There are US charging standards now.[1] And a subsidy program which is probably too big.
Basic US standards:
- At least four charging stations per location.
- At least 150KW per charger.
- 97% uptime.
- May not require a membership. Must accept credit cards. May not charge more without a membership. Must display price per KwH before charging. Phone-based and car-based payment interfaces allowed but must not be required of the customer.
- States getting funding must have a charging station every 50 miles along Interstate highways.
- Must support CCS connector. Other connectors optional.
This is not fully compatible with Tesla's business model, which may be a problem for Tesla.
- May not require a membership. Must accept credit cards. May not charge more without a membership. Must display price per KwH before charging. Phone-based and car-based payment interfaces allowed but must not be required of the customer.
Cries in European. It'd solve some of my absolute pet peeves with charging: no membership, no over charging without membership AND display price BEFORE charging.
The "bill shock" experience is real here. It happens I pay 2x the average price at random locations without any possibility to see that before I'm finished.
- ALMOST all highways with a fast charger every $reasonable_amount_of_km
- very few accept direct payments BUT with terrible UIs (like you know how much you paid but not how much energy you have charged (yes, really, many visualize the amount paid after energy counters get zeroed/disappeared from the display)
- many do demand crapplications that are a pain to use, buggy as hell, sometimes in places where the phone get no network, and of course no local AP to use the sole charging app locally, many allow charging, then the sole way to stop is stop from the car side and so on
In Italy is even worse, first because of the prices, then because of the scarcity of charging points, thirdly because many apps are not meant to be "international", i.e. I'm Italian, but I live in France, so I have french residence and payments cards etc, well, I keep getting errors, because if I'm Italian then I must offer an Italian bank card, an Italian ID and address and so on, otherwise I need to be French...
At least in terms of uptime they tend to works well in both countries all the time. But do not try to go southern or eastern in the EU, there you get almost no chargers at all. Also DO count outside highways all roaming tariffs, take a look at https://chargemap.com/map to understand. With certain roaming combination you might end up paying 10kWh like 20€ instead of 2€.
This is the proof we need PUBLIC infra, not private one. The public have the money and the interest to be everywhere (not only where they earn more) and be standard, open to anyone offering a good service. The private sector is good to pick innovation and find ways to spread it, but to really spread it it's the public that must step in.
It's not: so far, at least in EU/the parts of the EU I live most, there are not that much BEVs and there are a sufficient number of chargers on highways, locations with 10 to 20+ 150-300kWp chargers are fairly common and only few of them are normally occupied. BUT if BEV spread such charging stations will be not enough, so you'll get many that try to reserve a charge via app/seen the current "crowded" state and decide to go to the next charger. Consider that any car tend to charge at least 10', mostly 15'. Ok, it's not that much, but if you have to wait just a car, let's say it's not the worst case all of the time, but still means a total 20' stop. Something ok if you are on vacation but not if you doing a long work trip and BEVs tend to be interesting economically if you run a bit long the year.
Elon actually has the numbers. And the profit to expenditure did not add up. The team wasn’t adapting in a useful manor, hence this is the outcome.
This is as plausible as all the other opinions out there. In short we don’t know the half of it.
What we do know is that ev sales have taken a dive. A network that grows faster then ev adoption might not be that useful, considering the bigger the network the bigger the upkeep.
Also, Tesla only build that network because no one else was. (Check some past articles, this was clearly said). Evs have now been adopted to a point that other companies are getting into the game. Especially : gas stations.
Last: home charging for daily commute will be more important. Most people will only go to a Super Charger on trips. Like 5% of the usage of the vehicle?
There is more to this then flashy headlines.
Elon is a good business man, who denies that, hasn’t grasped what he was able to achieve so far.
Is he behaving like a 140 character idiot? Absolutely, but this is not new. His long form talks on the other hand often are very reasonable.
who knows... perhaps he should be held accountable to the other 80% of investors and be forced to explain his moves?, it's no longer his company and yet he still behaves like it.
Also a PR firm to avoid all these controversies would help a lot. He's a few really bad tweets from getting boycotted, or a few bad decisions from tanking tesla.
Supercharger network is definitely a reason why I went for a Tesla and i'm definitely left wondering what's going on and how this will affect long trips.
Tesla cant get the gov subsidies for charging stations because of the rules about membership. Without the subsidies they cant compete. Really is as simple as that
What we do know is that ev sales have taken a dive
"A record 1.2 million U.S. vehicle buyers chose to go electric last year, according to estimates from Kelley Blue Book, a Cox Automotive company. More specifically, 1,189,051 new electric vehicles (EVs) were put into service as the slow shift to an electrified future continued unabated. In 2023, the EV share of the total U.S. vehicle market was 7.6%, according to Kelley Blue Book estimates. That is up from 5.9% in 2022.
EV sales in the fourth quarter set a record for both volume and share: 317,168 and 8.1%, respectively. And while records were set, the oft-reported slowdown is real. Q4 EV sales increased year over year by 40% – a strong result by any measure, except when compared to the growth the industry saw in previous quarters. The market posted a 49% gain in Q3, and EV sales were up 52% year over year in Q4 2022. By volume, EV sales in Q4 were higher than in Q3 by roughly 5,000 units. The EV market in the U.S. is still growing, but not growing as fast."
>Last: home charging for daily commute will be more important. Most people will only go to a Super Charger on trips. Like 5% of the usage of the vehicle?
Sure, if you want to limit your customer base to people who own their own standalone homes and don't live in apartments or condos where they have to park on the street or in a shared lot/garage...
Then again, limiting the potential customer base is Elon's entire strategy for Tesla these days.
I charge at home and almost certainly would not have an EV if I could not. I know someone who had an EV and could not charge at home who got rid of it as it was really inconvenient to have to regularly wait 30 to 40 mins to charge as a charger was not on his commute.
Long story short, I think EVs with current battery tech is practically limited to those who can charge where they live (be it apartment parking garage or at their house)
I have been driving a Model 3 for the past almost two years, and I can't charge at home. It isn't all that inconvenient, as I can charge often while stopping at restaurants, and I almost never have to charge for "30-40 minutes".
Charge at the grocery store or while out to dinner.
If you commute 150 miles a week to work, and do another 50 miles on the weekend, you're at 200 miles a week. You can do 230 miles at 80% in a model 3 which means one charge a week covers you pretty well for most weeks. That's 15-20 minutes of charge time at a level 3 charger. I mean, you could do that while eating a Big Mac and fries, assuming an available charger.
If you really do live right in the city where you work and park on the street, your commute is probably more like 50-75 miles a week so you only really need to charge once every few weeks, or you can charge more frequently and much more briefly.
The time when this is difficult isn't city streets, it's distant apartment buildings in suburbia commuting into the city. The people with 400 or 500 miles a week of commute and no home charging. For them, it's 30-40 minutes of charging across two stops compared to 8-10 minutes at the gas station. In that world, one might have to plan a mid-week dinner out or twice a week shopping or something like that to get a "free" charge or two where waiting around isn't an issue.
My boss lives in an apartment building and drives an older electric van with a < 200 km range. He really likes the car and has repeatedly told me that charging it is not an issue.
He’s the no. 1 reason I’m thinking about Model 3, even though I park on the street.
Charging without a dedicated spot is a pain in the ass. Doesnt matter what your boss says, its much more of an ordeal than the gas station or charging at home. Whether its still worth getting an EV up to you of course, but "not an issue" just is not true
I park my car on the street and have no problem parking it by a charger instead. Granted this is Europe where our cities are walkable so popping my car on to charge a short walk away is easy and convenient.
However, what we do know is the transition being existential for some actors - and even countries. If Russian propaganda about Ukraine is bad, EVs are much worse, since they are actually an existential threat.
According to an article quoted by another poster, they are growing slower. The rate of growth is decreasing. It is reasonable to assume that without another keystone event, we are past the halfway point in the growth curve, and peak ownership is less than double what it is currently.
California and the national government are poised to spend about $10B between them to build charging infra. I doubt Tesla spent 1/4th that to build its Supercharger network.
There an interesting tweet from the other article that was flagged (??), that mention installation of fast charger in Europe and US and compare Tesla to the rest. https://twitter.com/FredericLambert/status/17864827320815741...
What is striking is the difference in the scale (4x), and it seems that the US are all in for Tesla.
It's in part because Europe applied sensible regulation to standardize EV charging. This standardization drives investment and deployment because everyone can build to the same standard and have all brands of charger, all brands of charging network work with all brands of EV.
Europe's aiming for a baseline of 400 kW chargers on the TEN-T routes by 2026 and 600 kW by 2028:
I saw a McKinsey report claiming that higher-powered chargers are very profitable. They charge more per KwH, but the charger operator doesn't pay more per KwH, and more cars per day can use the thing since charging is faster.
Shell is now into charging stations. They figure that if it has a big hose that fuels a car, that's their business. If Tesla doesn't want to be in the charger business, they could sell the business to Shell.
EV charging around me charge at 2x the residential rate (unless they're free, but nobody has put in free chargers in a while). Yeah, there's other costs beyond the energy, but still.
Anyway, if they want to stop building, that's fine, but there's better ways to do it. This kind of mess really isn't that unexpected from Tesla, but it reinforces that changes will come with no warning, which isn't what I'm looking for in a company that makes a product that should last 20-30 years (and potentially much longer)
I'm seeing ~ $0.30/kWh, and it's abour $0.14 at home if IIRC. But I'm looking at chargepoint and it only tells me about chargers that fit my PHEV, which can't even take a full level 2 charge. I don't know if fast chargers charge more for convenience?
As far as I can tell from reporting, there was no warning, and then they fired everyone and now existing projects have no point of contact, and nobody know what's going on. If I were in the middle of considering purchasing a car that relies on their network, I would have to stop and rethink. It's unlikely to continue to grow, but will it continue to operate at all?
The right way to do this, even if there's no notice, is to realise a big change is going to make a lot of noise and communicate what the plan is, and have a transition plan. "We believe the charging industry has become self-sufficient [put some buzzwords here], so we're pausing new deployments; sites that have broken ground will continue construction. If you have questions about your site, please contact your rep/some vp?. Maintenance will continue at our current standard of X% availability, with N day repairs for most issues. Our chargers will/will not be available for others to install." Add some congratulatory BS about how you developed the charging industry and now it's ready to be set free. If you really want to fire everyone in the team, I guess that's fine, but don't do it right away. Have them wind down the sites not started over a week or two, and consolidate down the project planning to a smaller number of people. If people would quit instead, offer retention tied to milestones.
EV charging sounds easy, but I think when you properly add up numbers they do not look that great. You could make it work by subsidising cost from car prices... But if that option is not around, you have to properly charge for charging.
I have a friend running an EV charging company (not in the US). He makes plenty of money.
But his company also provides lots of value adds during charging, including onsite dining.
Although I imagine America's asinine rules, zoning laws, and permitting processes, may be preventing truly innovative players from entering the market.
(Given that most US cities cannot even provide quick breakfast dining options aside from bagels, muffins, or fast food, this shouldn't be a surprise...)
What do you mean by quick and what quick breakfast foods are we missing out on? I’m thinking about how fast it is to sit down and order at Waffle House, Dennys, or Perkins. Would that not be enough time to eat?
Cities in Mexico have people selling different types of breakfast foods from stalls, trailers peddled around behind bikes, even garages that open up and sell food in the morning.
China has so many breakfast options (street vendors selling various fried dishes, and congee stalls, are two of my favorites) to the extent that Chinese who visit America are surprised by how absolute shit the choices are in the US for breakfast.
In Seattle, my choices if I don't want to sit down, are boring breakfast sandwiches or a sugar filled muffin.
Oddly enough I didn't find much in the way of breakfast foods in Tokyo, it seems they don't have a big breakfast street food culture.
That’s really most of American business. The rest is monopolies (big tech), oligopolies (defense), or other areas with reduced competition due to regulations (healthcare) or network effects (social media, credit card networks) or capital needs (utilities).
I don't get this move whatsoever, but if I were to be forced to play Devil's advocate, I'd point to the fact that the Supercharger network is merely the only game in town in the US, and globally, it will become a bit of a fart in the wind.
It's already happening in Europe, and in fact, it's a bit of an issue that the Tesla route planner prioritizes Supercharger stations over other operators.
It is my understanding that the Supercharger network was built to supercharge EV adaption, which has succeeded. Now there is a healthy amount of charging stations available.
The next task is absolutely to solve the 1st mile.
technologically the charger was good enough for any upcoming demand I'd say no?
the most challenging is the "deployment" / installation of it and turning it more (price) efficient which I guess would be done by different department hence firing
Tesla is behind technologically on their chargers, notably on voltage. The Cybertruck charges faster on Electrify America than it does on Tesla's own chargers:
Maybe Tesla doesn't need to be in the charger business anymore :)
It was useful while introducing a new product to the market, but now there's plenty of alternatives, standardization, competition and advancements everywhere.
Batteries charge better when in a certain temperature range, due to physics. If you tell an EV you are heading to a charger, it can prep the battery to the proper temps.
With a more integrated system (e.g. all Tesla hardware involved or simply a charger that can communicate with the vehicle's software), sensors and software may specify what it needs to be in order for charging to commence. Otherwise it's generally an optimization rather than a requirement. The optimal range will depend on the class of the charger (how fast it's able to charge as well as sensors and software), the vehicle in question (the physical batteries themselves as well as cooling/heating systems), and other physical factors.
In general: the faster the hardware can physically charge the battery, the more important temperature becomes.
"If Tesla slows down, these other companies will pick up some of the slack but not all of it. Because Tesla just deploys charging stations at another level," said Loren McDonald, chief executive of EVAdoption.
If other companies were able to deploy charging networks as well as Tesla, the superchargers wouldn’t be such a selling point for getting a Tesla over any other EV. Of course, now that is become a moot point with other condones using Tesla’s chargers.
From the reports I’ve read/watched in the news, and EV owners I’ve talked to, it seems like it’s 2 things. One is building good and reliable processes for payment. Two is monitoring and maintenance, so the chargers actually function when someone shows up to use them. I don’t know if Tesla is better at that or is building more reliable chargers from the start, maybe both. Not having to worry at all about payments for the first several years probably helped.
A lot of the charger companies seem to think it’s a cheap and easy business. Make a charger, throw it in a parking lot, and get income forever. I think they need to do better, especially with how long some people need to spend at the chargers. Gas stations have attendants. If something is wrong there is someone there to fix basic things or schedule someone to come out to fix more complex things. And they can hang a sign up when something isn’t working. Charging stations need this, as far as I can tell. A lot of them are put in parking lots of existing stores. I think one option would be to partner with the store, so they can have someone on staff who trains on the charger maintenance and takes care of some of those things. Maybe it’s not their full time job, but they get an extra percentage for taking on those extra responsibilities, which is paid for by the charging companies.
There is also the question of future development to make the systems better. Tesla’s charger won the war. One would expect the winner to continue development so it can keep getting better and faster. Range anxiety and the time it takes to charge are still some of the big things in consumers minds that will prevent them from buying an EV. Solving those problems are a marriage between the battery and charging tech. A company in control of both parts of that would have a huge advantage when it comes to being first to market with those improvements.
Basic US standards:
- At least four charging stations per location.
- At least 150KW per charger.
- 97% uptime.
- May not require a membership. Must accept credit cards. May not charge more without a membership. Must display price per KwH before charging. Phone-based and car-based payment interfaces allowed but must not be required of the customer.
- States getting funding must have a charging station every 50 miles along Interstate highways.
- Must support CCS connector. Other connectors optional.
This is not fully compatible with Tesla's business model, which may be a problem for Tesla.
[1] https://tritiumcharging.com/what-is-nevi-and-how-will-it-hel...