stated, though, Volkswagen was forced to create EA as part of their Dieselgate settlement, and their behavior in the past hasn't exactly instilled confidence that they see it as something worth investing in.
EA is bad at best. Very unreliable network, especially the ones not near urban centers. Yeah you get reliable charging if you’re near big cities but once you’re out in the middle of nowhere, it can be terrifying. I’ve personally arrived at an EA charger to only find it not working and the next closest one was a 50 mile detour. Thankfully I plan liberally, but I’d be in a very bad spot if not. Someone I know, also had a locking problem where the charger wouldn’t detach. And I’ve seen news items relating to literal bricking of cars by using the chargers.
Having to "plan liberally" is something that makes EVs much less usable on long trips. When road tripping, its fastest to arrive at a charger with a very low state of charge (way less than a 50mi buffer). When I road trip my Model X, I trust that the supercharger will work, and I target arrival at a 3-5% state of charge. This allows me to charge at the fastest part of the charging curve, and to depart when the charge rate starts to drop off.
I have road tripped well over 10k miles in my Telsa over the last 5 years, and I've never seen an entire supercharger site offline (like happens with EA). I'm sure it must happen after natural disasters when grid power is cut, but its not the normal state of operations like it is with EA.
EA is pretty bad. The fact that no one can decide what side the connector should be on also leads to chaos (cars splayed out everywhere around the chargers).
> Volkswagen owns Electrify America the only competitor at scale to Tesla's supercharging network.
The only car manufacturer with a competitive charging network or only competitor period? ChargePoint seems better than Tesla my area. Most of the Tesla stations in this area require a hotel stay to charge.
IMO the market is too new and there’s more room for innovation here. At the point that EVs can be charged in less than 5 minutes, I’d be on board with standardizing.
That's because much of the Supercharger network was deployed with the assumption of only supporting Tesla vehicles. If any third party charging network deployed NACS fast charging stalls in your area, they would absolutely be compatible with any CCS1 vehicle with an adapter.
The most likely outcome is that third party stalls will either mimic Tesla's magic dock or over-provision with two cables per stall, or (most likely) have some ratio of NACS-only, CCS1-only, and CHAdeMO stalls based on demand.
> So now, once again, the USA adopts a "standard" shunned by the rest of the world.
Maybe I could have the wrong read, but this sentence structure:
> the USA… shunned by the rest of the world.
Does two things: it implies there's a standard "the rest of the world" has agreed on (there isn't, and there never is, it's one of the things that makes the world big) and it signals you as probably one of the two types of people which might be unintentional on your part, but still:
1. A European complaining about America.
2. An American complaining that we're not doing things the European way.
There are other possibilities, but those are the two most probable reads.
As far as charging standards go, we haven't settled on a standard because there's only one charging network worth a damn in the country, and until Tesla started making agreements with other automakers to sign them on, it was exclusively for use by their customers which isn't great if you're Ford or GM or another startup EV manufacturer and trying to get people to buy your electric cars instead. Right now it looks like (in my opinion, this is not settled) we'll probably settle on NACS, but as opposed to what? CCS? 1 or 2? CHAdeMO/ChaoJi? Is there a technical issue you have with NACS specifically or is it just that it's not a de jure standard somewhere else?
That's a lot of cogitating on my motives. I'm just an American who hates dealing with non-standard "standards." I hated it with SCSI's connector fiasco. I hated how Sony undermined Firewire (oh, and AES/EBU before that, and kept pushing their MemoryStick long after the world had settled on SD), and that USB failed to learn from the idiocy of SCSI's connector fiasco. And don't even get me started on Lightning.
And there are just plain shitty standards, like ATSC's. Anyway, for adults who have lived through plenty of these standards blunders, it's even more irritating to see them not headed off by the only entity that has a chance of doing so in this instance: the federal government.
The last I heard, CCS 2 was set to be widely adopted. And sure enough, any charging connection that doesn't support DC is absurd. So yes you can argue it's good the government didn't act sooner and mandate one of those earlier short-sighted ones.
Eh, whatever. As long as something dominates the continent I guess it's OK. It's not as if I'm likely to take my car to Europe or Africa on a lark.
Fair enough, Dongletown sucks. It’s a common enough thing on this forum that was the optics as I saw it, but additional context helps.
As far as CCS2 goes, or actually CCS Types I and II, there’s already a split between continents and regions on that one; and then there’s CHAdeMO and GB/T which are in active use. CCS aspired to be a global standard but it was never going to get there, not on this planet. There’s also another standard called MCS in development.
I view this as very RIM/Blackberry like, only Tesla has learned from history. Eventually the competitor charging networks were going to be "good enough" - Tesla had the option of working with Ford or GM, or letting them dump their combined resources into a competitor (and every other MFG). Sure in the short-term this will make them more vulnerable to competition, but if your only moat was the charging network you were doomed to fail anyway.
Had RIM opened up BES/BBM to the iphone early on, they might still be around today.
BES was possibly a more significant part of RIM's than the charger infrastructure is to Tesla. Opening the charger infrastructure is just them defining their moat, really. Tesla will still sell cars but more importantly they'll keep collecting usage data that they'll resell to the highest bidder.
When Tesla sells someone a car for $50k, what do you think is the value of the data on how often they charge it? $20? Surely it can never be a significant revenue stream.
It's not just charging data obviously, it's all the car usage data. Where you go, how fast, with who... And yes, after a few years, the value of that data is worth more than the original profit they made selling the car itself. Its also recurring revenue, they don't even need to sell you a new car to keep making money.
Margins on hardware are so slim, it doesn't take much surveillance to double or triple the profit a manufacturer makes over the lifespan of an object. You thought IoT was about customer convenience? It's not science fiction. Smart Televisions already report on what you're watching, in real-time. https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/insights/
Where you go can not be inferred from the charging sessions. You can kinda infer the speed, by looking at the state of charger between two sessions. You can't infer with whom you're travelling.
Honestly, people always overinflate the usefulness of "data".
Ford will track your entire drive, how you used your car, even the radio station that was playing. All of this data is uploaded when you take your car in for servicing if you do not have a connected car.
OnStar recently (2-3 years ago now?) started feeding 100gbps of telematics data on every single GM car back to GM in an effort to determine better pricing on used cars. Data includes every sensor change on the car and even details from the onboard wireless entertainment system (your wifi device)
These are projects I have worked on. They have an overabundance of data on you and 99% of you fit the model of usefulness
We're telling you this is a multibillion dollar business that's transforming the world around you. You may choose to ignore or downplay it, but it won't change the facts. Even If you're paying for something you may not be the primary customer anymore since there's more money to be made from tracking you than from selling you stuff.
Also, Ford and GM do not do service. A lot of the detailed car information can really help with service and maintenance. But dealers actually don't want that to improve systematically and Ford doesn't gain enough from it.
Tesla makes all that dealer profit themselves and can systematically improve service and make a huge profit from off warranty vehicles. This is a huge revenue stream Tesla is only just starting to get. Something people often miss when they look at future profitability.
Ford and GM make huge amounts of money from part supply fro off warranty cars. Tesla will do even better because they will do the service, not just the parts.
Well they’ll have data on non-Tesla users now too. The current market leader in the US has about 17% share, so even if Tesla eventually becomes the biggest auto maker, you’d still expect at least 75% of cars to not be made by them. They now have charging data on those 75%.
More profitable than the data though will be selling the charges. The rates they’re charging at Tesla Superchargers are far in excess of what they’re paying for the electricity.
GM is scrapping Android Auto and Apple Carplay, building it's own native operating system to get access to that customer data that Google and Apple won't share with them.
To be fair, GM expects $20 billion to $25 billion a year in revenue by 2030. Who knows how much customer data is worth but they seem to think it's worth the expense.
That is an interesting question. If Tesla has a network of cars collecting real world data that can be used to train ML I suspect it might be more than $20 per Tesla in the future (they can sell models to other manufacturers). Maybe not right now but more a future thing.
I’m glad there finally seems to be a push to a better standard in North America.
I’m really curious how this affects Teslas market share though going forward.
Their supercharger network is why we continue with them despite countless other issues. It’s their biggest moat as far as I’m concerned.
Now I have significantly more options, and my next car will not be a Tesla. I’m sure I’m not alone in that.
Is the brand name of being effectively the gas station of EVs worth it to them? I assume there’ll be a surcharge , so is it better for them to have the biggest slice of much smaller pies?
The thing about how this is affects Tesla is "compared to what?"
Compared to the historic status quo where there were no other chargers, and Tesla had exclusive access to a large-ish proprietary charging network, it looks like Tesla giving up their advantage, and seems bad.
But the forward-looking status quo was going to be a gigantic network of CCS chargers that makes Tesla's proprietary network look small, with every other car maker using CCS. In that world, Tesla would have had to switch their cars over to CCS eventually and retrofit their existing chargers to CCS, and people who bought Teslas with the proprietary plug have a terrible UX of needing adapters everywhere.
Compared to _that_ status quo, this is a huge win for Tesla (and one that back-foots every other carmaker, which -- if NACS does take off -- need to do their own migration to a new charging port and strand their existing customers with the adapter life, making their earliest adopters angry and frustrated). So yeah, this is a great move for Tesla, and GM and Ford in enabling it are total idiots. (Rivian is just going along with the semi-inevitable at this point.)
Also one other detail: There's a hell of a lot more money in the car 'fuel' industry than the car making business. R&D costs are way lower, you don't need that many employees, and you can always charge these third party automakers more. Tesla is going to make bank off these adopters.
Most EVs charge at home most of the time, so there isn't that much money in the "fuel" industry, they are mostly needed for long distance trips (and so crowd up on holiday weekends), not daily driving.
Umm, there's a significant chunk of the world's population who will likely never be able to charge at home, because they live in apartments and park on-street.
"EV owners who live in apartment buildings and park on the street will rely heavily on public chargers—in 2021, 42 percent of European EV owners living in cities had no access to home charging points."
Public chargers =/= DC fast chargers (like Tesla superchargers).
I've already seen level 2 chargers that drop down from light posts in my city. Roll those out to every light post near apartment buildings and throw in some curb-side stalls if you need more capacity. Most people won't need to charge every night with 200/300mi+ range, so you won't need a 1:1 mapping of chargers to cars. This way, people charge passively overnight at stations that are cheaper to build than DC fast chargers.
Apparently LED can use less than 100W, and before LEDs streetlights would use 250-400W . The really bright sodium ones were 1000W, but those probably weren't over your neighborhood sidewalk.
I wouldn't make investment decisions on that kind of prediction. Slower (cheaper) chargers will take much of the load, and unless outlawed, are going to heavily bite into fuel station margins. The best they can do is charge more for DC fast charging when it is needed (during holiday weekends).
In the US, most apartment dwellers park in a garage, which can and will be retrofitted with chargers. Street parking is the major challenge. In Park Slope Brooklyn, I often see a lone cable coming out of a brownstone out to a Tesla on the street. :-)
What is your stats for most apartment people Park in a garage? Where I live garages cost a hefty amount extra and the apartment complex doesn't even have enough for more than a quarter of the residents anyway
On street parking is very much allowed only in some countries, the biggest one being the USA, but much of western Europe it is disallowed (or at least, you pay for it by the hour). Many countries require proof of parking spot before they will let you even buy a car.
Even in that case, it isn't hard for cities to put out L2 charging pylons at each on-street parking space. They can just combine it with street light infrastructure or whatever (they would also be able to monetize street parking at that point, which is inevitable anyways).
> Even in that case, it isn't hard for cities to put out L2 charging pylons at each on-street parking space.
How does this work for physical logistics? e.g. I’m a two-car household that can’t practically reduce to a single car, with a driveway that only fits one car. (That my partner uses.) I street park in front of my house, and there’s street/sidewalk/lawn. The only place I can think of to put a charging station is in my lawn with some kind of arch over the sidewalk to reach my car. Also becomes problematic as street parking spots aren’t reserved. (I could potentially remove a tree from my front yard and pave over it to provide another parking space, but that’s not a very appealing solution.)
Are your electric lines all buried? I guess if they are that would make it much more difficult. Otherwise, you have poles or something to keep the lines in the air.
I'm just amazed America has so much free parking still. People buy houses, even if they have garages, they use the garage as storage and park their car on the street. Having lived in other countries where that simply can't happen, its like this country practically gives away parking spaces for free.
Yes, utilities are all buried. Electrical doesn’t even come from the street side of the house, it comes in from a utility corridor behind my house.
Also have a garage, but isn’t practical to park in it for various reasons, some more fixable than others. (It’s set up as a home gym which I view as essential for my health, it’s single car and parking in the driveway would block in the garage, it doesn’t have a floor drain or appropriate slope for draining which is fairly important for winter snowmelt, and it doesn’t have an automatic door opener.)
Seattle has lots of garages like that, so much so that they no longer dig basements for new housing (lots of old garages are basically a decline to a basement with a garage door). Seattle is one of those cities that doesn't enforce parking minimums, so street parking is otherwise over prescribed by new dense housing projects going up (unlike say LA).
I don't think street parking is sustainable. We build denser, and without parking, it is eventually going to fall apart where too many people are going to be fighting it out for too few street parking.
Depends. In Japan you're only allowed to buy a car if you have a free parking space on your property. A police office will come by your home to verify that the number of parking spots on your property is enough to house all the cars you plan on having. So in this case you would just have to deal with only having one car, or pave over the lawn to fit another parking spot.
At least in Germany, most city areas where people live are "Anwohnerparken", so people who live on the street are allowed to park on the street, nobody else.
I offered to pay for a charger to be installed in my spot, and the hoa board flat out refused. Granted, they're old, and are probably still upset about the switch to unleaded gasoline...
The latest rounds of gas convenience stores have gotten more square footage than earlier generations. I suspect they are anticipating indoor seating for charging customers at some point.
I’ve also started seeing joint ventures where it’s a proper coffee stand or in one case I can think of an A&W root beer.
Gas stations tend to be physically separated from pastimes (what Burger King owner wants diesel fumes in their store?), and someone at least is hedging their bets that won’t always be the case. I don’t know if they’ll see the fruits but their kids absolutely will.
I've been seeing some of these as well in recent years.
The most memorable one was down in Louisville, where there was a gas station/bait shop/bar. The bartender sold me some whole-hog pork sausage at $2/lb. which he kept in a duffel bag in the ice box. Totally on the up-and-up.
Another is a well-known BBQ joint / convenience store out by Kansas City (I forget the name).
Most common, I think, is having a Subway inside the convenience store. I've seen Burger Kings as well.
That is a very astute observation! Thank you. I have wondered why more and more convenience stores are getting into not just quick, pick-up snacks, but full blown fast-food style sit down environment.
Recently when I drove around in the USA, I saw Sheetz, Wawa, Royal Farms, Rutter's, and High's. These are substantially larger with lots of amenities compared to the standard gas stations. Nothing compared to Buc-ee's, but still getting up there.
Not sure about the others, but at least for Wawa and Royal Farms: many locations have offered fast-food style options for a very long time, like 25+ years, maybe more.
Wawa has always been known for quality. I remember years back when there was a romaine lettuce shortage, they put up deeply apologetic signs about how they're temporarily substituting iceberg lettuce in their sandwiches.
Meanwhile Royal Farms is known for their fried chicken. Although, the one near my college in Baltimore was more known for being a frequent target of robberies :/
On a road trip, I recently ate at a Sheetz in central PA that had Electrify America chargers. Good food selection, similar to Wawa. Not the best overall experience though -- an unhinged lunatic flipped out at me for leaving a single unused napkin on my table (which lacked a napkin dispenser, and the place had no recycling can). I avoided that charging location for my return trip...
Sheetz, Wawa and Royal Farms all already have Tesla chargers. Wawa has a location in Virginia with no gas pumps but Tesla chargers. So yes they are already planning for this future.
In poking around with PlugShare in the Seattle area, I'm seeing Arco gas/convenience stores with chargers. "EV Connect" is what is marked on the map. One is near the office that I don't go to anymore, but next time I'm that way to pick up hardware, I'll check it out. IIRC, there's no real room to build out the lot, but maybe the store could expand.
Gas station stores are moving in on grocery stores.
There's a huge war brewing that most people don't even know about, but once grocery stores started imitating Costco and offering gas, the convenience stores have been firing back by undercutting grocery stores on staples.
Around here they'll even undercut Walmart on dairy and select produce.
I think this alternate future of a gigantic CCS network is a really long ways off. Have you ever tried to use non-Tesla DC fast charging? It's a mess! There aren't a lot of stalls, one of them is usually broken, and the payment processing is a mess! I thought people were exaggerating until I experienced it first hand. While I think they will eventually get their act together, I don't think it's unreasonable to claim that the terrible DC fast charging experience is a huge deterrent to non-tesla EV buyers right now. This ultimately creates a chicken and egg problem that results in such slow progress in the EV charging world (outside of Tesla.) It's why Tesla's US EV market share is around 60%.
I actually think this is great for Tesla in other ways in the nearer term. With other automakers switching to NACS, this removes a huge concern for would be non-Tesla EV buyers. Now you may think this would erode Tesla's market share, but I think it will convert far more ICE customers than Tesla customers. The net effect is a faster EV adoption, faster cultural acceptance of EVs, and more people considering Tesla in the near-mid term.
I fail to see how this negatively affects Ford, GM, and Rivian. They can retrofit the charge port relatively cheaply or deal with an adapter. Yes, it affects resale value of early customers. But that's how it goes with new technology, and buyers are naive to think otherwise. Besides, when compared to their ICE counterparts, they're probably still coming out ahead on maintenance.
> In that world, Tesla would have had to switch their cars over to CCS eventually and retrofit their existing chargers to CCS, and people who bought Teslas with the proprietary plug have a terrible UX of needing adapters everywhere.
They've switched to CCS in Europe and as far as I can tell it's going just fine for them. Not sure what would motivate them to pull this risky move besides an insane love for their customers' UX (which ... I doubt).
> In that world, Tesla would have had to switch their cars over to CCS eventually and retrofit their existing chargers to CCS, and people who bought Teslas with the proprietary plug have a terrible UX of needing adapters everywhere.
It should be noted that in any case Tesla will have to support CCS, though in its CCS2 version. It is the de facto standard in Europe and is in the process of making their chargers in Europe fully compatible since the M3 comes with CCS2 by default here. And it is unlikely to change any time soon, CHAdeMO is dying here and all the other networks are using CCS2 (which seems to be much better than CCS1 if I trust the complaints about CCS1 I read on HN).
In fact Type 2 or Combo2 (CCS2) is an EU requirement for the charging stations so while you can offer alternatives, all new charging stations must offer of those two.
Yes. CCS2 has not technically won yet as being the default port for all EVs in Europe, but any other option would have to have significant advantages over CCS2 to win, features that a potential CCS3 version would not be able to support.
My friend who is not an EV driver got stuck with an EV rental (Bolt) for a semi-rural trip and boy was that a ton of drama.
I’ve been thinking hard about an EV myself and now I’m looking at PHEVs instead. I’ve gotten a crash course in EV charging around here and it’s not good. Level 2 chargers are not for spontaneous trips and level 1 chargers are fucking pointless. It estimated two and a half days to charge from 40-80% at my house. My house was wired for level 2 charging by the previous owners but the plug is 220 3 prong rather than the NEMA 14-50 plug that seems to be de rigeur lately. At least I could probably get an electrician to fix that cheap.
If anything the non CCS chargers are made by idiots.
What they say is dead on -- EVs are great, but getting an EV in a rental situation that's not optimal for an EV without notice and without planning for it is a terrible, terrible situation.
Level 2 chargers are great in your garage, or in a place you're going to park for a long time anyway (hotels, say), but for quick top-offs on a road trip, yeah, not good.
I have a hybrid, basically get 30 miles on a charge. It’s frankly perfect!
To put it simply, there are two types of modes I drive - short & in town or long (100+ mile round trip).
There is absolutely zero chance I’ll be using an EV to drive over 100 miles as there’s a risk I get stuck for hours or even need a tow.
For in town trips, 20-30 miles is more than fine and I never even switch to gas. There’s very little trips in between.
Tesla holds a decent spot for suburban regions where you drive 10-120 miles round trip. Arguably that’s probably fine for half of America. Particularly, if you have two cars (one gas, one electric) as most households with EVs do.
Dumb you're getting downvoted, because the charging infrastructure is bad. I was "EV curious" and recently rented a Kia EV with a 250 mile range for a trip to Northern California. I had two purposes - drive to/from San Francisco and Sacramento. Drive all around the Sacramento metro area. I figured California, probably having the best EV infrastructure, would make the experience a good one. I was wrong.
1) Half the stations we attempted to charge at were broken for various reasons. Sometimes it was the payment system. Sometimes it was charging as a whole. sometimes the CCS side was broken, sometimes the Tesla side was broken. Sometimes the screen was broken. The point is these are not-simple machines with massive amounts of electricity going through them. Many things break.
1/1 Davis
2/4 Davis
1/2 El Dorado Hills
0/3 Palo Alto
1/1 Palo Alto
2) Vendors. All terrible. All except one municipal L2 required you to download their app. Thankfully all allowed guest charging, but if I was evil, I'd require users to register. Good chance they're desperate, and good chance you're the only charger in the area.
The experience didn't put me off on EVs, and I'm still considering getting one because I can charge at home. Relying on infrastructure, though, is a terrible idea.
You just need a good EV. PHEV is like buying a typewriter with a screen when everyone is already buying computers. I have had a pure EV since 2019 and never had charging problems like that and I drive a lot. I have the 14-50 at home and it charges quickly, every morning I’m at 80% charge. Spend $100 to get an electrician to fix that for you.
Different people have different driving patterns and different needs.
Some parts of the country have less (and crappier) charging infrastructure. Those parts of the country coincide with areas where places are further apart and you need more range. For some of us who happily live in flyover states, a PHEV is an awesome in between.
I'm glad that an EV works out for you. Hopefully charging times (and charging infrastructure) will improve so that an EV works out for me as well. Until then, a PHEV works well for me and is far more efficient than a pure ICE.
I lived in a rural location and now in suburbs and still never had any issues, even 4 years ago when there were far fewer chargers. Here is a map of the level 2+ chargers in the country:
With 300 miles of range all you have to do is get to the next charger and if you're willing to spend 5 minutes in advance to plan your road trip it really doesn't add any extra time if you stop to charge while eating, using the restroom, etc. I like the extra cargo space not having an internal combustion engine gives me.
I've done 300 actual miles with my model 3 (long range) and now with my X as well. I've heard the Ioniq has good range as well and I'm sure more models are being released every few months from other brands with actual ranges over 300
> I lived in a rural location and now in suburbs and still never had any issues, even 4 years ago when there were far fewer chargers. Here is a map of the level 2+ chargers in the country:
As he said, different circumstances can shift the solution point. What you have someone that doesn't have a data plan on their phone, or doesn't carry a smartphone and thus doesn't have access to a mapping app? Or the charge point requires a smartphone app that I don't connectivity to use with?
For me as well an EV is questionable. My gas burning SUV is $1100 a year to insure, tax included. A Tesla Model 3 at the same level insurance would could me $6014 a year before taxes. I don't drive enough to save $5000 in gas and maintenance a year.
Then there's my garage. Long story short, the best it can do right now is 120V 6A charge speed. To properly upgrade my garage to support a full EV would cost an additional $2500. Assuming if I also have to upgrade the electrical mains from 100A to 200A, it's $15,000 to $25,000. And my electricity costs 20 cents a kilowatt hour.
Does buying an EV it still make sense after all that if you were in my circumstances?
You need fast charging at home, end of story. If you can only get 120V at home, forget it. That being said once you do get it, it's so nice never having to stop at a gas station again.
As for insurance, you should shop around. Not sure what's on your driving record, but it was $90/mo for me to insure my brand new model 3 when I had that vehicle. But I don't have any tickets/accidents or large claims.
I just got on Intact’s website and got a quote for one John Smith, 18 year old male from Branford, Ontario. John wanted a quote on a Tesla Model 3 Performance. Their quote was $3200/year.
You want to try and explain why it is that you are getting quotes that are twice that of the highest risk drivers?
You are right. I mistakenly failed to pay the parking meter on time 7 or 8 years and was issued a ticket. Of course I threw myself at the mercy of the courts; a simple mix up of days I pleaded. It was not the statutory holiday I thought it had been that would have waived the parking fees. And I paid my ticket immediately. But they would have none of it. So unforgivable was my crime, so heinous, so far murder or rape, that there could only be one punishment that could be appropriate for my sin; to be executed.
I await on death row now. The chosen method of execution is to be killed by old age 60 or 70 years from now, being withered and worn by the ravages of time. Most cruelly in the interim, I am expected to work a 37 hour work for 48 weeks out of the year in grueling conditions. A climate controlled office with an ergonomic chair in front of a computer with Visual Studio Code open.
Sometimes it seems like if it would not have been kinder to simply kill me there and then. Those days I ask myself why they keep me here. Just to suffer?
tl;dr
No accidents, no claims, no criminal activity on record except the one parking ticket. I don't pretend to comprehend why the quotes are that way for me.
In comparison my current SUV is $1100 a year same level of coverage as that quote. Just for fun I got a quote for an 2022 Acura NSX a while ago and it was $1500 a year, and the NSX is quite a bit more expensive then a Model 3.
For a 33 year old driver, single, male, unmarried, with no tickets/accidents/etc., living in Sudbury, ON:
Intact Insurance:
2022 Tesla Model S LR 4DR: $178.17/mo [1]
2022 Acura NSX Hybrid 2DR AWD: $535.08/mo [2]
TD Insurance:
2022 Tesla Model S LR 4DR: $232.42 [3]
2022 Acura NSX Hybrid 2DR AWD: "CALL" [4]
Rather than calling I went to BrokerLink, which lets you get quotes from different sources. The average quotes given by BrokerLink for each vehicle were:
2022 Tesla Model S LR 4DR: $360/mo [5]
2022 Acura NSX Hybrid 2DR AWD: $520/mo [6]
So no, I do not believe you are being honest. There is no reason to believe that.
You must have a terrible record or something. No one is getting quoted $6k/year unless they have a felony hit and run on their record or something equally as egregious. Not even in Canada.
I don’t have either, but it seems to me a PHEV is a great EV alternative for people who do a lot of local (city) driving and also occasionally need a vehicle to do weekend trips for camping, etc, where charging is not available or an inconvenience.
The part of my brain that doesn’t understand how photovoltaics work really wants solar panels on EVs but aside from keeping the cabin at ambient, which does in fact have some mileage value, all they would really achieve is keeping self discharge at bay.
If you parked it with a 50 mile range and came back a week later, it might still have 50 miles of range.
My household has an EV, a home level 2 charger, and I still wouldn't mind getting an PHEV. Not even for the weekend trips, but just because it's cheaper than another full EV, and I don't really drive enough to need the range beyond the battery on a PHEV.
As for your plug, that's cheap and easy to replace (literally the homeowner can do it in most jurisdictions, be safe) - the question is the size of the breaker/wire routed to the plug.
If your breaker is fifty amps, then changing for NEMA 14-50 shouldn't be more than $100-200 even if you hire a master electrician.
If the breaker is NOT fifty amps, then you have to carefully check that the wire is the sized correctly all the way from the box to the outlet (it can LOOK right coming out of the breaker box, and look right going into the outlet box, but somewhere hidden in the walls it changes to an incorrect size).
What do you mean by this? Do you mean "public L2 chargers" or private in-home L2 chargers? If public, I agree--it would take 4 hours to charge your car on a road trip, but if private then just keep your car charged to 80-90%.
> My house was wired for level 2 charging by the previous owners but the plug is 220 3 prong rather than the NEMA 14-50 plug that seems to be de rigeur lately. At least I could probably get an electrician to fix that cheap.
There are multiple NEMA 3-prong 220V standards, at least one of which is 50V and at least Tesla sells charger adapters for all of them. If you're buying an EV though you may as well shell out the extra $500 + labor and have an electrician install the dedicated charger (so you can keep your portable charger in the car for traveling).
> If anything the non CCS chargers are made by idiots.
I'm not sure what this means either. The Tesla charger isn't CCS and I haven't had any problems with it. Also, plenty of CCS chargers suck (at least one of the CCS standards is exclusively L2).
For the large majority of driving PHEVs are superior. They offer identical efficiency for short (<50 mile) trips at a large cost savings. They can handle longish trips where a BEV would wind up dead on the side of the road. Even in the rare circumstances where BEVs are better the advantages are slight.
There are downsides: extra weight of a gas engine, more mechanical complexity, and weird maintenance, especially if its an gas engine your not using very often. The person I know who has one went a couple months without using much gas. Does gas go bad?
Eh, it's not great but it's totally doable as long as it isn't winter. My understanding is that a Nissan Leaf is much much worse than a Bolt for road trips...
I just did an NYC to Cleveland trip in my Bolt EUV, along a route with only a few DC charging locations, and never once had to wait for an available charger -- even on Memorial Day.
That said, if you need to use the heater, then yeah it's not viable for a road trip. No heat pump, so major battery drain.
The other key to a Bolt road trip is to avoid speeding too much. There's an absolutely tremendous difference in range when going 65 mph vs 80 mph.
> My understanding is that a Nissan Leaf is much much worse than a Bolt for road trips...
As a Nissan Leaf owner, yes. Because of CHADeMO (that is going to be a big problem in a few years, as existing stations fail and don't get replaced) and because of the passively cooled battery pack. I can do one DC fast charging no problem without much change in battery temps (CA weather). 2 or 3 in the same day? Might get toasty.
That said, all EVs have issues during winter(Tesla included, their EPA ranges are way overstated). It's just that, for a Tesla, it's easier to find a supercharger.
The consumption difference due to speed affects all cars, no matter their drivetrain. For ICE, that burns a hole in your pocket as it causes you to stop at gas stations more often.
re: winter range, my understanding is that EVs with heat pumps (including Teslas) tend to have much more efficient heaters than ones without heat pumps (e.g. Bolts).
re: speed and consumption, for sure. But because the Bolt's DC fast charging rate maxes out at a fairly lame 50-55 kW, and speeding => reduced range => more charging time required, so on a long Bolt road trip there's diminishing returns from speeding a ton. I suppose it depends a lot on terrain and climate though, since e.g. speeding can be more beneficial if it means you're running the heater for less time.
Oh it was terrible even by proxy. It would drop estimated range at about 2 miles per mile. Took all day to get between two metropolitan areas. Spent several hours at a level 2 to ensure they didn’t get stuck in the woods with crap cell coverage.
If your commute is less than 100 miles, you have nothing to worry, if you get a proper charger at home. Owned Tesla for 3.5 years with 60 mile commute, it has been very nice.
For fun, I just looked up my route tomorrow using public transportation.
I typically leave around 6:30am, drive 45 miles and arrive at work about 7:15am.
Using Google and a host of websites to plan, I could walk a mile to catch a regional bus, ride and arrive there 1 hour after I began. I can then walk to another bus station, ride a local bus to a the main bus station, connect to another bus that drops me off pretty much at my workplace. I'd arrive 2.5 hours after I began this journey. The earliest I can get to work by this route is 9:30am. The regional bus system doesn't run any earlier.
Alternatively, if I take our non-ev, it's the same time, but costs 5x as much as our Model Y. The ICE car cost about the same as the EV.
Plenty of people drive a car for short trips and those in rural areas will likely continue to do so. Also, consider company vehicles for workers transporting heavy equipment or delivery vehicles. All within the range of current EVs for a full day. EVs won't fix car traffic issues in cities, but public transit won't cover 100% of cases effectively.
Assuming Ford and GM are not inept and their adoption of NACS is driven by necessity rather than choice. This implies a significant lead by Tesla in charging technology. Essentially like Android adopting lightning connectors. Huge, long term positive impact to Tesla as market leader.
Tesla Insurance is a kind of small moat. But I think Tesla is really banking on winning the automotive AI race. They currently don't seem to be winning, but that does appear to be their main gamble. If they can be the first to achieve level 4+ self-driving then they would definitely dominate regardless of charging infrastructure.
Only idiots buy black-box based car insurance (whether Tesla or any other).
I mean, come on, insurance companies are already renowned for slippery policy wordings and the desire to get out of paying-out.
Do you seriously think an insurance company having access to your driving data is really being done for your benefit ?
I would be willing to bet its so that Mr Risk Adjustor at the insurance company can say "computer AI algorithm says it thinks you were driving 'aggressively' that morning".
And once "computer says no" you'll have a hell of a time trying to fight it.
> And once "computer says no" you'll have a hell of a time trying to fight it.
Cars have been equipped with event data recorders that capture information moments before the crash for at least 20 years. It is part of the air bag controller. Insurance companies have equipment to read that data and use it against customers all the time.
You don't need a Tesla or other black box insurance to get cheated.
Having a little accelerometer data that is probably a mild hassle to extract is far different than an always-on, internet-enabled, sensor-filled computer that literally has a camera pointing at your face.
Why would a source of signal that has aligned incentives for all three major parties (individual, manufacturer, and insurance company) not be selected for by the market?
It's not as if people are buying meteor insurance here. Automotive accidents are frequent enough to where if a policy provider fails to cover damage that really is in-policy they'll be sued, regulated, and shamed.
Even more so, since Tesla has a financial incentive to ensure that these benefits really do accrue to the driver.
Monitored policies are almost always significantly cheaper. That's why people buy them. I won't engage on who the "idiot" is in that analysis except to say that Adam Smith probably has an opinion.
The reason this works is that it forces the consumers to self-partition into those who think they drive safely and those who know they don't. That doesn't correlate perfectly with actual safety, but it's clear that it's a good proxy signal. Insurance companies may be renowned for "slippery policy wordings", but they're even better known for doing good statistics.
> Do you seriously think an insurance company having access to your driving data is really being done for your benefit ?
Well yes, there's marginal value for both you and Tesla in excluding aggressive drivers from the program. Some company with worse telemetry eats the cost of the accidents from those drivers.
It's fine to argue that this is a privacy tradeoff you don't think should be legal but there's pretty obviously value to be had for both insurance and customer.
Just like how Samsung beat Apple to face scanning technology.
Mercedes version is extremely limited and is only available on $100k+ cars with tons of additional hardware.
I have Tesla FSD. It is certainly overpriced, but it has genuinely been getting a lot better in the last year. When I first got it I was disappointed because it was so useless, now I use it probably 70%+ of my drives.
IMO Tesla is the closest to a mass-market version of the technology.
Fanboys sometimes talk about a favoured corporation with rose coloured glasses. Hateboys (or whatever you might call an inverse fanboy) often talk in reductive and/or derogatory terms about both corporations and anyone who defends them. Both groups are occasionally a bit sad and naive, but it's usually only the latter which become corrosive and openly hateful.
Unfortunately the bulk of the internet seems incapable of recognising this and all too often gives hateboys a free pass.
Fanboys also annoy me. The other side of the coin is that there are people who worship companies no matter what they do.
I personally prefer more of a “let’s judge each product on its own” sort of person. I love my iPhone and AirPods, but I don’t personally have any desire to own a Mac or the new Vision Pro.
The self-driving car level system is stupid because it is implies linearity but it is absolutely not.
It also implies that higher level == better, which is certainly not a given. Is a system that can drive well on 10% of roads 99% of the time better than a system that can drive on 90% of roads 80% of the time? Not objectively. The former is "level 3" and the latter is "level 2".
A solution that can get you to 3 quickly might never get you to 4. And just because you beat someone else to market with "level 3" doesn't mean their solution won't skip over yours straight to 4/5.
This is a tired argument. Level 3 driving in extremely strict conditions in a very small area using technology and software that doesn't scale isn't "beating" Tesla.
Level 3 is the lowest level of self-driving. Level 2 and below are driver assistance features. Tesla makes very nice driver assistance features, but they have not released any features which operate the vehicle safely by itself under any circumstance.
MB is beating Tesla in the self driving game because they've released a car that is >0% self driving. Tesla is beating everyone at the driver assistance game.
This is semantics. Firstly because this difference is largely because Tesla chooses to not deploy it as level 3 in some tiny highly-mapped market with sensors (LIDAR) and software that don't scale (MB's level 3 breaks at the first change in roads like construction). Secondly because Tesla is 90%+ of the way to building level 3 driving in 99% of places. MB is 99% of the way to level 3 driving in 0.1% of places and it would take them years and billions of dollars to get that to 5%. I'll let you do the math and see which is further ahead.
It's not semantics at all. They're both currently focused on solving very different problems under the broad category of "driving automation". While MBs approach has obvious coverage limitations, the advantage to that approach is that the solution is a more clearly scoped problem with a more obvious answer: expand the coverage. Tesla's approach doesn't have nearly as clear of a path to advancement. They need technology that doesn't yet exist to get there. Some have posed some serious concerns about whether Tesla's feature-first maturity-second approach is an engineering dead end and will ever be able to mature to the point of being able to operate unsupervised. They may be close, but the Pareto principle is a bitch.
Time will tell, but I suspect we'll see Tesla adopt some of the same strategies that other automakers are taking before this race is over.
> clearly scoped problem with a more obvious answer: expand the coverage
That's the problem, though. The scope is always changing. Roads change, barriers get put up, roads are closed, potholes form, detours signs go up. As soon as any of this happens, the extremely accuracy mapping that systems like MB rely on stops working. This has been proven when this sort of tech caused literally a dozen self-driving cars to just randomly stop and block a single intersection a year ago.
> Tesla's approach doesn't have nearly as clear of a path to advancement.
The path is very clear and they're doing it.
> They need technology that doesn't yet exist to get there.
This isn't really the case. Self driving can be done with cameras and sufficiently advanced software alone. The software isn't 100% there yet, which is why they're still requiring human supervision. But the technology is definitely there.
> Some have posed some serious concerns about whether Tesla's feature-first maturity-second approach is an engineering dead end and will ever be able to mature to the point of being able to operate unsupervised
Sure, possibly, but MB's approach is by far the more certain dead-end due to my first point.
> Time will tell, but I suspect we'll see Tesla adopt some of the same strategies that other automakers are taking before this race is over.
I doubt it. The other automakers are using dated methods that have been attempted for decades. Tesla is the first to go balls-out on camera-only automation.
MB's approach will work when cars literally drive on rails.
> currently focused on solving very different problems
MB is focused on highlines and providing little value for a very high price.
MB is simply no a software company I would trust. Company like Waymo have spend billions and billions to get to where they are and their software engineers are a hell of a lot better then those at MB if I know anything about German software engineering.
Tesla has deployed end to end neural networks that can handle a huge amount of situation and is getting better far faster then MB is improving its system. With MB approach it would take decades to get there and that if you assume really good execution.
MB's system accomplishes the levels of quality defined in the SAE standard. Tesla is taking a different strategy by focusing on quantity of features, although many of them fail to meet the reliability standards of the higher SAE specs.
Tesla is stuck at level 2 because the level of reliability required at level 3 would mean they'd have to remove features to meet it.
Tesla generates plenty of headlines every time one decapitates a driver or crashes full speed into large pretty much visible from space police/fire truck blinking all of its lights.
At some point there will be a research breakthrough in ML with models that can extrapolate physics which is the current thing that is missing from self driving being actually good.
At that point Tesla is going to be the winner without a doubt because they have the hardware and data to train en masse and deploy to cars.
As a current Tesla model 3 owner, when I bought it - there was nothing remotely similar on the market. Today, I see the SC network, AutoPilot and general-'fun' factor as the Tesla differentiators.
When I need to buy a new car in a few years (I honestly have no idea what kind of lifespan to expect), I'm looking forward to more options.
The long term future of Tesla is a battery manufacturer and a charging network. Those are the two things they are good at. The cars themselves are quickly being beaten out by the larger players.
My wife drives a Tesla and I drive newish rental cars on a reasonably frequent basis. So I have a basis for comparison. They are definitely not being beaten by larger players. At least not at this stage.
Their software is top notch compared to the mish-mash of home grown and Car Play on other vehicles. And the implementation of AutoSteer (free cut down version of self driving) is far superior to what I've seen in other cars.
I can see other automakers catching up in 2-3 years, but that is not the case right now.
I've never seen "software" (by which I assume you mean the consumer facing stuff in the cabin) that made me want to buy a car. Yes, I've seen Tesla's. It looks fine. So does a radio with 6 buttons.
If I want anything, I have a cellphone. It's impossible to compete with "put that UX through better speakers/mic/screen"
So much this. I was ecstatic to hear the articles a few months ago saying that car manufacturers are going back to buttons. I prefer my car to have essentially no software. It needs to have a modestly sized screen and then whatever is necessary to display my navigation app and media app from my phone. Climate control and media control should both be physical buttons.
I recently bought an EV and a secondary concern (as in, not one of the primary concerns of size, range, charging speed, and price), was the control interface. I went with a model that has nearly all physical controls. Had the choice between otherwise equivalent vehicles been available, I'd have paid a non-trivial sum to get a button interface option.
From my Tesla-owning friends, I hear that their software is the "best", which seems to be like being the tallest dwarf. I literally can't imagine a pure software/touch interface being better than a physical button interface for the most important driving controls.
I’ve personally enjoyed auto steer on every car I’ve driven not a Tesla. Some let you keep your hands off the wheel, and none of them phantom break every couple hundred miles, which is the ultimate deal breaker.
> I’ve personally enjoyed auto steer on every car I’ve driven not a Tesla. Some let you keep your hands off the wheel, and none of them phantom break every couple hundred miles, which is the ultimate deal breaker.
I'm actually curious what systems you're using. I have very limited experience, I have a M3 and a 21 Corolla with Toyota's version.
My M3 has never once just given up on the lanes and stopped steering, but it's a very common occurrence on the Toyota. It just gives up and suddenly you're back to controlling it with no real rhyme or reason to it that I can find.
I don't mind it happening, after all they are just assistants like you said, it's just the zero warning "I give up" that it seems to have. At least with Tesla's version it attempts to keep going while screaming at you to take over. The Toyota version just gives a small beep and by the time you figure out what the beep was it's given up completely and if you were unprepared (having your hands off the wheel[bad thing to do anyways, but a lot of people do it], only slightly following the road) you may be sliding into an adjacent lane.
I've used Hyundai's adaptive cruse control on an older model. It doesn't do anything with the steering wheel, but it beeps when you leave the lane without using a turn signal. As far as tracking the speed of the cars in front of you and coming to a complete stop in traffic, it works great. I've never had a phantom braking incident with many thousands of miles driven on that mode. But that's not auto-steering at all.
I've used Blue Cruise a good bit which supports hands-off modes. This system works very well on highways hands-free. It seems to want me to put my hands back on the wheel when approaching the toll gantries and goes back to hands-free a few seconds after the toll gantry, but otherwise I've been able to go well over 100 miles at a time without touching the wheel or brakes. I've never had any kind of phantom braking situation or slow downs, it works well in stop and go traffic, and has overall been a great experience.
i only ever want CarPlay. i want my own apps that i already have, my own settings, integration into my calendar without leaking data to some random third party.
on my smart tv i use apple tv, and never their own ui. i trust apple for privacy and dont want to log in or configure 20 apps on my car. i want my iPhone and its features, period.
I'm happy to consider a non-Tesla (mostly because I'd really prefer a more traditional gauge cluster and more physical controls), but have struggled to find anything that beats the price for performance of the Model 3 Performance. And yes, I realize I'm a niche buyer.
> "A few years ago there was no good option besides tesla, but in another couple years tesla will have fallen behind the competition"
Much of the competition still struggles with software. Sure you can use Apple CarPlay or whatever for the basics, but as far as the full software suite goes, there isn't yet much that comes close to Tesla's performance, ease-of-use, UX, functionality, hardware integration, automatic over-the-air updates, etc...
This is my point. Tesla is good at a small handful of things, and making cars is not one of them.
They could sell batteries, charging infra, software, and whatever else to the companies that are competent at building (and fixing!!) cars. They aren't going to remain competitive on the cars themselves
> "Tesla is good at a small handful of things, and making cars is not one of them."
Tesla is manufacturing EVs at much greater volumes than almost anyone else, and doing so very profitably. They also score consistently high on customer satisfaction. Seems like making cars is exactly what Tesla has become very good at in recent years?
Sure, Tesla may not make the most luxurious, nor the cheapest cars on the market. But right now they seem to be very successfully hitting a sweet spot in the middle.
I still cannot figure out what Car People mean when they say Tesla is bad at making cars. What are you looking at that normal people don't see? The one thing I agree about is the yoke steering wheel, but that's on a high-end car nobody seems to actually buy.
I'm not a Car Person (I hate cars, electric ones included), but what I often hear said is that they feel very cheaply made, in terms of fit and finish, both interior and exterior. Panel gaps, water leaking into the trunk, squeaks and rattles. Mostly not very serious (not powertrain issues or anything), but nevertheless, not something you want to see on a car you're paying as much for as a Tesla.
I had heard the same things. And then I actually rented a Model 3 for a week (twice actually). Aside from panel gaps (the Trunk lid was slightly misaligned on one of the cars I rented), I think the whole “Tesla is bad at cars” is promulgated by people who have never actually sat in a Tesla.
Everyone loves to complain about panel gaps and that's usually what drives them mad. lol. I've never cared for panel gaps or minimalists interiors though.
BMW in my circles has the reputation as being a brand you buy when you can afford to have a car in the shop most of the time. Most American brands have reputation as just being really poorly built and bad value props. Not sure how either of those two options overcomes that view.
Outrageously expensive to repair sure (though which car isn’t these days, my corrolla got into a fender bender and fixing the bumper was north of $1000), but I’m talking about always in the shop due to shoddy construction. Afaik that doesn’t really apply to teslas.
>a brand you buy when you can afford to have a car in the shop most of the time
TBF, unless you are in a Niche market (off roading a land rover) - it's generally hard to buy a bad car today.
Is a Camry more reliable than a 3 series? Yes. But you're talking 4 9s vs 5 under warranty; being near a good dealership with good service is markedly more important than brand reputation. If my Audi/BMW/Volvo are in the shop for a week every other year and they easily give a loaner to cover, does it really matter? At that point, the cup holder being 5% better placed for convenient access matters more.
Once you’re out of warranty BMW tend to “implode” like everything breaks at once. But even in warranty dealing with going to the dealership and getting the repair is a huge hassle vs just having a car that stays out of your way.
Time is our most valuable asset and giving it up to stupid things like waiting in dealership waiting rooms, regardless of how much free coffee and popcorn they have just isn’t my idea of time well spent.
We had a first-year X1. Starter went after ~10,000 miles. Dealership was garbage (hence my comments above), but still towed us home and dropped off a loaner-car for the ~week it took to fix. Annoying, wasted ~hour waiting for toe truck to pick us up; but overall not a horrendous experience (despite piling 3 adults and 2 dogs into toe truck).
I had a 2010 Impreza, ~first month or two of ownership - dashboard went nuts and i pulled over. Car got towed to dealership - they found nothing wrong. Lost an evening and no loaner car in the ~48h it took them to determine 'nothing wrong'. Two 'new' cars - vastly better experience with one than the other.
Anecdotal of course; but
> even in warranty dealing with going to the dealership and getting the repair is a huge
You get that with any car - my Tacoma was indestructible and still had multiple recalls I had to drop it off for.
You are correct if you're talking driving a car into the ground though - I'd vastly rather have a 10 y/o v6 Taco than an 8 y/o supercharged Dakota.
> The cars themselves are quickly being beaten out by the larger players
Based on what exactly?
Tesla cars are wildly popular in their segments. They have elite efficiency, high margin, they lead in costumer loyalty and costumer satisfaction ratings. Model Y is literally the most sold car in the world.
What actual evidence are you basing these claims on?
Tesla is making a huge amount of money because of vertical integration, why would they give that up to be a contract manufacturer or sell batteries.
Keep in mind it was extremely common on HN to proclaim Tesla was going to go bankrupt, that the Model S would never be manufactured at any scale, that the Model 3 would fail and would also never be manufactured at great scale.
Sure Tesla has plenty of flaws and always have, and yet they remain ahead of the competition in what's going to be a multi-trillion dollar market (EVs) segment.
Tesla's primary business problem is that they only have one killer product, the Model 3 (meaning they're too easy to cripple if sales fall out from under that one thing). They massively screwed up on the truck, when they should have just made a normal EV truck with some Tesla touches (Elon's ego on Cybertruck cost them hundreds of billions of dollars in sales over the next decade; it will go down as one of the dumbest business mistakes in recorded history). The truck should have been their key diversification, especially in the huge US market for trucks. The truck segment should have been mainstream and borderline boring, yielding tens of billions of dollars in annual global sales. Instead it's going to be a mocked niche product that trails off rapidly in sales after the initial splash (assuming they actually bring the Cybertruck to market).
But if Tesla knew what they were doing, they would have bought a large chunk of Ford while the valuations were at peak mismatch (or all of it, via their hyper overvalued stock; de facto bribe the Ford family with a huge number to take the acquisition offer), electrified Ford's truck lineup in a long-term partnership, and yielded epic scale profit from it for decades to come.
> Tesla's primary business problem is that they only have one killer product, the Model 3
Their killer product is the Model Y.
> meaning they're too easy to cripple if sales fall out from under that one thing
Common car platforms like Civic or F150 stay pretty can stay pretty consistant for decades.
And Tesla is actively working on other things.
Also remember, they make money from car service, that will increase over the years. They also do grid storage both large and small and that business is already big and growing fast.
They have other products already developed, like the Semi. And are currently building a factory for a 'Model 2' in Mexico.
> They massively screwed up on the truck
I would disagree. People now just assert that Cybertruck is bad. But the reason they went with that are still valid and it still has a lot of preorders and a lot of interest. In the long run that architecture could save them lots of money and be very profitable.
> Elon's ego on Cybertruck cost them hundreds of billions of dollars in sales
That's just an opinion. And if the really need to they could just design a normal truck and put it on the Cybertruck platform. They would cost a few billion but it wouldn't be that bad.
> it will go down as one of the dumbest business mistakes in recorded history
Or it will go down as one of the best. You clearly don't like the vehicle, but its numbers in terms of interest, people searching for it, preorders and so on are very good.
Remember when nobody was gone follow threw on their Model 3 preorders?
> But if Tesla knew what they were doing
Growing 50% over almost 20 decades and being one of the most profitable car companies in the world while still growing fast for the next couple years but they are apparently idiots.
> they would have bought a large chunk of Ford while the valuations were at peak mismatch
That's a terrible idea for so many reason. That like Compaq buying DEC.
> electrified Ford's truck lineup in a long-term partnership, and yielded epic scale profit from it for decades to come.
They can have epic sales profit without Ford. They can make something called the E150 and make it look like the F150 and sell just as well without taking on all the legacy.
I remember when everybody said 'Tesla should just let a contract manufacture build their cars' and that just as bad an idea.
Not a big fan of Tesla myself, but surely if they figure out self driving that’ll make their cars relevant for the forseeable future? On top of that they seem to be able to make cars cheaper and more quickly than most of the incumbents.
Musk absolutely underestimated the difficulty of full self driving. He's still doing it today. FSD is one of those techs that makes for awesome demos but it has thousands of edge cases that are hard to test for even with millions of vehicle miles recorded in their big AI datacenter.
The tell for me is Hyperloop. That is an optimal environment for FSD, a closed and contained track that has only identical vehicles on it, and yet they still use a human driver.
I only wonder how long it will take before Elon becomes disillusioned, maybe it will never happen. Maybe they'll pull a rabbit out of their hat and actually get it to work. I'm still skeptical.
However I wouldn't d pay attention to the hyperloop thing. It would be trivial to "hardcode" a car to drive at least the tunnel part. It's almost certainly that the FSD team doesn't want to waste time with that.
Musk said, in 2015: "Self-piloting cars are a solved problem." "I view it as a solved problem. We know exactly what we need to do and we will be there in a few years."
Last year, though, he was backpedaling: "Our focus is on solving the problem."
My driveway is windy and gravel. I live at the end of a windy, gravel road with a steep drop off on one side. The road it connects to is a back country road with NO lane markings at all. Deer are prone to watching you approach, then jumping out at the last minute. You need to slow down when you first see them, not when they start moving.
I doubt FSD will get to the point I would ever fully trust it outside of a freeway or city, and almost certainly never for the 2-3 miles closest to my house.
Now, if they can get the cars cheap enough that I can actually afford one, I might be interested. There are 4-6 trips I take a year in the 250-400 mile range, with zero public transport available inbetween (rural-ish to rural-ish areas), and not paying for the gas would be nice.
Just look up the margins on Tesla’s cars vs EVs from other manufacturers. For example, Tesla’s net profit margin in Q1 2023 was 13%, meanwhile Ford is hoping that their electric vehicle division can get to 8% net profit by 2026 (they currently lose money on them)
For sure. But that’s an absolutely massive “if”. Almost guaranteed we’ll be transitioning to EVs (I mean, we already are at a small scale) before full self driving is reliable.
The big players are just late to the game, but have been making cars for decades. They will easily overtake Tesla on number of EVs built as they transition.
Tesla isn’t good at making cars. And every year my confidence in full self driving goes down. They are good at charging though and will print money doing that.
Tesla is now closing in on run rates of 1.5-2 million. They are on bath to overtake companies like BMW in total sales. They are already far more profitable.
You seem to still think of Tesla as some small fish. Tesla is the biggest BEV producer in the world by a large margin. They produce more EV then all of the major German producers put together and at better margins.
Volkswagen is the 2nd largest car company in the world and they have been all in on EV for many years now, and Tesla is highly competitive with them and actually makes far higher profits.
A high level Toyota engineer said of the Model Y 'its a piece of art' (and that was not even the newest generation). Volkswagen CEO said that Tesla is beating them on production efficiency.
If you want a reality check, go look at Toyota first EV and compare it to Model Y. They are not even in the same class, Tesla beats it on literally every metric.
If you still think large car companies can just easily spin up millions of EV per year, you are deluding yourself. You are even more optimistic then the car companies own incredibly optimistic predictions. Ford and GM have even stopped saying they will catch Tesla, its now a race for Nr.2.
> Tesla isn’t good at making cars.
Based on what? Your subjective insights?
Tesla cars have very high margin and are cheaper then competitors in the same class. But they suck at building cars?
Tesla cars have high costumer loyalty and high consumer satisfaction in every survey? But they suck at making cars?
Are you sure your not mixing up your personal feeling with the real world.
> And every year my confidence in full self driving goes down.
They don't need self driving to be highly profitable.
> They are good at charging though and will print money doing that.
Actually charging doesn't make much money, its a terrible business.
If you include PHEV, Tesla is second behind BYD. Even if you look at EV only, the margin is not insurmountably large. When the big automakers (Ford, GM) truly change over they will dwarf Tesla.
But I'm not including PHEV as those are a very different supply chain.
> the margin is not insurmountably large
Mhh sorry what?
Look at how tiny Ford is. And you have to understand that Ford was very, very late at doing battery partnership. Their battery factories are very late. So they will not scale very fast the next 3-5 years because of battery constraints.
At the same time, GM on this diagram looks way larger then it is in reality. The reason GM looks big is because of one tiny China only micro-car that yields almost no profit and will never be exported (and sales have gone down this year already). Their actual Ultium sales are barley existing.
You keep thinking these companies are so much bigger then Tesla, they are not. Ford and GM have less then 2x the revenue of Tesla. Tesla has faster growth and less debt and less aging infrastructure (they have brand new factories) and now legacy business. In terms of available capital Tesla can actually deploy far more, and raise money far more then Ford or GM.
Let me give you an example, Volkswagen. The ID.3 is comparable to the Model 3 and it came out in 2019. It was part of their MEB platform, something they had majority invested years before that. In 2018 they said they would invest 50 billion $ and have since increased that. Clearly they matched Tesla in spending for the last 8 years or so. And yet look at the chart, they have half the BEV sales of Tesla. And Volkswagen is consider very successful in the EV world.
You vastly underestimate how hard it is to transition to EV. Just because Ford, GM, Honda and so on are bigger then Tesla, does not magically mean they can just start mass producing EV. Go at actually look at how hard it is to scale, even for large companies with huge ability to invest.
> (Ford, GM) truly change
Have you looked at Ford and GM own predictions. Because you seem to have a higher opinion on these companies then they themselves have.
Ford just talked about how they would be losing money for many more years and then only just match what Tesla is doing just now.
Large companies often over promise what they can do. But you actually go beyond that and claim that they under promised and will do significantly better then they themselves believe.
Of course GM just learn a hard lessen with their initial battery factory, scaling is hard and that why Ultium had almost no sales in Q1.
Sometimes I feel like people live in a different universe than me. Do you know how many electric vehicles Tesla is likely to deliver in 2023? 2 million.
Do you know how many GM is hoping to deliver? 150,000. Do you know how many they have delivered YTD? 40,000. And they're ahead of Ford, Rivian, and all other US EV manufacturers. Only cheap Chinese only EV brands have a similar volume.
"Easily overtaking" Tesla is not happening at this point. It will be a real fight to ramp production up to Tesla numbers. Did you know that the Tesla model Y was the best selling car in the world thus far in 2023? Not EV, car. It beat out the gas powered Toyota Corolla.
The big incumbents (US, EU, Japanese) have high cost bases and may struggle to compete on price with Tesla, as well as emerging Chinese competition.
The real "secret sauce" behind Tesla right now is that they've figured out how to produce affordable, desirable EVs at scale while maintaining industry-leading margins.
I wouldn't call the established players "late to the game" vis-a-vis self-driving. They've been dumping plenty into research and acquisition and are probably near parity with Telsa.
The perception of the larger players as laggards comes from the fact that they aren't as keen to lie consumers and investors. Their leadership doesn't enjoy the same privileges as Musk does.
I think the vast vast majority of people (non HN techies) at this stage don't care that nearly as much about self driving as they do about having an electric/Hybrid/PHEV car that's just a great total package of a car - something that the existing car manufacturers are far, far better at than Tesla.
Even manufacturers like Chevy and Ford can run circles around Tesla in terms of overall quality.
Anecdotally in LA which has tons of electric cars, people that originally had interest in the status symbolism of Tesla jumped back to Mercedes, BMW, and Volvo(Polestar) the instant those manufacturers had viable electric options.
People are banging down Toyota's doors for the plugin hybrids. Those people are not buying a Tesla in the meantime. People are just waiting for their existing trusted manufacturers to produce enough capacity.
it would be amazing if more people realized that keeping the car you have is still the most environmentally friendly solution.
I'm going to keep my ICE car until it is unreasonably old or impractical for me, which is probably at least 8 more years.
At that point who knows what the electric car landscape will look like, but certainly production will be massively more ramped up.
PHEVs will be the perfect car for most people. It will do 99.9% of people's trips on pure electric, and not have any compromises on long road trips either.
> The long term future of Tesla is a battery manufacturer and a charging network. Those are the two things they are good at.
Agree 100%.
At present, Tesla really feels like a bit of a "Jack of all trades, master of none" job.
I'm certainly no Elon fanboi, but I will happily state that there are clearly a number of things they do well (certain core components and the charging network).
But the cars themselves as a whole. They feel like what they are. Cheaply built, but sold at a premium price.
Tesla would do well if they became the OEM's OEM.
You know, a bit like how Dell, HP and everyone else ship servers with Seagate drives. Tesla should become the Seagate and leave the outer shell bit to others.
> At present, Tesla really feels like a bit of a "Jack of all trades, master of none" job.
That's an odd take. Model Y is the best selling vehicle in the world, and the second best selling vehicle in the US after the Ford F-150. It outsells the Corolla, Camry, Rav4, Civic, etc. Look at Mercedes, BMW and Audi sales, they've been plummeting because everyone is buying a Tesla instead.
They're also the leading battery storage company and their battery storage business has been growing like crazy.
> But the cars themselves as a whole. They feel like what they are. Cheaply built, but sold at a premium price.
This has become such a meme that I think anyone who says it has never driven a Tesla for more than a few hours. The interior quality is not on par with Mercedes/BMW and maybe there's a few panel gaps, but every other part of the car is significantly better. The handling, infotainment system, performance, efficiency, autopilot, maintenance, etc. A $50k Model Y competes with $70-80k cars, but has the interior of a $35k car. Most people are more than happy with that trade off and that's why it sells so well.
According to the 2022 numbers I was able to find, the Model Y was number 9 in the US, behind the Tacoma, CR-7, Sierra, Camry, Rav4, Ram, Silverado, F-150.
And the numbers on most non-Teslas seemed down because of chip supply.
I don't think it's controversial to say that cars have been supply constrained in the past few years.
I guess I should have been specific that I'm referring to the last quarter. Tesla's sales growth has been ~50% YoY so comparing to 2022 numbers won't be so accurate going forwards.
I wasn't referring to the cells, but the products themselves. CATL produces cells, and yes Tesla uses cells from many of those companies. But a battery storage system is more than just the cells. I was specifically referring to Tesla's PowerWall & PowerPack/Megapack products, which has been growing at a fast rate. Just in the last ~3 weeks there were two several hundred million dollar battery storage projects announced that use Tesla Megapack[1][2].
In terms of cell technology, it's really hard to say whether those press releases announcing major break throughs actually matter or not. Tesla is also producing its own cells, but they'll happily buy whatever cells are available since at this point they're constrained by cells.
I've had a Tesla (Model S) since early 2020 and once the initial allure wore offI've missed driving a BMW and once the i5 is here I'll be backing to driving BMW. The supercharger network is by far the reason I've stuck with the Tesla this long, but there's enough options now. The build quality, the drive quality, service quality, all of it is subpar. The Model 3 is a zippy car but the lack of an instrument cluster is a deal breaker for me.
Tesla deserve all the credit for getting everyone else to wake up. But they are so so at making a car I actually want to drive.
That means they have no future of consequence. Charging networks will be a mediocre low margin business and they'll be hyper plentiful with little to no serious moat. It'll be like owning gas pumps as a convenience store (yielding pennies on the dollar; the money will be in generation there, as it's in oil/gasoline in gas pumps). Batteries are and always will be a horrific business with low margins (just ask eg Panasonic and all the other players what their battery businesses are worth, especially compared to what Tesla has been making from automobiles).
I sometimes suspect what's really going on with Tesla is that they want to become the world's manufacturer of EVs of all sorts, utility-scale energy storage systems, and software for EVs including ADAS.
Musk has said it: "the factory is the product." I kinda wonder if the real goal is, as the legacy OEMs quake, rattle, flail around begging for government handouts, and start to fail, Tesla knocks on their door and says "hey we can build your cars for you, with your brand on them, using our charging standard, our batteries, and our software. Just sign here."
Tesla is working with those companies. But Tesla also has its own batteries, their own battery IP, their own manufacturing lines and so on. They even manufacture some of their own manufacturing equipment.
The have factories in Germany and Canada building dedicated battery manufacturing equipment.
They have their own battery factory in California, in Texas and in Berlin. Model Y are already being sold with these batteries in it.
And Tesla own batteries are very innovative specially in terms of their manufacturing.
> I assume there’ll be a surcharge , so is it better for them to have the biggest slice of much smaller pies?
Tesla will be getting billions of Federal dollars[1] for their network. IIRC, the law doesn't explicitly state that the network has to be CCS, only that it has to be "interoperable". If the government insists on CCS as a precondition, I predict Tesla taking them to court (and likely winning). As an outsider, it appears American manufacturers (NACS) are trying to squeeze out foreign manufactures (CCS) from Federal dollars for charging networks. I will change my mind if Hyundai, VW, Mercedes or BMW sign up for NACS.
If you thinking about buying an EV between now and 2025 in North America, you need to be a very very big enthusiast of any other brand but not Tesla.
You have a non zero risk of your non tesla car turn into a pumpkin few years after a purchase.
Basically any non tesla EV sold in North America before 2025 will depend on a proper work of that adapter with a particular network. And I explore lots of them the other direction, they are all ugly and make your experience horrible. Compare to just plug and go grab a coffee, with find a converter, plug it, make sure it work, get to the tesla app, make sure that part works...
Your traveling will be a charade of opportunity to charge in a particular network.
On the opposite side of it, if you buy a new or a used Tesla made in 2015, it will still charge you 5 years away from now with no issues in basically any network in North America. Not only tesla.
First of all, the mission of Tesla is to transition the world to sustainable energy. If you believe them, that should be enough.
But, second of all, this also makes business sense. Everyone will have to use the Tesla app, where they can get targeted offers and become a kind of "Tesla Light" customers. People wonder why Tesla doesn't advertise. Well, with these deals, the need for advertising is a lot less than without them. Also, Tesla is essentially becoming a platform for EVs. How long before some OEM license Tesla software?
And, remember that there are over 17000 superchargers in the US alone and the deal with Ford and GM only allows access to 12000 of them in the US and Canada together. To get the full Supercharger experience, you still need a Tesla.
An app isn't going to make me buy a car or Tesla equipment. Aesthetics, utility, and cost are my main purchasing decision dimensions, and Tesla isn't winning those for me. I'm not buying something shaped like a prune that can't haul gear and equipment.
The ads on Uber and other delivery apps are irrelevant to my daily life. Uber claims advertising has generating $500M in ARR, but that's co-mingled with restaurants seeking placement on Uber Eats. Ads for movies and McDonalds on Uber is probably generating a small pittance of that sum.
Furthermore, lots of businesses will get into EV charging when it takes off. Existing gas stations, restaurants, and shopping will undoubtedly join when they believe the timing is right.
FWIW, I'm dreading having to buy an EV. Gasoline works better for my use cases. I don't have a place to charge at home, and I don't want to wait for on-demand fill ups.
I think the push to EVs has been a function of worldwide market and regulation, not necessarily consumer choice.
> FWIW, I'm dreading having to buy an EV. Gasoline works better for my use cases. I don't have a place to charge at home, and I don't want to wait for on-demand fill ups.
Yeah, if you don't have home or workplace charging, EVs really don't have significant advantages at the moment.
> An app isn't going to make me buy a car or Tesla equipment. Aesthetics, utility, and cost are my main purchasing decision dimensions
The interesting thing is: There's confirmation bias in this, but every single person I've talked to who owns a Tesla might have said this before owning one, but would now never say it afterward. It does things you never know you needed, until you have it, and then you're shopping for cars afterward and your standards go up. Wait, the infotainment still has a resistive touch-screen which runs at 45fps? The maps won't automatically route me to nearby chargers and give me a battery charge prediction for arrival that learns from my driving habits?
Oh, here's an interesting one: Teslas have (configurable) cabin overheat protection. Maybe some other brands have this as well, I don't know, but: the cabin never gets above 100F, if you have more-than 20% battery, and it doesn't cause that much drain (maybe ~3%/day, maybe more in Arizona or Texas). In other words; you never have a hot car, and you don't fuddle with remote start / "turn the AC on 10 minutes before I leave" / whatever. Its just... never all that hot; and you don't notice it until you get in a traditional car that's been sitting in the parking lot all day, sticky leather seats and its 120F inside.
All I can say is: Your mindset is probably more a reflection of your environment than any more foundational principals; and if you want to keep it that way, I'd recommend that you don't spend any significant length of time driving a Tesla.
Couldn't disagree more. We really wanted an ev. Even bought it when there were no incentives available. Nothing to do with the global market or regulation.
It's a superior experience in every way. From the performance, to the software, to the charging. I just plug it in and never think about charging. On long drives it needs a topup when our family does.
I live in place where the parking is super weird. Historical building with historical grounds. We're literally not allowed to resurface the parking because it's all historic. Part of an old steam power plant between cotton mill buildings from the 1800s.
How am I going to fuel my vehicle? We won't be able to install power at limited distribution sites for everyone. 300 residents with their own EVs is going to make shared charging stations a nightmare, and everyone will fight. I know this because we installed a few charging stations and it has already became an issue for the six Teslas on campus. Multiply that by 60.
It's easy to spend five minutes at a gas pump on my way somewhere. No impact to my day. Having to schedule time slots with neighbors is a nightmare.
You can still buy a new ICE well into 2030s in the US, if you truly need one, meaning you can keep driving it until 2050s. By that time window the majority of cars on the road will be EVs, and the charging infrastructure will have changed substantially. I doubt it'll take that long for it to be upgraded though. I bet many people in your building will drive an EV by 2030. Most of them even.
> I live in place where the parking is super weird. Historical building with historical grounds. We're literally not allowed to resurface the parking because it's all historic. How am I going to fuel my vehicle?
They don't advertise because their word of mouth and media presence is incredibly strong. It's also the same reason I basically had to strong arm the sales center into selling me one of their cars -- the demand is incredibly high.
> Everyone will have to use the Tesla app, where they can get targeted offers
Sounds like a nightmare. Want to go on a road trip? Either subject yourself to target advertising on your phone or pay a monthly fee. Hard pass!
I don't want to have to use an app at all if I want to charge. And yes, plug and charge is still using an app, you need to use some kind of app somewhere to manage the payment. I'd much rather have the option to just choose what payment I'd like to use before I start charging. Sure, optionally support plug and charge as well, but at least give me the option to not need to go to an app to choose this this card or that card and what not.
> remember that there are over 17000 superchargers in the US alone and the deal with Ford and GM only allows access to 12000 of them in the US and Canada together.
From what I understand, the ~5k chargers that aren't included are the older ones which don't speak CCS and they're usually the lower power ones. Those will probably be replaced over the next few years. Meanwhile all their newer ones will work with all the other compatible cars, so this percentage (~29% currently) will shrink over time, probably pretty rapidly given they're increasing the rate of new charger installation.
And in the end, for a lot of people it probably won't even actually matter. I've spent 2 years so far with a non-Tesla EV and it hasn't been any kind of difficulty for me in the slightest. Will it be nice to get access to another 1,500ish charging locations with a basic adapter? Sure, there's a few more charging locations on the road trip routes I take which will be open to me. Will it actually impact me day to day? Not in the slightest.
Oh no, there's a few thousand old chargers which charge at slower speeds than the new ones a several hundred miles away that my car can't charge at? Guess my car is worthless :'(
Also worth noting: I don't hear people talking about this. Tesla allows non-Teslas to access a very small portion of the supercharger network already. They offer a two-tiered plan; pay-as-you-go, or a $13/mo subscription which activates the lower charging rates Teslas already get. I don't know if its been announced yet how this applies to the deal Tesla has signed with Ford (and GM/Rivian?); will it look more like how EA/evGo operate, where there's a plan you sign up for to get the more market-rate charging prices? Or are they doing away with that?
I think they don't use ads because they already get a ton of money with green credits. I recall all the Tesla doomsayer a few years back saying Tesla was going broke then Tesla sold these credits to other companies for millions. If Tesla loses these edges, which will happen if other car companies go 100% green, then we'll see a more hate-able Tesla with ad-ware.
Just to clarify, in business terminology, that's not a moat.
A moat is something difficult/impossible for other competitors to cross, something strategically defensive.
Being cool isn't a moat because anyone else can become cool. In contrast, network effects are a classic example of a moat, because no matter how much cooler/better your product is, people won't switch until the majority of the rest of their network switches. So nobody moves, hence a defensive moat.
That's not strictly correct. It's (very!) hard for someone to replicate the brand of Apple or Coca-Cola. Moats are all on a scale, and branding is one of the generally harder ones to compete with.
I believe these studies to be problematic for many reasons. The first is because they measure owner satisfaction, but they make zero effort to measure owner expectations. Are the expectations for people buying Teslas much higher than people who buy from other manufacturers? Are they more sophisticated of a buyer and think more deeply about their car?
The second issue is they also do things like compare the Rivian R1T to the Model 3, which is half the retail price and less than a quarter of the manufacturing cost (Rivian takes huge losses on their sales).
The final issue I'll mention is that JD Power makes almost all of its money from traditional car manufacturers. This is a huge conflict of interest and there is zero legal accountability.
Most people don’t need Tesla range. The MINI Cooper does 114 miles for under $30K, and Hyundai, Kia and Ford all offer 240 mile + ranges for under $40K.
Tesla Model 3 has 270 miles on the base model but you’re paying over $40k for that.
For me, it's hard to find anyone else that matches Tesla on price, range, and performance. It seems like with the other EVs you get to pick two of those.
JD Power is also a marketing arm for the auto industry. Their numbers have been a joke since at least the 80s. "#1 in initial quality" is such a laughable claim yet car companies pay JD Power to award it every year.
Market share isn't a good metric for a company that started out with 100% market share and therefore has nowhere to go but down. I think Tesla will continue to be successful selling cars and grow the number of cars they sell at a high rate.
Also, it sounds like this move is a really good incentive from a product perspective. If there really are a significant of people who only chose Tesla because of Superchargers, then they'll be forced to fix those problems. Though, personally, I really like my Model Y and someone would have to come up with a WAY superior car to get me to switch. I certainly wouldn't want to go back to one of these legacy car company's cars with their poor software, bad UX, and ugly and overwrought design aesthetic. Also, a lot of their competition is still on paper. Rivian is probably the nicest option for a non-Tesla EV right now.
Tesla did not have 100% market share. Nissan Leaf came out before the Model S. (And if you want to count the Roadster, you should count the EV1, etc.)
But I think the point is that electric cars will take over the whole market, and so if Tesla’s US market share falls to like 20-30% from the current 60% or whatever it is but that market is 10-30 times larger, that’s a huge win.
Yes, in theory the GM's EV-1 beat them to market by a lot. But in real terms Tesla had the EV market cornered for years. The only real competition was the Leaf and Bolt, and even those were low volume vehicles. It remains to be seen if the legacy automakers can successfully ramp production this year. They have made a lot of promises, but actual deliveries are still lagging.
I legit believe that many people in these threads haven't learned that the Model Y is the best selling vehicle in North America during 2023-Q1 [1]. Not just best selling EV, or best selling crossover; best selling vehicle. It outsold the Corrola, at half the price.
This is not a situation of "oh Tesla will continue to do well, they'll sell cars" or "what's their moat? they're finished": They are #1. Dozens of competitors have hit the market over the past five years. They are outselling all of them, at substantially higher price points (fed tax credit has something to do with it versus gas cars for Q1 here, but it impacts all EVs reasonably equally).
If there's something on the horizon which will change that, I need that explained to me because I'm not seeing it. That Fords and GMs will also get supercharging? Anyone who says "the supercharger network significantly influences purchases toward Tesla" doesn't own an EV; armchair commentators. To some small degree; sure. But the biggest influence, bar none, is: "My friend has one." That's it. Few spend significant time driving a Mach-E and think "everything about this screams I need it". But that is a not a-typical experience for Tesla vehicles, because so much about it is so far ahead of traditional cars, and even modern competing EVs.
So much about it is also pretty far behind, like quality control. But that doesn't come through when you're driving a friend's perfectly functional car. And it certainly hasn't hurt Tesla up to this point.
Definitely not alone. I'm on my second Tesla, and from what I can see of Tesla's plans for the future, I think it is likely I will not buy another for my next car. I'm very happy that everyone else is jumping on board with NACS.
> Is the brand name of being effectively the gas station of EVs worth it to them?
Yes, because it's becoming more and more clear that Tesla's future potential is way more in their role as an energy company than as a carmaker.
- Global charging network for cars + trucks => Tesla as an energy distributor
- Residential + utility scale solar + utility scale battery storage => Tesla as a maker of energy production infrastructure
- Tesla smart grid software => Tesla as a global electric utility
In other words, they're working towards becoming the clean energy combination of ExxonMobil + General Electric + Your local power company.
The cars are an important business that happen to also incubate and drive forward all the other technologies I mentioned.
> It’s their biggest moat as far as I’m concerned.
It’s their biggest moat IFF it’s limited to Tesla’s and their charging stations.
If every car adopts their charging port/socket and every charging station (Tesla and non-Tesla) supports Tesla’s port/socket then the most diminishes and ultimately disappears.
> I’m glad there finally seems to be a push to a better standard in North America.
"Better standard"?
It may be more widely available, the plug is a bit smaller, but it's not objectively 'better'. It does not support 800V, something CCS does even today.
They could sell charge circuitry and battery packs to the big three. They’ve been wanting to sell batteries to people for ages. Given how much of the cost of a car they are, maybe that’s a reasonably profitable market.
I mean, the range/$ seems to be a pretty good moat. Last I checked, the only cars with a decent amount of range per dollar were at the very low end (Chevy Bolt) and had very little range (200 miles vs 300 miles for Tesla M3).
I shipped my car several times back and forth between USA, Europe, and Australia because the rental cost would have been more than the shipping cost.
RoRo shipping my car cost round trip $1,600 last year USA/Europe plus $300 insurance rider.
Three month rental, plus rental insurance versus rider on my insurance? Rental would be approximately $3,100 car and about another $1,800 for insurance.
There's no registration headaches about the car not meeting the differing safety/emissions regulations in the different markets? It seems like its a massive hassle for people to even bring kei cars from JP to US, I routinely hear about how expensive it is to import cars across markets.
As a business it seems smarter to grow the pie and increase your revenues even if Tesla's marketshare decreases.
Even through the lens of hating Elon Musk and wanting alternatives, most people have no strong feelings at all. Price and availability largely dictates what Tesla will sell. I have not seen any data Elon's antics change sales volumes.
Smart or not, it's definitely Tesla's strategy. They have an explicit goal of 20% of the vehicle market. They don't care what their share of the EV market is, they want 20% of the combined market.
Tesla’s gross margins are down quite a bit since the Twitter deal. It’s hard to correlate consumer sentiment with the price drop vs other factors, but gross margins dropped from 27% to 23% which represent a lot of money.
How much this impacts the company going forward is hard to say, but my guess is we’re talking 10’s of billions. Which makes it much harder to keep up with the expanding EV market, their super charger network for example needs to dramatically increase capacity just to keep up with the current rate of new Tesla production. Aka 25 year old EV’s will still need a place to recharge.
Tesla’s gross margins were much higher in 2011 than 2022. But yea, this is why I said it’s hard to separate how much of this was Tesla specific vs industry wide. However, the need to cut prices despite high inflation was unusual in the car industry and suggests a Tesla specific issue.
There is no telling how much money is involved in falling margins if you don't also look at revenues. A quick Google search shows their gross profits look fine.
Also, you would have to compare them to other manufacturers. If profits were down an average of 20% and Tesla's were down 10% then they would be over performing their competitors during a down market.
Gross profits need to pay back capital expenses for equipment or land, R&D, etc which is why moderate drop in gross profits represents a much larger drop on long term profits.
#2 ; PROVIDE A RECEIPT OF WHERE THAT POWER CAME FROM. FULL FN STOP
Where is that energy produced, what are the inputs? How much FN fuel was consumed to deliver that energy to the energy-plant which fed the port to which my e-car hooked up to, WHO TH HECK IS CALCULATING THIS DATA?
> Where is that energy produced, what are the inputs?
You'd pretty much just have to look up the averages for the grid in your area. The pixies on the wires get all mixed up in the big pipes, its not like the wires from the car just go straight to a single power plant.
> WHO TH HECK IS CALCULATING THIS DATA?
In the US, the EIA along with local state agencies and grid operators.
Tesla owns the electric gas station! for now... Now that unity is achieved in the US, I think we're about to see an explosion in charging stations and designs of various charging hubs (drive-in movies's revival?) as Tesla won't be allowed to own the network 100% come soon.
Who else is going to invest in a fast DC network? The closest competitor was Electrify America, and they can't make the economics work. Tesla made it work by subsidizing their $1B+ global fast DC charging network cost out of robust vehicle margins.
Most EV users will charge at home, some at their place of work and businesses, with fast DC charging filling the remaining gap (people who can't charge at home or people on road trips/high utilization driving patterns).
> Tesla made it work by subsidizing their $1B+ global fast DC charging network cost out of robust vehicle margins.
VW is doing the same with EA (although with more vehicles and lower margins). I don't know the specifics and I'm sure they would love for every stall to be full but I wouldn't be surprised if they had no expectation of making a profit at this point or even in the next five years.
Honestly I think they have some limited upside here which is that if they can fix the quality of their service and add NACS cables then they can compete on price or location with superchargers for NACS owners' business. My guess is that the stalls are empty because few who seriously need to travel long distances would buy a non-supercharger compatible EV specifically because the EA experience sucks. If they fix their UX then they can immediately begin tapping into the NACS market instead of waiting for CCS cars to slowly trickle into the roadtripping segment of the market.
VW was required to fund Electrify America ($2B) as part of their Diselgate settlement with the US goverment, and they were prohibited from branding them as VW as part of the deal (hence the EA brand). EA has tried to get additional funding with not so great results.
Might be able to salvage the network if they add or swap out for NACS plugs (opening up to the mass market EVs), but if they can't make the unit economics work and increase utilization, those EA stations are going to end up abandoned with the enterprise shuttering.
And this is why EA is such a shitshow. VW was required to spend the money. They weren't required to make it a good charging system. So: poor maintenance, buggy software, and overall an experience that makes everyone who tries to use one hate it.
There are many brands of DCFC around me. EA obviously, EVGo, blink, 7Eleven, Road Ranger, Francis, and Volta. There's a few other travel centers on the routes I take which have their own branded chargers as well
The earlier non-Tesla charging stations definitely had a rough start as there was practically zero market at all for them. The economics will change as more EVs are on the road. I do agree most early EV owners are going to be those with easy charging at home, but people without home charging may eventually want EVs as well. Public charging station use will probably increase a good bit over the next few years.
Those are brands, not networks. No one is going to road trip if they can't trust they can roll into a station at 10% state of charge and charge in 20 minutes off hours. The network uptime is the selling point of Tesla Superchargers. You will never be left stranded.
Install the PlugShare app or check out their website and see what comments users leave about reliability with regards to your local stations.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1136861_tesla-superchar... (The Tesla Supercharger network was the first comprehensive DC fast-charging network in the United States, and it remains the best in terms of customer satisfaction, according to a new J.D. Power study.)
I don't care about "networks". I don't choose Exxon or Shell or whoever because they have the most gas stations, I go to the one that's most convenient for me. I'm not beholden to any particular "brand" or "network" of charger, I just want one close that works. I'm no particular brand fanboy, I'll use whatever works and is convenient.
> Install the PlugShare app or check out their website and see what comments users attempting to charge look like.
I use the PlugShare app a good bit. All the chargers I referenced are 9.5+, with most of them having 10 ratings. I also have my own personal experiences at those chargers. In all of my public charging sessions I've never once failed to charge at a decent rate at a DCFC. And I'm one who has driving around the city testing out chargers because I've been interested in the tech. I have experienced some of those free L2 chargers at grocery store parking lots being offline, but even then most of the time those have worked flawlessly.
And I don't bother with specific apps for charging "networks", all my DCFC has either been plug and charge or phone NFC/EMV payment terminals.
I don't personally put a lot of weight on Twitter polls to give me an accurate picture of reality, and if JD Power tells me something I'm likely to think the opposite is true. Most of JD Power's statements are meaningless noise to me.
I don't doubt Tesla's chargers have more uptime on average. There's a lot of things they do better historically, like having lower lifetime rated cables they change out more often and they're faster to roll out to places with issues to repair. But its not inherently a Tesla thing, the other chargers can do it and it seems in the past year a number of companies have stepped up their maintenance and reliability considerably. I'm going by the data I can see around me and what I see on PlugShare around me, which shows the non-Tesla chargers near me and on the routes I want to take are generally pretty reliable.
Since EvGO and Chargepoint seem to be public companies, I looked up their financial statements. It's not pretty. They are all bleeding money and that's with machines that people complain are down a lot. Chargepoint is in a slightly better spot because their Level 2 chargers seem to be somewhat better in the profitability department, but still losing tons of money.
And that's not really surprising. If you look around at quotes, installing a single DCFC charging stall of 150Kw or better looks to run about $100k per stall plus significant installation costs almost matching that.
At $100k for the stall itself, and if we assume $.50/kwh (a bit higher than most EVGO stations I see around here) and we assume $0.16/kwh electricity (residential rate here), that means each kwh sent to a car has a profit of $0.34. So the stall would need to dispense 294,117kwh of energy to pay for the stall itself. If the average rate of dispensing to a car is 100kw (which is probably high even without leafs and bolts due to charging curves) in 15 minute intervals, that's 11,765 cars that need to charge for 15 minute intervals to break even on the equipment itself, so an average of 32 cars charging per day (assuming my math is right, which it may not be).
32 cars per day at 15 minute average charge times means the stall has to be utilized 33% of the day. That paypack doesn't count maintenance, install fees, repairs (they are always breaking down), kickbacks to the land/building owners, etc... And many areas of North America doesn't get electricity for $0.16/kwh (though some are cheaper)
The math definitely feels to me like it's really hard to make DCFC stations profitable in much of the US, especially until EVs become more prevalent.
> we assume $0.16/kwh electricity (residential rate here)
EIA average for industrial electricity is ~$0.14/kWh. I know around here its not uncommon for industrial users to pay all the way down to ~$0.07/kWh, there's a good bit of difference depending on how far up the line the industrial user owns which varies the delivery cost a good bit.
I definitely agree these early days in DCFC is mostly a brand mindshare and land grab play for a lot of these companies, I'm guessing they're trying to already be in the ground in all the places for when/if the market for DCFC really swings to higher demand.
I think the way to make it profitable is to install PV canopies over the charging stations. Then at least during the day the electricity is free.
Of course capital cost is higher because you still need a fat feed from the grid and transformers and coolers, and maintenance might be more costly, but free electricity during the day when most people are driving would almost certainly pay that back quickly.
>The closest competitor was Electrify America, and they can't make the economics work. Tesla made it work by subsidizing their $1B+ global fast DC charging network cost out of robust vehicle margins.
The economics are going to have to change.
Right now, dollar-for-dollar, electricity for your vehicle is cheaper than gasoline. I'm confident that will not be the case in the near future; the charging infrastructure has to be built and maintained, and the government will want their tax money (in Canada, a significant proportion of gas prices are taxes).
>Right now, dollar-for-dollar, electricity for your vehicle is cheaper than gasoline
When I did the math on this, that wasn't necessarily the case in my area, it depended on the situation. $0.40/kWh comes out to around 7 miles per dollar, depending on your vehicle and how you drive it (eg on a road trip going 80mph you'd probably get less than 7, chill city driving with no passengers maybe you get as high as 10 miles per dollar).
My current ICE car isn't particularly efficient (around 30mpg on the highway, whereas nowadays even non-hybrids can get 40mpg) but for road trip purposes it would also get around 7 miles per dollar.
Tesla also made it work by making their chargers cheaper with smart engineering. CCS stations are huge monoliths packed full of fancy lights, touchscreens, ridiculously long cables, giant plugs. Superchargers have none of that. A cable no longer than absolutely necessary, a stand just large enough to hold it comfortably, a plug about as small as possible, no blinkenlights or touchscreens.
An ordinary 120V 15A plug can add 100km to a car over night when electricity is 1/2 to 1/4 the price of a DC fast charger. Tesla's mobile charger is $200.
The superchargers are essential is giving people the peace of mind to make the EV switch and for enabling long-distance road trips, but they just can't complete with the economics of home charging, which is where the bulk of EVs will be charged.
there are many home situations where home charging is not immediately feasible. Apartments and condos (both medium density or high density) are not conducive to personal charging installations.
Actually I think you'll find that the electric gas station is owned by anyone with a car garage and electricity. Fast DC charging is the exception, not the rule.
Sure, but I'd think that makes the economics of operating fast chargers all the more tenuous. Like, if we assume they're mostly needed for people away from home, that means both that they're essential to adoption of EVs in general (people want to be able to go on road trips) and that they suddenly go from being a thing people need all the time to a thing whose demand has extreme fluctuations seasonally, or with the economy insofar as it affects people's seasonal income, etc., just like other travel-oriented businesses like hotels.
(I should also note: so far the EV adoption story has been much better for people who own their homes and have dedicated parking, but as someone who lives in an urban neighborhood where most car-owners park on the street, I think expending to markets like mine will necessarily mean more public chargers are needed.)
Is Tesla planning to update Supercharger stations to accommodate non-Tesla vehicles.
Charge plug notwithstanding, the placement of Supercharger stands is usually for the left-rear charge port on all current Teslas. The stand location and cable length is a problem for vehicles with different designs.
Demonstrated here (particularly the F-150 Lightning)...
I hope that part of the standard is that all vehicles shall have a charge plug on either front/right or back/left corners.
Making the cable longer makes the experience worse for everyone - it makes the cable heavier (harder to use), more expensive (which will end up in power prices), easier to damage (as it is dragged across the floor or driven over), more electrical losses in the cable (again, higher prices).
There are plenty of other things we have standardized for similar reasons - for example, imagine if different banks had credit cards that were different sizes so wouldn't fit in your wallet.
>The only people who stand to lose are those weirdos who reverse into parking places. ;)
As a weirdo who reverses into parking spaces, I find that it's almost always safer doing that in a crowded parking lot than it is to park nose in.
When you're driving up to the spot you're already (hopefully) fully attentive to any risks (children, animals, people crossing, whatever), and can wait or carefully drive around those obstacles. Then when you're ready to leave you're already facing the optimal angle to slowly inch out and look in all directions for hazards.
If you're backing out of a car space you have to trust your ability to look at all three mirrors simultaneously + ideally also straining your neck to cover blind spots.
The backup camera requirement really shaped the auto industry. It meant all models needed a screen too. And that in turn meant that many cars used the same screen for other kinds of UI, replacing buttons and dials, and requiring a computer, software teams, etc.
Compare to Europe, where low end cars don't have a screen - and are also substantially cheaper.
Or back out the easier and safer way and place your arm behind the passenger seat and physically look out the back windows. It's the way we're taught to reverse where I learned to drive, granted this was before backup cameras existed.
Having the connector in a corner is definitely a lot nicer than central. However, it should be on a passenger side corner rather than driver side as Tesla uses to make curbside charging more convenient.
1. Number of rear end and front end collisions and how expensive it would be to repair charge ports.
2. It would be ugly, people complain about the radar placement on some cars, imagine every car having both a radar and charge port right in the middle.
One fact that's not widely appreciated: Tesla is very efficient, and this efficiency is starting to have macro effects such as this. They've been building out their network diligently for over a decade, they have the permitting, assembly, uptime, everything dailed in. Every single dollar of capex they put in the network will get them more connectors and more sites in less time than if EA or any other company will get for that same dollar.
They might also be the only major manufacturer outside of China that can build EVs profitably at scale. 5 years ago the Model 3 had no competitors and today they have plenty, when looking at the spec sheets. But no one has been able to ship the sheer numbers of EVs Tesla has, because they either physically can't or won't do it because can't make money (it's hard to say as legacy autos don't break out their EV divisions)
The Model 3 now costs $40,240, which is $33,400 in 2018 dollars after inflation. That is, they are making comfortable margins on the $35K base model they aspired to when they started selling the model.
EVs are still overwhelmingly charged overnight at home. As they percolate to lower price points, that will change somewhat, but ultimately the total spend on charging stations is just too low to be much more than a distraction for a company the size of Tesla. The reason they built the supercharger network was that it was needed to sell cars, and now that they have it they might as well make money with it. I doubt it's much more than that.
You hinted at this, but a significant % of the population lives in either rented or multi-family housing, so home charging may not be feasible (at least in the short-to-medium term).
While I own my home, I don't own my parking space (community property, assigned to me via HOA rules). While we're allowed to install a chargers, it's only possible for homes with assigned spaces directly in front of the home (albeit pricey, as it involves concrete work to run cables under community sidewalks). Some homes have spaces offset by a fair distance, or across community street, so installing a home charger is either extremely expensive or impossible.
The people who can charge at home still make up more than 50% of the market, though, and there's a few more years before that really becomes a limiting factor in sales. That's plenty of time for most places to get L2 chargers available.
But, it is a problem that needs solved. We're firmly within the "buy a new EV" demographic otherwise, but the cost+hassle of installing a charger at home definitely contributes to our "meh, we'll keep the ICE another year or two" mentality.
And in a few years, charger availability might start to impact resales. Maybe. Mostly just thinking aloud.
First reaction: I think you are right. Not only will a large portion of all chargeups happen at home, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the margin is lower.
Second reaction: Maybe there's a business model where most of the profit from a charging station comes from things other than charging (e.g. onsite coffee shop, store, gym, etc) that gives people things to do while charging.
That seems foolish from a business perspective. The one thing they're most successful at is cars. They built an incredible first-mover advantage in EVs, but that isn't at all true in the power market. They're just a blip in the battery market. And while superchargers are great, there's no moat there at all.
If they're smart, they'll double down on cars like the Model 3 & Y, and instead of making them sillier (no stalks?!) they'll make them ever more appealing and cost competitive. They're the Toyota of the EV world right now, and if they play this right they'll be the Toyota of the whole market in 10 years. They would need a proper truck, though, to make that happen.
Tesla was always closer in vision to an energy company than auto maker.
Wouldn’t surprise me if they leverage the healthy EV competition to growing their battery, supercharger, and energy generation capabilities. With these one day overtaking car sales revenue.
What battery capability? Do they even make the top 10? And superchargers are pretty sweet, but there is no moat at all there, anybody can make a NACS fast charger. EA hasn't done great, but that doesn't mean anything other than EA kinda sucks, there are plenty of manufacturers capable of building reliable DC chargers.
Tesla's Nevada plant makes 37 gWh per year and is currently expanding to 100 gWh per year. 100 gWh would put that at #2 if it was operational today, however the current leaders will also continue to grow rapidly so it's unlikely they'd go above the middle of the top 10 list.
Despite being one of its most visible operations, the supercharger network is an utterly minuscule part of Tesla's overall business. It's unlikely to ever represent much more than 1% of Tesla's profit.
There's never going to be big money in vehicle charging because the vast majority of charging occurs at the owner's premises, and there's no technical impediment stopping the remainder from being a highly competitive industry.
The impediment is that it takes a huge amount of technical knowledge and execution, plus a huge amount of capital, plus the ability to operate a huge service and maintenance team.
If there is already a very large first rate infrastructure, then replicating that is very difficult.
Your statement sounds to me like 'trains are technically easy' there is not reason we can't have highly competitive industry in cargo transport from Chicago to New York. But yet there is only one company really operating that infrastructure.
Charging is not as extreme of a case as trains, but putting in huge capital investment for minimal profit just doesn't make a lot of sense.
We can see this today, EA is losing money. Non Tesla charge companies all lose money.
If charging is all pay per use and not a subscription (especially not a subscription you get included with a vehicle), there's no need to operate on a large scale; it's like gas stations: most are franchised chain stations, but there's tons of independents.
Electrify America is the product of a court settlement; it doesn't really need to earn money, it just needs to keep VW out of court.
Electrify America has already spent the money from the court settlement, they need raise money like any other company and make a profit.
> If charging is all pay per use and not a subscription (especially not a subscription you get included with a vehicle)
Those things are already happening on large scale.
The logic you suggest is only true if an independent can easily make a competitive station. The problem is Tesla is mass producing super charges at prices that simply can't be matched by other producers.
There are also economics of scale in terms of routing cars and achieving higher utilization.
Private franchises need to actually make a good profit to be worth setting up. In EV charging the money goes to the equipment provider or the electricity producer. You might make some money with additional services like a shop or a cafe. But in that case you might as well make a deal with a large player like Tesla to put up a station.
Also if your station breaks, you need an repair person to show up quickly. And company that sell charging equipment they mass produced are usually not good at providing those services.
You will also have the disadvantage that the biggest fleet will simply route people to their own stations. Driving down your utilization.
I think most charging networks will be large not individual. We see very few individual DC fast chargers.
Lithium stores energy. If Tesla is Exxon they also need to vertically integrate and source actual energy, which I suppose they do to some extent with SolarCity.
Tesla has been the the vertical integration and power supply business for a while now. Or at least has wanted to be. See the Tesla PowerWall and Solar Roof projects.
I don't really care whether it's CCS or NACS. What I do care about is that a choice is made.
The worst outcome for EV adaption would be to have multiple different charger networks and plugs that all need adapters to be compatible with each other.
What's important is that there is single standard, not how thin the cable is or how it looks.
For the EU, CCS was chosen a long time ago and this means every car can use every charger without thinking about it.
For the US, it makes sense to go with NACS if Tesla opens up their network.
Cars are always built to spec for either EU, US or any market. So it matters little if EU and US chose a different plug.
Would love to hear fast how charging stations will scale in a way that beats the current price and speed of filling up a car with gasoline.
I mean, even in a small town with, say, three gas stations, there are peak times when all the spots are taken. Average fueling time is probably a few minutes.
How to switch that to an all-electric system?
+ build a significantly higher number of fast electric charges than there are gas pumps. But apparently fast charging stations are rather expensive to build, and that's reflected in prices-- they are higher than current gas prices. There's also the significant increase in the time to fuel the vehicle compared to gas, and that's not going to change any time soon.
+ ramp up at-home charging as well as "at-business" charging for things like landscapers/etc. who use a lot of vehicles. But if you do this at scale electricity costs go through the roof and you're back to the same pricing problem as above.
I'm just thinking of this in terms of a kind of soft-realtime system. You've got something like "blocks" of vehicles all of which need to be fueled on deadlines which can generally get met currently. If there's a massive switch to EV I don't see how those deadlines get met without an enormous increase in charging prices. And without massive subsidies there's no way to build the infrastructure needed to meet the deadlines.
(And let's just assume zero risk of a fast-charger monopoly or cartel...)
I have no data, but I suspect we underestimate the impact of at-home charging. Essentially, all vehicles parked at a residence start every day with a full charge. This eliminates most of the demand on fast-charge stations for around-town use.
Granted, they still consume power that the grid has to supply, so pricing may change, but I suspect gas station traffic will go way down, in aggregate, as EV adoption climbs.
One thing the government hasn't noticed yet (afaik) is that electric cars aren't taxed like gasoline cars. The per-gallon tax (which pays for important things like roads) is a substantial portion of the overall cost. Nobody factors that eventual cost in when they claim EVs are sooo much cheaper. They will probably continue to be cheaper, just less aggressively cheaper than Tesla claims.
> Essentially, all vehicles parked at a residence start every day with a full charge.
But as I pointed out, this causes a non-trivial rise in the demand for electricity at the home, and a consequent jump in electricity prices.
Somewhat relevant-- inflation and other economic problems have already caused a growth in car repos this year. And it includes both the mid-level and luxury vehicles. People who thought they could afford those massive "market adjustments" in the past two years are literally unable to make payments. And that's with banks really wanting to avoid doing the repos since the price at auction is already going to be significantly lower than those market-adjusted prices.
That is to say...
If EVs are produced at scale and home chargers installed at scale, a jump in electricity prices could lead to the same problem. In that case it doesn't matter how cheap EVs get, that electricity price jump is functionally equivalent to taking on higher monthly payments for the car. And someone in Dallas, Texas needs both a charged car to get to work and their home air conditioner running to not die. If things get tight then it's the actual car payments that have to go unpaid. And we'll be back in repo land again.
Some anti-EV states have realized this and have raised the registration cost on these cars substantially. This is less than the gas tax you would probably pay on normal commuting but I expect more states to follow this lead.
Most of the states that have introduced this fee are the states with low gas taxes, so EV owners end up paying substantially more in EV fees than an average user pays in gasoline taxes.
Not only have politicians noticed this, but the conniving little jerks have already started framing the problem in a way that implies EVs should be paying far more than gas cars.
Many states are pushing for tag fees based upon the average revenue per gas/disel vehicle per year without regard to those vehicles MPG. Given that a lot of EVs are replacing high MPG vehicles, the formulations are incredibly unfair.
But they still have a few years before EV owners are a substantial constituency, so there's a chance to jam through unfair taxation (in the false name of fairness) before that happens.
I am not a civil engineer, but it's frequently cited in these discussions that road damage goes up as a function of the 4th power of vehicle weight[0].
A Rivian R1T has a curb weight of 7148lbs [1], a 4wd Chevy Silverado 1500 has a curb weight of 4826 lbs [2]. I think an increased registration fee is more than fair. Hell, do it for all vehicles if you want to make it really fair. We drive far larger vehicles in the US than necessary.
> Many states are pushing for tag fees based upon the average revenue per gas/disel vehicle per year without regard to those vehicles MPG. Given that a lot of EVs are replacing high MPG vehicles, the formulations are incredibly unfair.
Is it, though? Does the taxation rate matter more than the total collected per year distributed by the number of users? If you aren’t counting/won’t count miles driven, this seems like a fair alternative. The idea isn’t to tax 21 cents a gallon - that’s the implementation detail - the idea is to collect $xx billion a year to (ostensibly) pay for transportation related costs.
To use a logical proof instead, assume all cars are converted to EV with the flick of a wand. Do you think your proposal would seriously last? The same amount (modulo some percentage) needs to be collected to pay for whatever costs are relying on that tax to be funded. The rate (not the total price) has to go up for EV users.
Now if gas at the pump included an explicit carbon tax then absolutely, that shouldn’t be ported over to the rate EV users are charged.
> Is it, though? Does the taxation rate matter more than the total collected per year distributed by the number of users?
I'd agree with that, if it were applied fairly. Drop the gas tax and switch to $/car across the board. Alternatively, develop a new formula based purely upon vehicle weight[1].
But instead, they just want EVs, including things like Nissan Leaf, to pay the same as the average. In my state, the average is a lot closer to an F-150 doing 15k/year than it is to a Corolla.
This is just punitive to the EV owner.
[1] As it is, mpg correlates strongly with weight, so gar cars effectively already get taxed based upon a combination of weight and miles driven. The challenge is to figure out a reasonable, non-punitive approach to doing the same for EVs. At least in "anti-EV" states, it is very obvious that there is no attempt to do that.
Yup, I have had an EV for 5 years and I now fast charge on the road only about 2x/year.
If you can charge at home, work, or both.. you will likely end up in a similar position.
Currently the price of energy per mile at a Tesla Supercharger is about 1/3 to 1/2 the equivalent amount of gasoline. If you charge at home it's more like 1/4.
A large fraction (probably more than half) of EV owners charge at home and rarely need a fast charger. Approximately zero ICE owners refuel at home. ICE cars must be refueled at gas stations. Demand for fast chargers will never be as high as demand for gas stations for this reason.
Anybody with $10,000 can install PV panels and charge their EV at home for free forever. Fleet owners with $50,000 can charge their entire fleet for free forever. No impact on the grid with these latter options.
> Currently the price of energy per mile at a Tesla Supercharger is about 1/3 to 1/2 the equivalent amount of gasoline.
Is there a citation for that? It was my understanding that fast chargers were much more expensive, but I could be wrong.
> Approximately zero ICE owners refuel at home.
Nor do they currently use the extra electricity needed to fuel their cars each night. Again, at scale that's going to have an effect on electricity costs.
> Anybody with $10,000 can install PV panels and charge their EV at home for free forever. Edit: bonus if you have links to any youtube vids of people who have done this and are currently subsidizing the entire cost of daily commutes with solar.
I don't know anything about solar and would love some citations if you have them.
This guy has an Aussie accent but I'm pretty sure he's talking about US dollars. His numbers look accurate to me. He's estimating $5000 for charging a long-range Model 3. I think that might be a bit optimistic so I'd stick with my original estimate of $10k.
Caution: I strongly suggest you buy your PV panels from a company other than Tesla. Tesla's PV business is a bit of a clusterf*ck. Just get regular PV panels and a good inverter from a local installer. If you want to charge at night, you could either install a grid-tied system with net metering (which decreases your cost of grid power), or you could install a battery just for car-charging. In that case, the Tesla Powerwall battery is a perfectly suitable option. Tesla makes great batteries, but their PV offering is overpriced and they seem to have horrible customer service.
I have a Tesla ~10k miles and have not used supercharger yet because I just plug the car in at home once a week.
If you estimate total pump time.
IE 35 minutes on supercharger vs 10 minutes on gas (including time to drive to station) but take into account number of times you need to actually charge up the car at a super charger. IE once every 2 months vs 3x per month, you will see that you actually spend less total time in a charger station vs gas pump.
It takes like 3 minutes tops to fill up a passenger car from near 0 to 100% range. I would have to stop for gas 10 times in a single month to use 30 minutes of pump time, which, for a car with 500 mile range, would imply 5000 miles of travel in a single month, which is almost non-stop driving at 50 mph. Driving to a station is never an issue, because gas stations are ubiquitous, and found along the route you're traveling anyways.
I spend more time pumping gas for my ICE than I do waiting on my EV to charge, by hours a year.
Lets say it takes 5 minutes on average to turn off to the gas station, go to the pump, pay to start the pump, get the handle into the car, actually pump the gas, return the pump handle, close it all up, get in the car, and rejoin traffic. In my testing its often more than 5 minutes from my times, but lets just say 5 to make things easy. I get gas about every other week in my ICE, so 5 minutes every other week, but I do take some vacations so lets round to a 50 week year, half of that is 25, times 5, 125. That's 125 minutes of pumping gas that I do every year. A little over 2 hours. And that's excluding any kind of road trips where I might have done several of those 5 minute stops in a single week.
Guess how much time I had to spend waiting on public DCFC last year? I took a road trip and stopped for maybe 40 minutes total. Outside of that, 0 minutes.
I spend more time waiting to recharge my ICE than I do my EV, by a good bit.
Lets take a look at US averages though instead of just my use case. Average miles driven is what, ~13,500? Average range of a car is ~400mi? That means ~33.75 fill ups a year instead of just 25? 33.75 * 5 = 168.75 minutes, or 2.8 hours a year pumping gas. If someone can charge at home and public chargers where they're already going to be (work/shop/relax places), they might not ever even need to wait on a public charger, so 2.8 hours compared to literally 0 minutes waiting for charging.
Simple, most residents of the town won't be at those stations regularly. Most of my DCFC charging sessions have been because I've been wanting to try out different locations and charging equipment, not because I needed the DCFC. In reality, the vast majority of miles my EV will do will not need any public charging infrastructure, at all.
Meanwhile, 100% of the miles on my ICE will need public fueling infrastructure. I inherently need to go to a pump sometime to get gas.
> But if you do this at scale electricity costs go through the roof and you're back to the same pricing problem as above
I don't think its as big of a deal as you're thinking it will be. Sure, some percentage of homes out there don't have >100A service at home and will probably need some kind of upgrade to their home service necessitating new equipment up the chain. But for my household to swap out an EV? About 15 feet of power cable, a circuit breaker, a double-gang box, and a NEMA 14-50 outlet was all that was needed.
My peak power usage in the house didn't change at all adding the EV. My EV uses the same amount of power as running a burner on the stove while doing my laundry (electric dryer). Meanwhile my house (and the rest of the grid up the line) was designed for me to pull enough power for me to cook in the oven, on the stove, do my laundry, run the AC, power all the lights in my house, and more. Guess what, I'm not often cooking and doing laundry at 2AM, and I probably already got my house cooled down by then so the AC isn't often cranking that hard at that time. Take a guess when my car charges.
So how much did it cost the grid to add my car? $0.
>So how much did it cost the grid to add my car? $0.
As you say, you are now "running the laundry and cooking" for hours at night to charge your car. How do you conclude this doesn't add cost to the grid?
It didn't take a single piece of new equipment to handle it. All of that equipment was built out to support my high demand loads, so it already existed and was ready to go. The power plants serving my house already had that capacity, the transformers could handle the load, all the lines were rated to handle far more power going to my house than the time I charge. Even if everyone on my street added an EV, it wouldn't take a single piece of new equipment to handle the load because all the equipment is already designed to handle more than that during other hours of the day. So long as people on average charge late at night or other off-peak times, it hasn't increased the peak loads on the grid at all, which is what they have to build to anyways.
Sure, I'm buying energy at those hours of the night, but that's a low time of energy usage overall. So much of a low usage, spot prices at those hours in my area routinely go negative, i.e. there's so much spare energy they're giving it away.
My REP makes money accepting electricity at negative rates for me to charge my car many nights of the year before even factoring in what I then pay them for it. Of course, this then figures into their overall rate contract they have for me, there's certainly hours in the day where my energy usage costs them more than what their contracted rate is for me.
It's true in most of the US right now depending on how efficient either vehicle is. I can't check supercharger rates but EA pricing is mostly the same across the country:
EA membership pricing: $0.36/kWh
California gas prices: $4.86/gal
($4.86/gallon)/(x mpg)=$0.36/1kwh *(29kwh/100mi)
x=46.6 mpg to break even with the Chevy Bolt's efficiency in the worst case scenario for gas in the US.
A Prius and many other hybrid passenger cars easily beat that with mpg to spare.
The Nat'l average gas price of $3.58 means your car only has to beat 34.3 mpg for fuel to be cheaper than EA membership pricing or 25.7 mpg to beat guest pricing of $0.48.
If we use 24kwh/100mi for the most efficient production EV in the US at California prices the break even is 56.2 mpg, lower than the combined EPA of the most efficient hybrid (Ioniq Blue, 58 mpg).
250Wh can move my EV car (Tesla Model Y) 1 mile in around-town traffic (i.e. not at highway speeds).
So to move the car 30 miles, I need 30*250 = 7.5kWh.
If 1kWh costs $.36 at a DCFC, then 7.5kWh of electricity costs $2.70.
Compared to $4.86/gallon and assuming an ICE car gets 30mpg, that says electricity at a DCFC is about 55% of the price of gasoline, for the same number of miles driven.
The breakeven mpg is 30/.55 = 54mpg. (This is a bit different from your figure of 46.6mpg because you were assuming 290Wh/mile and I was using 250Wh/mile.)
I was using 30mpg above because I'm comparing to my ICE sports car which is fun and fast and gets 30mpg. High-mpg ICE cars are (IMHO) less fun. (And my ICE car is still not as fun or fast as my Tesla).
So your numbers are in the right ballpark. $.36 is roughly correct for electricity at Tesla superchargers too (it varies depending on where and when you charge).
But at home where I usually charge I pay $.14/kWh for electricity. If I compare that price with my 30mpg ICE car, we see that I pay $1.05 to move my Tesla 30 miles. Premium fuel (which my turbocharged ICE car requires) is about $4.10 where I live. So for me my cost of energy is 4.10/1.05 = 3.9x. That is, my ICE car costs about 4 times as much to operate as my Tesla. And it's less fun to drive.
Caveat 1: For highway driving, the Tesla requires more than 250Wh per mile because of air resistance at speed, so the price advantage is smaller on the highway. That's even more true if you use superchargers (see above). But Level 2 chargers are common at many hotels and are usually free. So if you take road trips and are not in a hurry, you can avoid DC fast chargers and their high costs. Most hotels do not provide free gas pumps, but many provide free charging for EVs.
Caveat 2: Teslas eat tires like candy. You WILL have to buy new tires more often
with a Tesla than with an ICE car. But that's the only maintenance expense
that's higher with an EV in my experience.
Agreed on all counts, vehicles are a very complicated product segment so specifics will always matter a lot, but overall running costs are usually going to go in favor of the EV assuming you can charge at home or at your destination. Something like a Prius Prime is probably the only type of vehicle that can realistically compete on running costs for the average consumer and it will probably be a lot more boring than any EV other than the Leaf or Bolt.
I do wish we had seen more performance oriented hybrids at reasonable price points since they get the benefits of instant torque without as much of a weight penalty as full EV but I think that we might already be a bit too late into the EV transition for that.
Important to note that any appreciable amount of home charging makes it a lot harder for gas to beat EVs or PHEVs most places and my calculations above are for 100% fast charging. PHEVs are hard to calculate for because where they land between hybrids and full EVs is basically entirely dependent on the user but the upshot (ignoring emissions) is that the best PHEVs aren't much worse than the best hybrids or the best EVs so you can choose the cheapest fuel on a day-to-day basis and potentially come out ahead.
An 8 stall Tesla charging station has a throughput of ~24 cars per hour. A 4 lane interstate can handle ~8k per hour. So, to support peak throughput between cities, you'd need ~2700 stalls every 100 miles or so. But this assumes 100% EVs. With current growth projections, we'd half this ~12 years from now. That seems completely doable, tbh.
Cost is an interesting issue. Capital costs aren't particularly excessive, at <$1M for a typical station. Ongoing costs are dominated by demand charges rather than usage charges. Demand charges amortize better as utilization increases. If anything, today might be the peak for DCFC cost as better utilization makes lower prices potentially profitable.
And, of course, the bulk of charging is always at home or a workplace on L2. TBH, people underestimate fixed costs in our grid today. It isn't clear what will happen, but I wouldn't bet on increased utilization automatically leading to higher rates.
EDIT: The above DCFC analysis assumes that 100% of those vehicles will need to charge. My guess is that this is radically high, even for big travel days. Real world might need a lot fewer stalls than that.
My electricity as $/kwh has gone down over the past 10 years. All else being equal, my bill stayed the same. That's because the fixed $/month for maintenance _doubled_.
I've since added an EV increasing my usage. It costs less than it would have 10 years ago. I've seen the same thing playing out with other utilities in my state and across the country.
Increased kwh consumption with relatively flat peak demand[1] means that the fixed costs of running and maintaining utilities is a smaller overall percentage of energy costs. OTOH, increased demand drives higher prices which is a conflicting factor. At DCFC it is pretty easy to work this out, as good utilization always helps. At residences, the impacts are far less clear.
[1] Interestingly, the bulk of EV charging is effectively addressable demand. We are already seeing a lot of utility experimentation in this area.
as an EV owner, I suspect the answer is: home charging. Most people with EVs can start their day with a full charge, every day, so maybe the answer is that the gas station model will be relevant to many fewer people - e.g. people who have to drive more than their range every day, people with no plugs at home, etc).
>I mean, even in a small town with, say, three gas stations, there are peak times when all the spots are taken. Average fueling time is probably a few minutes.
I agree, and bring this up often.
During arguments about charging versus refueling, the length of time to charge your EV is significantly greater than fueling up. EV proponents say, "what's the big deal? I just set my car to charge and stretch my legs for half-an-hour".
That works when EVs are 1% of the cars on the road, but not when they're 50%. During road trip season, high traffic gas stations are backed up as it is. Will we need 3-5x the infrastructure (read: "pumps") to service that level of EVs? I mean, we'll get there, but it might be annoying for a long while.
There is a charging station in Beijing with over 600 stalls. Yes, we might need more charging stations than gas pumps. But since a charging station + infrastructure is a lot cheaper than a gas pump + infrastructure, what's the big deal?
I’m with you on this. I think the only way to build out a network at this point is with EV manufacturers or governments subsidizing the costs. You can’t turn a profit selling the electricity because the gross margins are so much lower and the real estate costs are so much higher than petroleum-based products. The amount of profit earned per parked minute is going to be exponentially lower.
And the grid connections are not a trivial problem to scale. At some point you exceed the capacity of normal grid connections and you start to require higher voltage feeds and bigger transformers, and that cost is massive. And as the network grows, you’ll need to scale the number or size of substations, which is also not trivial.
Battery tech is expected to improve to the point of 1000km in 20 minutes. This means 5 minutes will give you about 100 miles. The larger problem is how we will safely scale grid generation to meet the demand.
The average EV uses about 10 kWh of power a day. The average Air Conditioner uses about 10 kWh a day. Yes, the grid will need to expand, but it shouldn't be challenging.
Unless your power grid is already broken for other reasons, (cough California).
TLDR: Basically, there's a CCS adapter hidden in the Supercharger stall. If you want to charge a CCS car, all you do is start the session from your phone. The CCS adapter unlocks, and it's on the end of the cable when you pull it out of the holder.
I didn't notice it at first when I arrived, until I recognized the location from the video. It's really compact.
CCS1 and CCS2 use the same communication protocol and Tesla adopted it for NACS in the North America market because they had to for the European market.
Older NA Tesla's can get a body module upgrade to support their CCS to NACS adapter.
It sounds like the adapter will be used at least initially to restrict which cars can use Superchargers. I would imagine this is partially due to the lack of payment terminals but also to prevent untested configurations of EVs.
I'm going to assume all these companies did their homework and NACS is a real open standard, not something under Tesla's boot.
In which case, great! This is the outcome I was hoping for. NACS is the better and more popular connector, it should become the standard in NA. CCS1 isn't that bad, but when you have a choice, choose the better one.
Nissan leafs are still using Chademo, which shows how serious they are about EVs.
At this point, the rate at which automakers NACS support is a good proxy for corporate malaise. Everyone sees the writing on the wall for CCS, and if an automaker takes another couple months to announce a migration it simply means the executive leadership has no clue what they are doing with regards to EVs.
And/or, since automakers evidently need some sort of agreement with Tesla[1], if it takes a while, it could be due to negotiations.
For example, if there are fees for using the connector (not sure), an automaker might hold out to get the best price. There may be terms related to the rates that will be paid for using Tesla's charging stations.
There might be other issues. Maybe Tesla wants to qualify automakers' designs so cars don't cause problems with their charging network, or vice versa. The automaker might want access to Tesla engineers or facilities for help with designing or testing stuff.
Also, I don't know who's supplying the connectors (that will be built into the cars), but if it's Tesla, the automaker may want commitments about how many will be delivered by what date and at what cost.
There could also be some sort of IT integration, like charging location map data or maybe allowing customers a different way to pay for charging (through the automaker's app or something).
> Maybe Tesla wants to qualify automakers' designs so cars don't cause problems with their charging network, or vice versa.
I shouldn't need Exxon and Shell and Phillips and Wawa and Sheetz and whoever to qualify my car to get gas. I shouldn't need Tesla and EA and whoever to qualify my car to get electricity.
I don't see how anyone can see that and think its a good thing.
They all need to agree how it's done though. And gas cars were the same - did you think the size and shape of the gas pump nozzle were handed down from God or something? Everyone had to agree on that at some point. Apparently that was in 1930, or around 30 years after cars were invented.
https://www.cspdailynews.com/csp-magazine/industry-views-all...
We are at that point right now. That is the process happening in front of us. Eventually it will all be settled enough that nobody will have to check that devices work with each other, but we aren't there yet.
> did you think the size and shape of the gas pump nozzle were handed down from God or something?
No, but you'd just have the fuel tank opening large enough that you can put in any particular handle. And in the end you didn't need Gulf saying this brand or that brand could buy gas, but not that brand. So while there were a lot of different handles before U842, they usually all actually worked with all the different brands and the gas stations didn't have to pre-approve the different cars to get gas there.
I've had a few gas tools and gas tanks which didn't have a gas port that was shaped for a U842 handle and yet I've still managed to fuel them just fine. I didn't need to get Shell's authorization every time I wanted to fuel a Toro.
I'm kind of amazed people think its a good thing for Shell to have the ability to say "no, that brand of car isn't allowed to buy gas here anymore". Imagine if Ford operated most of the pumps in the US and could just decide Toyotas could no longer get gas at the majority of pumps. Sound like a good idea?
Imagine if Tesla operated most of the DCFC dispensers and could just decide Toyotas could no longer get gas at the majority of dispensers? Oh wait, they already made that decision. Despite the majority of Tesla dispensers technically supporting CCS communications a Toyota couldn't possibly charge on most of those dispensers even if they had an adapter, because Toyota and Tesla don't have an agreement.
I don't like that a single private company is in charge of this standard, but I think this sort of thing is pretty common and necessary when two companies integrate technologies.
For example, look at how USB C compatibility worked at first. There was a standard, but there were still lots of problems. In practice, implementers may not correctly understand certain parts of the standard, may not grasp the importance of doing something a specific way, or may try to cut corners. Also, the standard may have omissions or errors.
All of this should theoretically be fed back into a future version of the standard, but with evolving technologies, it takes time to get there.
Yeah but Google doesn't need to certify Anker or whoever to make a charger and there's no on-going agreement to make this charging brick work with my phone. Anker can't just later decide to not work with Samsung devices and suddenly not work. They all just speak USB-PD and it works.
Tesla chargers shouldn't care if the car is a Tesla or Rivian or GM or VW or whatever, if it plugs in and it speaks CCS it should charge.
Hopefully government funding of any type will be withheld from Tesla until this happens. I don't care about the port as much as I care about anything with the right connector should be able to charge anywhere. Having to have the proper "agreement" between your car manufacturer and the charging company seems ridiculous. Especially with how mercurial some of the leaders of these companies can be.
maybe google should've, i remember it was basically "buyer beware" with cables. there was this benson something guy who was testing cables and found that a bunch of them would blow up your phone, until he literally had his test equipment blown up by a bad cable. compared to the usb-c situation, apple mfi is a godsend.
I’d say that’s the case for Stellantis (Dodge etc), but I suspect the big European automakers will be slower to get onboard due to the greater investment in CCS in the EU. It’ll require a bigger mental shift, as their leadership may not have as strong a grasp on the North American situation, and will probably have a greater bias toward “standards”. (Yes I realize we’re talking about CCS1 vs CCS2, but it doesn’t practically matter).
Nah, Stellantis is just bad. Their EV tech is poor. They have no dedicated EV platform, and they struggle to make profit on EVs. They're not invested in CCS at all — they're still hoping EVs are a fad.
Stellantis has dedicated EVs in Europe. That largely why Stellantis was created in the first place. So FCA would not be totally lost on EVs. The PSA group does have EVs.
But you are correct, they are not much invested in CCS in the US. Unlike say Volkswagen.
By lack of a dedicated platform I mean that all of their EVs share the platform with ICE/hybrid versions of vehicles. They're either available with an engine of your choice (like Peugeot and DS), or are only a new body on an older ICE+EV shared platform (like Jeep Avenger is built on Opel/Vauxhall Astra).
Contrast this with VW MEB, Hyundai/Kia eGMP, Porsche J1, Mercedes EVA, etc. that were all ground-up EV skateboards without ICE support.
NACS is dramatically easier to maneuver into the port on the car, and supports higher amperage. CSS requires an extra internal flap on the car side that you have to open and close manually, as well. It’s a seriously underwhelming design.
By combining DC and AC onto the same pins, it reduces the part count and weight of bus bars / conductors which run from a car's charging socket and the battery.
NACS is a better user experience for people and significantly so for people with mobility issues, disabilities, etc.
The pre-eminent NACS fast charging network is markedly better than the totality of all CCS1 charging networks.
I've used both and while from a technical standpoint CCS might be superior (I have no idea), in practice NACS is sleeker and feels less clunky.
Is that a good reason to adopt a standard that isn't open? Probably not. Does the average customer cares and will it have an impact on their day to day? Probably not.
EDIT: Seems like NACS is open after all so I don't really understand why we would bother with CCS.
It's open in every respect that matters, but pedants will rightly point out that it hasn't been submitted to a classic standards body (like SAE) to formalise in the way that satisfies middle management and expensive consultants.
The form factor is significantly smaller, which means it’s easier to use. But more importantly the charging connector has no moving parts. A common failure on CCS chargers is that the locking pin breaks and the charger will no longer stay firmly attached to the vehicle causing charging issues. On the NACS adapter the locking pin is on the vehicle.
Charging infrastructure sees significantly more duty cycles than an individual car so it makes sense to move the wear part to the vehicle.
Even with CCS1 the US was out of sync with "the rest of the world", which uses a few different connectors.
And in the end it doesn't really matter. I'm not driving my car across the ocean very often. Import processes already tend to make taking a car from one continent to the other a huge hassle, so to the vast majority of people its probably easier to just sell the car in one place and buy another on the other shore.
Is there any technical reason you can't build an adapter from NACS to CCS1? We have adapters for Tesla destination chargers (NACS without fast charging??) to J1772 and they work just fine.
According to the press release, they will be building those adapters and they will be available in 2024.
Pre ~2020 North American Tesla's can't speak the CCS protocol and need a $200 upgrade to speak it. Presumably many of the Superchargers don't either. I imagine the delay is to upgrade the Superchargers to speak the CCS protocol so that a dumb adapter may be used rather than having to build an expensive smart adapter that can do protocol conversion.
The wire protocol of classic Tesla supercharging is custom, so it'd require electronic components, not just a physical adapter. It may be technically hard, e.g. ChaDeMo and CCS speak a different wire protocol, and there are no adapters for them.
However, when the charging station can use the CCS protocol, it's only a matter a of physical adapter. Tesla's "Magic Dock" is it.
Sure; maybe you want a type of vehicle Tesla doesn't offer, or you want to buy from a vendor who's more open about making parts and service information available to users, or you want a more traditional car interface with normal switches and buttons rather than a big touch screen.
Your question is sort of like asking if there's any reason to buy a computer that isn't made by Apple. Of course there is, it just depends on what you're looking for.
I'd imagine a lot of people are also explicitly avoiding Tesla due to its association with its increasingly erratic owner.
If it were me, and I absolutely needed a new car and did not want to get an ICE vehicle, I would lease something until the 2025 conversion is complete. The value of an EV with a nonstandard charger is going to drop precipitously at that point.
Buy the car for what it is today, not what it might be tomorrow. Many Tesla owners have been burned hoping for a feature, a retrofit, or even missing out on one taken away.
If I’m evaluating EVs for what they are today, I see little reason to buy a non-Tesla, since the charger is going to require an adapter for the charging infrastructure that appears to be the standard soon.
That's a fair point - if you are going to drive long distances, then a Tesla is the best option in terms of network reliability and price. But for most, an adapter with the occasional road trip isn't a deal breaker. Tesla owners have had to use an adapter for charging at non-superchargers since inception.
The recent moves by Tesla have probably been to force the government to amend regulations that would standardize the CCS Type 1 connector for DC fast charging. These rules were announced in February by the Biden administration for projects funded by the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program.
If Tesla hadn't gotten others on board, the next 5 years would likely see CCS chargers eclipse the Supercharger network many times over with probably 5-7x more CCS chargers as Tesla chargers. As people in this thread have said, the Supercharger network is a big selling point for Teslas. If CCS charging availability were 5-7x greater than Tesla availability, that current advantage would become a liability for Tesla over the long-run.
Given that GM, Ford, and Rivian are all announcing that they're adopting the CCS charger, it seems likely that the government will probably change their regulations around charging standards to the Tesla charger. If the three largest American EV companies are all using NACS in 2025, it makes little sense for them to mandate CCS chargers. With Tesla, Ford, Rivian, and GM all going NACS, it seems likely that more will follow. Hyundai is already thinking about it: https://www.autoblog.com/2023/06/20/hyundai-to-consider-join.... Stellantis (Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, Fiat) is evaluating it: https://fordauthority.com/2023/06/ford-rival-stellantis-look....
In fact, Tesla had to make its connector non-proprietary or they'd be locked out of everything funded by the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program. The rules allow for non-CCS chargers to be available (as long as there's also a CCS charger) only if they're non-proprietary. If Tesla had kept their connector proprietary, any charger with a Tesla connector would be ineligible for government funding. Now, they can have a Tesla connector as long as they also have a CCS connector. As I've speculated, given that it seems likely most EVs sold in the US will be using NACS from 2025+, it seems likely that the government will even change its rules to favor the NACS connector.
Tesla's shift to calling it the North American Charging Standard and opening it up to competitors is probably more about preventing one of their advantages (Tesla vehicles being compatible with the most charging stations) into a major liability (Tesla vehicles requiring an adapter to use the majority of charging stations in 2025+).
I would hope that the government still wouldn't give Tesla any funding until they agreed to the rest of the rules within the bill. They need a way to charge without an app and an open communication standard to initiate a charge. Anyone that has the proper adapter / port should be able to charge at any charging station that receives any amount of government funding. No one should have to rely on their vehicle manufacturer making a deal with the charger owner to charge at a station.
Offtopic: could people that write news titles please learn how to capitalize words? Or can we make sure that at AI will know it, when most of news are written by it?
Took me 3 tries to parse the title.
"Rivian Joins Forces" - is that name of an organization? - "with Tesla"... nope, that doesn't make sense.
"Rivan Joins forces" (somebody to do something), syntax error got "with".
"Rivan joins forces with Tesla" - yay!
And you know that person who wrote this knows about lowercase, because of "with" and "for"...
The article is titled correctly per most style guides:
Generally speaking, AP style uses title case for headlines, which means all words are capitalized except for certain short words, such as articles and short prepositions.
In AP style, headlines capitalize the first word, proper names, or proper abbreviations, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs.
Words that should not be capitalized include:
Articles (a, an, the)
Short (fewer than 5 letters)
Coordinating Conjunctions (and, but, for)
Prepositions (at, by, from, etc.)
What you say about AP style is not quite correct. Actually, AP uses sentence case for headlines. Title case is only used for composition titles, i.e., the titles of books, movies, plays, etc.
Don't be so smug. This title follows the AP style guide for headlines, which is the norm. So it's not so much that "people that write news titles" need to learn to capitalize words, it's that you need to learn how to read them.
It's often confusing to native speakers as well, especially in a domain like this where words like "join" and "force" can easily be used as buzzwords.
Title case makes a certain limited sense in newspapers. But on HN, where most articles don't use the title case even when the underlying media do use it, there is a lot of potential for confusion.
I've never understood the point of this. This capitalization standard carries no information. How many nouns in German can also be other parts of speech? It is easy to learn, but how useful is it?
Many nouns have forms shared by corresponding adjectives and verbs. Some words are overloaded in other ways (e.g. pronouns and nouns). It actually happens quite often and I'd say it helps clear up confusion.
I think "with" should be capitalized but "for" should not. I believe AP style guide says that propositions that are four or more letters should be capitalized.
A personal target I have is that I compare my intelligence to an LLM by seeing if it correctly interprets things people say that I have trouble with. In this way, I can see where the LLMs are beating me. I had no trouble with this headline but had I had trouble, I would conclude that ChatGPT-3.5 is smarter than I am on headline interpretation, because it interprets the headline concordant with the story first time.
In this model, I would judge myself as less able to extract information from other humans than ChatGPT. I believe that the ability to extract signal is a good marker of intelligence. Low-spec intelligences often require high-precision: they are more like formal language parsers than natural language parsers and are therefore less sophisticated.
As a non-native English speaker I was confused by the need to capitalize so many words (but not all) in headers. I make frequent use of https://capitalizemytitle.com/ to make sure that I follow some type of standard.
Tesla adds about a million Tesla's to the road every year in North America. Supporting a few hundred thousand non-Tesla's will have less impact than adding a million Tesla's.
Tesla adds ~1 site per day in the US at the moment, and this may even help them accelerate that. They also do a pretty good job of fixing hotspots when they start to develop.
Just a niche automaker adapting a niche plug while the rest of the world has adopted CCS for its cars, enabling universal charging all over the place...
• There is no such thing as a "CCS" plug. Most countries outside North America and China have adopted CCS2, which is incompatible with the CCS1 plugs found in North America.
• China use their own standard for DC fast charging, GB/T. With respect to dreams of a "global" standard, this isn't mere trivia as China has significantly more EVs on the road than any other country.
• Japan still uses CHAdeMO.
• In North America, there are significantly more cars on the road with NACS plugs than with CCS1, and there are more DC fast charging stalls deployed with NACS connectors than with CCS1. (And that's including the many CCS1 stalls which aren't currently working.)
I chafe at the US (and NA) tendency to stray from otherwise global standards, but in this case I'm not convinced it really matters. Car companies are already really good at localizing vehicles to regions, so that's not an argument either.
When has this ever been true? The supercharger network was always one of the key advantages of a Tesla over any other EV: you could actually have a reliable fast charging network, as opposed to the patchwork of other questionable charging networks. You actually could, reliably, expect a road trip to not have any issues.
I truly abhor strawman comments such as this. They offer nothing other than a false sense of superiority. They are like buzzing mosquitos on a hike: annoying, distracting, and useless.
This does not even make sense, even beyond the weird strawman. If the "Tesla fans" think the superchargers are their most competitive advantage... Why would they want other automakers to adopt it?
