I think this is great but I continue to wonder about Tesla's plan here.
The Supercharger network is one of their remaining competitive advantages. Other manufacturers were behind for years on efficiency, range, etc. but are now catching up - and other manufacturers are far better at making an actual _car_ than Tesla. Build quality, quality control, durability, comfort, noise, etc.
Unless Tesla is so confident that their manufacturing skills will give them a continuing and durable cost advantage - that makes up for the fact that they haven't innovated or even improved their basic vehicle design for the past 10 years - I don't see how this works to their advantage.
First - Tesla had to open charging to other manufacturers to receive additional governmental subsidies.
Second - Tesla will get addition 7 plus billions grants to add additional charging infrastructure.
Third - Tesla will add at least another 10 to 20 billion in charging revenue with at least 30 percent profit to the bottom line.
Forth - Once all the other manufacturers signs on, they can offer other services…
IMHO
It's definitely a case where network effects are good for everybody. Like you can travel across say lower Michigan on the Supercharger network right now, but there's ~2 planned stop routes from the Mackinac Bridge to Detroit, it's tenuous, not some huge lead.
Tesla isn't doing this out of the kindness of their heart, they make money off of charging cars. I bet the money they make off of charging stations comes easier too. Like they really just need to pay for maintenance. Compared to building cars, delivering them, providing service, etc. it's kind of a no-brainer to just make tesla chargers able to charge all EV's and just keep building out that network.
But why wouldn't someone (really, anyone) be just as equipped to build out NACS stations? Each new manufacturer switching over to NACS means the really big companies (bp, Shell) who already have tons of physical land and infrastructure, will be more incentivized to serve NACS, doesn't it?
I'm not sure that the current locations that companies like BP and Shell have for gas stations would work for EV charging station.
According to what I've read most gas stations make very little profit if any on gas sales. It is the things they sell in the accompanying convenience store where they make their money.
An average ICE "charging" at a gas station adds mileage around 15x faster than the fastest charging EV at a Supercharger. If you convert an existing gas station location to an EV charging station that means that the number of cars you can handle per hour goes down by more than an order of magnitude, which means your convenience store sales will go down.
The convenience store sales probably won't go down by an order of magnitude because there are usually a significant number of people who come just for the convenience store and don't refuel their car. Still, I'd expect that at a lot of locations that drop of in convenience store visits from people who are there to refuel will be enough to make that location not profitable.
> I'm not sure that the current locations that companies like BP and Shell have for gas stations would work for EV charging station.
North America is behind on EV infrastructure. The current fighting over which plug to use will delay it by some more years. In Europe there are many fuel station style charging locations. For example:
> 15x faster than the fastest charging EV at a Supercharger
Shell's new station has 400 kW CCS chargers, but the problem is on the battery side more than the charger side. EVs can't make full use of the charger's available power across the whole charge curve. Better, fast charging batteries are needed.
Well I think the business model would change a bit and e.g. you’d probably see convenience stores being converted into something more lounge-y. No matter how you slice it, having real estate at every high-traffic location in America is a much better position to be in than not having such real estate. Especially given that those companies have gargantuan war chests, are technologically, logistically, and financially extremely sophisticated, etc etc. Not to mention they also own the fuel sources that generate most of the electricity, and they’re the largest players even in the next generation energy sources.
There might be something I’m missing, I just don’t see why this would be anything close to a durable advantage for Tesla.
Don’t know about BP or Shell but local power companies seem prime to take over that space. Tesla relies on them for power. I don’t see why the local power companies won’t cut out the middle man that’s Tesla and service customers directly.
In theory, they could do this, but local power companies are so regulated and bureaucratic that they'd never be able to take on building and maintaining charging stations for cars. At least that's how it is where I live (I have family that works at my local power company)
The plan seems very clear to me. They developed a better charger that helped kickstart the market and gave them a competitive advantage. In the future, differentiating on a charger becomes a disadvantage as the EV market gets larger and Tesla owns a smaller percentage, meaning most charging stations will not be compatible with Teslas. The inflection point between the charger being a competitive advantage/disadvantage is occurring around now. Additionally, licensing the rights to the charger gives Tesla a stake in the entire EV market as a whole.
Unless you found yourself in a spot with no other options, I can't imagine any Telsa owner would choose to use a CCS charger that is a worse experience for them in every way.
I wouldn't go out of my way for it but there happens to be an EA charger more directly on the route I frequently travel. So it's nice to have the option.
Software compatible. Still have to spend $175 for the physical adapter, it does not come with the car. No charger, in fact, comes with a Tesla these days. I did buy the adapter, of course, because though I may not ever use it I like having the option.
Their business plan is that they know they won't make every EV that is sold, but they will make money by charging many more than they sell.
The list of Manufacturers on board at this time: Ford, GM, Rivian, Volvo (and presumably Polstar).
Hyundai and Stellantis are considering it. If they join, and it'd be silly not to at this point, that's about half the car market right there. Now it's just up to the German and Japanese automakers.
> Their business plan is that they know they won't make every EV that is sold, but they will make money by charging many more than they sell.
That's such a tough market, though. They make thousands of dollars per car they sell. Fast chargers are for road trips, which means most EV owners don't rely on them day-to-day. Making the same thousands of dollars of profit from fast charging is no small task. And given it has to be made over the long haul, it's even harder to get the same value.
Combine that with the fact that there are already lots of non-Tesla fast chargers and there will be ever more going forward, and I think this business decision looks risky. I can only interpret it as a statement on what they think is going to happen to their new car profit margin.
Sure, but they also get to remain the leader and not have to change all of their cars and chargers, so it's a convenient way to make some surplus revenue. The next closest company in terms of charging infrastructure is VW and they're nowhere near Telsa.
> other manufacturers are far better at making an actual car
Are they really "far better"? My wife's Tesla hasn't had any issues in the last 3 years. The build quality is great. Every time I have a chance to take the Tesla over my Kia, I do it because it's so much more pleasant to drive it.
Over the years I've had many cars. I am struggling to think of one better than the current Tesla that we have.
I think the appearance is largely defined by its aerodynamics. people may be calling for them to make arbitrary changes in appearance but i’d rather they keep the functional shape.
Exactly, I don't want an ugly car. One of the numerous things I love about my Model Y is how awesome it looks. Screw the Ford, GM, Chrysler, Subi, Toyota, etc bars of soap.
This lets them bring in tons of money from owners of other manufacturer's cars using their chargers. It also means they don't get forced into CCS in NA which was the probable alternative path to convincing other manufacturers to use their NACS hardware.
The supercharger network is just a drop in the bucket compared to what they make from selling new cars. And there will be quite a lot of competition for fast chargers, there's no moat at all there. It's an interesting business decision.
Tesla is confident in their economic skills. They have multiple sources of revenue, both one time (they have massive margins on cars) and recurring (selling software on cars, and money from the Energy division, plus now from charging), and they have a LOT in the bank (a sweet 15-20 Billion cash, iirc).
Other legacy companies have loads of baggage, and they cannot compete. [1]
Supercharging is no longer the moat they must have, and they are willing to drain it to increase more revenue from the access instead.
They generate a decent profit on supercharging and increased usage = increased profits.. On the maufacturing side market is saturated with Teslas. They keep dropping the price to increase demand but you can only play that game for so long.
Sandy Munro currently believes that Tesla is 5 years ahead. Heck, even the Ford CEO has openly said that it’s very hard to catch up to Tesla in terms of software, batteries, and vehicle design [1]. For example, here is a video explaining the differences in the Tesla vehicle manufacturing over the years [2].
I think this is their way of saying the current profit margins aren't going to persist. It is exceedingly difficult to make a fast charging business with the kind of profit margin they currently rake in on new car sales, so giving up the single biggest reason people buy a Tesla is a statement unto itself.
> The Supercharger network is one of their remaining competitive advantages.
Not really. Tesla chargers are slow and low voltage compared to other charger manufacturers. Other charging networks are deploying 400 kW chargers. Like FastNed has deployed 400 kW chargers from EVBox and Alpitronic:
Seems like you answered your own question. Tesla realizes that other makers are at least perceived to be better at making actual cars. It's immaterial whether that's actually true (though I personally happen to believe it is) because perception is what matters in the market. Therefore, continuing to focus on cars is a losing strategy. They're pivoting to their only real long-term differentiator, which is the charging network and the hardware that connects to it. The interesting question here IMO is when they made that choice.
They were probably forced their hand here by the US Government, which is really sad given that the rest of the industry basically got a free pass for shunning EV adoption for years.
That said, this is definitely making me interested in a non-Tesla for our next EV. Tesla's tech is unrivaled, but the competition has better hard products.
Once the competition's lane-keeping/"smart" driving catch up to Tesla's APv2, I think I'm out. Even though I absolutely love using FSD beta.
This would mean they are a nationwide power company with the ability to charge more kWH for reduced charging time. Add in solar panels,battery banks, and optimizing recharging with the local power company and it's printing cash at that point.
I think it's also that the EV market needs better charging stations, that are more reliable as the existing charging brands have a bad reputation. Tesla also needs charging stations to work for non-tesla vehicles or the trust in a EV would drop.
> NACS for Ford does mean a Supercharger experience
The Supercharger will still be talking to a Ford-built port connected to a Ford battery run on Ford software. I’m optimistic. But it’s not as tight as Tesla all through.
Speaking for myself, but although I loathe Elon and deride Tesla’s build quality, there’s truly nothing like driving around a Plaid Model S for it’s absolutely tearjerking speed. The weird steering wheel continues to annoy, however.
Stepping back though, one can get a performance Model 3 very inexpensively, relatively, and as far as I can tell or have seen, no other manufacturer outside of Porsche (with BMW making some minor inroads) has electric cars close to as fast.
So if given a choice between a ridiculously fast Tesla and a, say, much slower Volvo for the same or more money, I’ll go with the Tesla. Not that I base the entire purchase on acceleration performance, but all else being relatively equal I will be driving a Tesla until others catch up.
> no other manufacturer outside of Porsche (with BMW making some minor inroads) has electric cars close to as fast.
Off the top of my head, the Ford Mach-E GT and the Kia EV6 GT are also sub-4 second cars.
I expect the blinding acceleration to become just a feature most EVs have some version of. Even the Bolt is pretty quick for a compliance car (nearly as fast as a VW GTI, the quintessential hot hatch).
Personally, having owned a Model 3 Performance, I finally figured out that there was such a thing as too much power. It's a great party trick, but as a practical matter I think I'm quite happy with anything sub-5 second.
the plaid, i believe, is sub 2s. it is a vanguard product. i believe they use the same motor in the semi- so, in hindsight, they started with impractical fun but had an eye on practical power down the way. This is rather smart, no?
Anything that does 0-60 in under 10s is fast enough for me. I’d rather have a quieter and more comfortable ride. I have an actual race car to race on an actual track and don’t need to endanger myself or others going Plaid speeds on public roadways.
I have a 5 year old Avalon Hybrid that was in the bodyshop and rented a Tesla for a month and it was awful. Brand new and it felt like I was driving a Wish.com golf cart. The only redeeming feature was the supercharger in my building.
I feel you, I was chatting with my dad and he said something similar. Your framing as either or though isn’t quite right. I’ve found that the Model S is quite comfortable and quiet inside.
I also think it would be a very cool experience to drive a race car on a track, and I’m glad you get that experience. But I don’t see my interest in that extending or being prioritized enough to make the time and financial investment for such a specific thing. But your framing is again problematic, probably unknowingly, because having a car that can go fast and “going Plaid speeds on public roadways” with the race car comparison conjuring images of irresponsible drivers is almost entirely orthogonal to actually owning such a car.
I'm not arguing, but do you have a source for this? I happen to agree with GP. I'm 55, I want a quiet, comfortable car. I don't care about performance.
Nor is it the experience anyone with a Tesla experiences. Nothing else comes close to Tesla in build quality (My wife's Subi Forrester is a flaming POS in comparison) or driving experience. Every other car company makes vehicles to make money, and fail on target after warranty (or in the case of Ford during warranty costing Ford billions in warranty costs). Tesla seems to "break" capitalism, they make their cars to last and NOT break.
I'm intrigued by this. I own a 2017 forester and it is rock solid. I, my family, many friends, have all owned Subarus extensively, and build-quality/fit-and-finish have never been an issue, including on some quite old vehicles.
I would very much /like/ to own a Tesla, but I hear so many bad things about loose panels, road noise, touchscreen interface, problem getting repairs, and even that the Subaru's adaptive cruise control is better than the Tesla. It's hard to justify moving away from a brand which has been absolutely reliable though.
So I'm very interested in hearing that your experience is that the Tesla has actually been better. If you don't mind: which Tesla model/year do you have experience with? I'd be interesting in determining if they're getting better, or started out great and perhaps getting worse.
There may be regional differences. Most people I know that have teslas complain about shocking build quality issues, with the exception of the cars built in China.
But Lucid Air Sapphire blows Tesla Plaid out of the water better top speed, range, interior, just nicer, better quality, and a not stupid steering wheel.
FWIW, you can get it with a normal wheel. In fact, the yoke is a $250 upgrade. Elon originally said it would only be available with the yoke but apparently he relented.
I did not know this! They didn’t have that option to my knowledge when I got mine. Probably doesn’t matter at this point as I’m mostly used to it, but good to know.
This is a narrative grafted on after the fact. When Eberhard and Tarpenning founded Tesla - years before Elon was involved - it was founded as a car company.
> Tesla was incorporated in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning as Tesla Motors. The company's name is a tribute to inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. In February 2004, via a $6.5 million investment, Elon Musk became the company's largest shareholder. He became CEO in 2008.
Which market is the one they will dominate? Supporting NACS is not a hurdle, and there are already quite a lot of non-Tesla DC fast chargers in existence. Some of them have already announced they'll add NACS plugs themselves. There's no magic to building another charging station, and if everyone supports plug-and-charge (or hell, just reliable credit card processing), it'll be a super competitive market with tight margins.
All well and good to say, but every other company that has tried to charge EVs has utterly failed, and it's been over a decade now. Once customers can move freely between all the networks, the ones with bad reliability will disappear. Right now that's every network not Tesla. Like you said, the margins are tight. EA can't just lower their prices. And even if they could, who's gonna take a chance on a shitty network during a family road trip to save a couple bucks? Not me.
> but every other company that has tried to charge EVs has utterly failed
You need a broader perspective. Europe is a bigger EV market than North America is at present. European charging networks that are going strong, offer faster charging than Tesla, and are growing include Fastned, Circle K, EnBW, Ionity, Shell, BP, etc.
They've had the benefit of Europe standardizing on CCS type 2 Combo. When everyone can build to the same standard it drives investment and development.
This is the North American charging standard. North America previously standardized on CCS1 (which is exactly the same as CCS2, but without 3-phase support, which we don't need here) and it has done nothing. My perspective is plenty broad. What point are you trying to make, exactly? That if we just continue doing exactly as we have, NA will turn into Europe eventually?
Okay, I sincerely apologize for not saying that "every company in North America" has failed. I probably just figured that since this whole conversation is about the North American Charging Standard it was implied. But you are right. There are companies in Europe that have succeed. Maybe Mars too? Haven't been there, not driving my NACS car there, but you can win that argument too, if you like.
And the plug is mechanically different in that it has one fewer pin due too... drum roll please... no 3-phase support. But it is mechanically different, so you can win there too, if you like. Look at you! Winning all the pedantry awards today. So much fun. I mean, we're not having a damn conversation about anything, just arguing over every single word I say that you can possibly find an issue with, but to some people, this is as much fun as you can have.
I don't have much use for your sorrys. It's better you think about what you're saying rather than running around in ignorance. Your narrow outlook prevents you from seeing better alternatives.
> And the plug is mechanically different in that it has one fewer pin
No, Type 2 has a different shape and two more pins than Type 1. CCS type 2 is used in more countries than any other EV plug.
Like I said, you are right about everything. I'm an uncultured imbecile. I'll start reading more, going to museums. I'll travel the world. Europe is paramount when considering US charging infrastructure. The shape of a connector is the most important part. Can we move on and have you tell me your point? What do you actually have to say about Volvo adopting NACS?
> Europe is paramount when considering US charging infrastructure.
It is when you want an example of how to do it right. Europe is a long way ahead of North America in EV infrastructure because of sensible standardization.
Learn from Europe. Europe does EV infrastructure better.
It probably doesn't, apart from some kind of bragging rights about how their charge connector standard won in North America (which however facile, is important to the most zealous among their customer base).
Tesla was forced to open their charging network to become eligible for federal tax credits. If Tesla starts preferencing or discounting charging for their cars in their network going forward, they will lose those credits and perhaps get in other trouble.
Given that, they are making the best of the situation by partnering with their competitors, who themselves failed to have Tesla's foresight about the importance of a comprehensive charging network - even after Tesla clearly demonstrated the value in that. Remember, VW was forced to create Electrify America as part of the Dieselgate settlement.
It's pretty shocking that all the charge networks are getting rug pulled because they couldn't figure out how to accept payment reliably.
I wonder if Tesla has figured that out for third-party automobiles yet. (I mean, I assume they have, but I assumed the other charge networks would be able to obtain working credit card readers, and that definitely didn't happen.)
The plug is more about combining DC and AC pins, payment is orthogonal. The difference between "NACS" and "Tesla" is that because Europe has mandated CCS, Tesla has made their connectors talk CCS because global simplicity.
Yes, Tesla's will still have plug-to-pay, but that's on top of NACS, not part of NACS. NACS is just CCS with a different (smaller) handle.
The Technology Connections guy made a good explainer about all this the other day, if you don't mind a slightly-get-off-my-lawn youtuber persona: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjny4u5THpU
> The Technology Connections guy made a good explainer about all this the other day, if you don't mind a slightly-get-off-my-lawn youtuber persona: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjny4u5THpU
That persona is part of TC's schtick, but the video itself was major cringe. TC does not like Tesla, and watching him forcibly eating crow + that persona that comes across as "I am right, even when I was very wrong" = 50 painful minutes.
IMO the non-Tesla networks thoroughly misunderstood the market. People are willing to drive, specifically, to a Tesla charging station because they have the biggest network (and they’re fairly reliable, but anyone could achieve that). Other than that, there is no particular network effect, and drivers don’t want a network effect. Drivers want a charger at a convenient location that works, but there is no more inherent brand loyalty than there is with gas stations.
So, to compete effectively, chargers should have deployed in useful locations and made charging convenient. Using gas station-style card readers would have worked fine, and they are a mature technology. No one needs to install an app or create an account to buy gas, and charging should have worked the same way.
The lack of innovation in payment technologies is a huge barrier. It should be entirely feasible to "set up a payment card" within a secure computing system like a car's computer (perhaps using an inexpensive commodity secure enclave processor), and then securely pay for charging services over an arbitrary wire protocol like NACS/CCS without the need to make an account for each provider. Apple and Google each managed to realize a similar functionality for NFC, but it took their enormous market power (and a huge mess of technical innovation that should have come from the payment card industry directly, rather than requiring still more proprietary systems.) In Europe they had to create an entirely new payment overlay called Plug & Charge, but it only handles that one application (and doesn't exist in the US.)
A good chunk of the problems in charging stem from the fact that we allowed basic infrastructure like payments to be locked up within these private companies, rather than mandating standards.
I would settle for the basics before insisting on actual innovation. I also want chargers to allow using a credit card (or Apple Pay or whatever) as an alternative to whatever is programmed into the car.
Sure. What I'm describing is essentially Apple Pay, just not limited to mobile phones and an NFC interface. If the payment card industry had looked a decade forward and developed something like Apple Pay for IoT devices, then you could enter a credit card to your car and it would make the payment directly over the charging cable. They didn't do this, and as a result we have to use NFC, magstripes, proprietary wire protocols, or else live in Europe. It's a bummer.
Yes. But this isn’t a general payment protocol that the payment industry developed to facilitate convenient payment applications. It’s an application-specific protocol that had to be developed at enormous cost for the specific application of charging and only really happened because EU regulators pushed very hard on charging companies and manufacturers to realize it. The US gets to benefit from it (if we’re lucky) because Europe did the work, although it’s not supported by Tesla and many of the smaller charging services don’t support it.
My point is that a IoT payment protocol should have been a part of the EMV standard, the same one that lets me use my credit card while overseas. We shouldn’t have to rely on such a huge government-backed effort specific to every specific business sector where a device might need to pay for a service.
Luckily all the CCS chargers I've charged at which were installed within the last year or so had regular credit card terminals which I could pay with phone tap to pay or EMV chipped cards.
The CCS chargers here all have those, but they don't work at Electrify America, evGo, ChargePoint or the smaller networks kiosks I've seen.
The one counterexample was that I found an EA terminal with a working credit card reader, but it did not work reliably.
For instance, you had to tap Visa, but insert chip for MC, and swipe Amex (I might have those constraints wrong), and if you did the wrong thing, the charge circuit computer state machine would get confused with the unexpected payment error, and put your car computer into a "busted charger" timeout mode. A re-attempt would cause most CC companies to issue a fraud lockout for that kiosk.
Also, these issues were compounded by the CCS connector EA uses being a bit out of mechanical tolerance, so the machine has a sign saying to pull up during handshake to get the computers to talk.
The same EA kiosks work reasonably well (> 90% success on first handshake) if you pay with the app.
I just used one at an evgo station that worked with a chipped Visa card the other day. I had another time a few weeks ago with tap to pay Visa through Google Wallet.
I've used chipped cards at Chargepoint work on many occasions.
And I've never had a plug and charge session fail at EA.
In my experience, I couldn't trust those chargers to not fail at some point charging when I was away from my car eating lunch or walking around a park. The reliability was just a huge pain in the rear.
In my experience, I never had a single time where the charging got interrupted nor have I had any other kind of other failure to charge properly on my car.
I live in LA where chargers are very used so it's probably just a matter of the locale you're in.
I've had chargers fail at:
* EVGo at Warner Center
* The greenlots at The LADWP on Ventura and Corbin(ish)
* Flo at reseda and oxnard
* Blink or whatever at Kaiser and DeSoto
* Blink at the Ikea and burbank
To name a few. Tons more floating around in my head between my two EVs. Every single one of them likes to fail at some arbitrary time when I'm far away from my car
What is nice about the Tesla charging map is that I can see how many slots are available so I don’t drive somewhere only to find out the charger is in use or broken.
The other networks have that too, fwiw. Though, for some, there is a big red "emergency stop" button that people can press, and it incorrectly marks the charger as broken.
So, the map will incorrectly tell you not to use that charger.
All these unreliable fragmented networks that think they're precious enough to demand downloading a crappy app and registration deserve to go out of business.
When my car needs 20 minutes to recharge, I hate spending 15 minutes fighting someone's dumb password policy just to start charging.
In EU there's Ionity and Fastned that always work and always accept contactless payments.
They probably could figure it out. I don't think that was the point though, at least in Canada.
It felt more like all of the chargers networks wanted to become something more like of Japan's prepaid IC card system for the trains. I think their dream was to have drivers buy into a reoccurring subscription for super charger access, and become big enough to be the One Charger Network to Rule Them All.
Whether this new announcement changes anything for the Canadian charging networks, I don't know. Some of the operators had already entered into cross subscription agreements with each other to try and alleviate the pain points. Part of me thinks that they'll run to the federal government and ask for protection against Tesla's network if they view it as too great a threat, but they could also end up playing nice with with each other as well.
Next few years is going to be interesting to watch either way.
So far as I read it, NACS chargers use the exact same "Plug-and-Charge" standards that CCS tried to adopt but for dumb (compatibility) reasons made "optional" (leading to a lot of buggy half-implementations). The fix seems to be that the NACS standard changes it from "optional" to "required" and with access to Tesla's Supercharger network in the US as a carrot that should mean a lot more well tested implementations among the other manufacturers than previously existed for CCS1.
Ford's press release cited a study where they had paid drivers go to random Blue Oval (their charge affiliate network) chargers and see whether they could charge or not. They said this was the main reason they were adopting the tesla standard.
Anecdotally, 90% of the time I've been unable to charge at a Blue Oval certified network (I drive a BMW, but the list of networks is well-known), it has been a payment issue, not a CCS issue.
Also, the Biden administration recognized that this was a problem, and built a payment availability SLA into the inflation reduction act.
It’s not. I drive a CCS car. The reason EA and EVGo are getting demolished is due to the comically limited number of chargers they install per station (four commonly vs dozens at Tesla stations) and the unreliability of the chargers themselves. I’ve never had a problem with payment.
This is the big one for me, too. I've driven non-Tesla and Tesla EVs for years, and the big draw of the supercharger stations is that there's so many stalls that there's always one open. When I roadtrip with the CCS car, I get lucky when there's one of the four stalls available.
Nothing more frustrating than going to a full charger with a line and driving over to another place that's open just for it to charge your card but fail to initialize.
My Canadian town of 70,000 has about 100 public CCS charging stations but one for Telsa. So no not great. It's already there so why are they switching?
A GM executive was on the news saying how Canadians complained in a survey there were not enough charging stations. I say BS. This sudden study appears and contradicts the 10:1 ratio of CCS to Tesla charger in my town?
> My Canadian town of 70,000...It's already there so why are they switching?
It's estimated America will need around 2mm EV chargers by 2030; it currently has about 160k [1]. Every charger currently deployed is less than a tenth of what we need in seven years. That's not quite tabula rasa, but it's close.
CCS lost because it prioritized backward compatibility in an environment where most of what's needed must be built. The difference between sticking with existing infrastructure and retrofitting is, in the grand scheme, a rounding error and so properly ignored.
Most of those 2M EV chargers only need to be Level 2.
It makes MUCH more sense to use J1772 by default in those 2M chargers, since every EV other than Tesla currently uses that standard, and Tesla can easily use an adapter.
So CCS hasn't "lost". In fact, it's likely to remain a standard. In fact, there are some 5,200 CCS charging station locations in the US, compared to only about 1,800 Supercharger stations. [1]
A stronger position in the market only amplifies itself. Beta was better in every way than VHS, but VHS had a lead in popularity, and network effects eventually resulted in the death of Beta.
SAE (the Society of Automotive Engineers) just formally adopted NACS as preferred standard [1], so CCS1 may have indeed "lost".
Conversion of existing CCS1 chargers was one of the things SAE supposedly considered in making the decision. NACS "speaks CCS software over Tesla-designed hardware" so it's mostly just a hardware change at one end of the cable. (Tesla made some smart decisions when they decided to standards track NACS.)
As long as I can charge my car (Ioniq 5) moving forward, it doesn't really matter.
CCS has higher speed charging than is available at Superchargers, at least for my car, though, so I hope the NACS standard has the ability to support the higher charging speed.
> 5,200 CCS charging station locations in the US, compared to only about 1,800
Sure, but in the smaller print on that diagram it mentions that there are twice as many superchargers. CCS stations are typically small, superchargers typically large.
As long as there are chargers available at a particular station, why should I care how many are sitting unused?
I've been by many Supercharger stations where there were no cars charging at all. Sometimes I see one or two, but the majority of the time most of the chargers are empty.
The number of locations indicates the flexibility of the charging network. There are CCS chargers in places where Superchargers don't exist, meaning you have more places you can go with CCS than you can go with a Tesla.
And that isn't a hypothetical. I've driven down to the Carlsbad Caverns with my family in the past, and I wanted to do it again with my electric car. For a long time, southwest New Mexico had NO fast charging stations for any brand of charger, but in the last year it's gained enough CCS chargers that I could comfortably drive back to the caverns without worrying about range. And there are still no Superchargers within a hundred miles. (Note I'd be coming from Colorado, so driving down from the north side of the state--you could probably make it TO Carlsbad from a west Texas Supercharger, and then make it back to the same Supercharger, but that would be many hours of driving out of my way.)
Would I like to see more redundancy at every location? Sure. But to me it's more important that there are chargers available where I want to go than that there are a ton of redundant chargers at every location.
Maybe if I lived in LA and wanted to be able to drive to SF I would have different priorities.
How many of those CCS stations are actually up and running properly? I can't stand Musk and Tesla and haven't yet made the jump into EVs but I plan to soon and everything I've seen online suggests Telsa chargers just work while EA and other CCS brands are extremely hit and miss.
Other than new stations that just haven't come online, I've never once pulled up to a location and failed to charge at a decent rate. Similar experiences with most people I've talked to actually at the stations I'm charging at.
I'm sure wherever these reviewers are doing their reviews, they're getting bad experiences. But personally I've never once had a problem. Maybe bad maintenance is more of a localized thing?
I've done a long distance road trip, and the CCS stations have occasional failed chargers, but every single one was available to charge my car.
Think of it this way: The Supercharger network has to be reliable, because there's only one station every ~100 miles or so. The CCS network can afford to be a bit less reliable because it's more redundant. And even then, the "less reliable" typically means that one out of four available chargers in a location is out of service, not that the location itself is unusable.
And there are apps that lets you see the status of chargers at a location, so you can check in advance whether a particular location is working. If a location seems to be in poor repair, you can always plan around it.
There are more CCS stations than Tesla, though there are more NACS ports [1]. Tesla also has the first-mover advantage in having sited prime locations. The deciding factor, however, was reliability: Tesla's Superchargers work.
100 DC fast charging plugs would be a lot, I'm guessing most of these 100 are actually J-1772 L2 AC plugs and not CCS combo 1. It's pretty cheap to get an adaptor for J-1772 <--> Tesla in either direction for AC usage, so in practice AC plugs are basically universal.
DC adaptors are much more expensive due to needing really high kW capable connectors and often require active communication within the adaptor.
My only concern with one is that we're giving one private company a monopoly on it. Is that good, I'm not sure but in general it's usually not good for consumers.
Are we giving them a monopoly? The standard was published, and as someone else mentioned SAE is in the process of formalizing it. I also doubt very much that Ford, GM, et al actually negotiated their contracts without some stipulation that there couldn't be a rug pull.
I am kinda glad that NACS won. It wouldn't really break my heart if it did not, but I own two EVs -- one is CCS1, the other Tesla. It's just a minor irritation, but there is no doubt at all that the J1772 connector is far more likely to be finicky when I plug it in every day. The fact that it's the same connector no matter what kind of charging is happening is icing on the cake.
Good question. They'll be understandably unhappy that their competitive advantage is being muscled away. I worry about the future innovation that was planned for these companies that are moving from CCS to Tesla, as adopting it really does put an upper bound on charge speeds. Definitely a big win for Tesla across the board.
I don't think 800V is a competitive advantage yet. Hyundai has the fastest charging EV at the moment, but it still doesn't use 350kW and it's only a few minutes faster than a Tesla for 10-80. Plus, it's not at all clear that they won't be forced to dial the number down -- Teslas used to charge a bit faster but it was really messing with the batteries, and Hyundai may be about to hit a similar problem. The C rate they'll allowing their batteries to charge at is pretty high.
It needed to happen, between the existing Tesla network and the IIJA upcoming spending on a charging network it will make EV adoption happen much faster. Competing standards only hurts the consumers and will slow EV adoption.
Yes a big leap backward for any EVs with 800V systems like Hyundai, Porsche, Mercedes, Polestar, Lucid Air. Until NACS v2 arrives but even that is less than 1000V edit: I guess NACS 1000V would be v4 not v2
It falls into the category of 'high enough.' IIRC Tesla mentions 1000V for NACS. And we already know that superchargers happily push more than 600A. That's such a ridiculous amount of power that it'll be decades before batteries aren't the limit.
8.2% of the Volvo Group (AB Volvo). 82% of Volvo Cars.
From the 2022 report:
> Volvo Car AB (publ.), with its registered office in Gothenburg, Sweden, is a publicly listed company on the Nasdaq Stockholm Stock Exchange. The largest owner, holding 82 per cent of shares and capital, is Geely Sweden Holdings AB, owned by Shanghai Geely Zhaoyuan International Investment Co., Ltd., registered in Shanghai, China, and ultimately owned by Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Ltd., registered in Hangzhou, China.
Same parent company and same technology (the 2 is basically an XC/C-40 with a different body). Yes they will make the move, just need the announcement.
CCS is still the standard for the entirety of the EU including Tesla's own cars. It may be dying in NA but the EU is still a large market and using a different plug isn't that big of a deal for the manufacturers.
That's CCS 2, with a different port than the CCS 1, and while there might be software similarities, the different ports make it a different beast altogether.
Every other car except for the American models of Volvo and Tesla, from what I can tell.
That said, there are two CCS standards, one for (older) Japanese and American vehicles (SAE J1772), and another widely used in Europe (IEC 62196 Type). Both have been designed to be as backwards compatible with older charging standards as possible.
European Teslas ship with CCS Type 2 so I doubt this will have any impact on Volvos outside the USA.
I think so too. I've thrown a tiny bit of money at Aptera because I think they are the most interesting car company in America right now with the most interesting car planned for a US launch in the next couple of years. I'm following them with great interest.
I think in the post, context for CCS is CCS 1 which is the Americab variant. CCS 2 is not interoperable and not really useful for discussion here. Maybe Korea too? I can't remember.
VAG (Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche), Stellantis (Jeep, Dodge, RAM, Chrysler, Alfa Romeo), Hyundai-KIA, and all the Japanese OEMs are still on CCS.
VAG created Electrify America as part of the dieselgate deal, and since it's the largest CCS network if they switch CCS is pretty much officially done in north america.
The Supercharger network is one of their remaining competitive advantages. Other manufacturers were behind for years on efficiency, range, etc. but are now catching up - and other manufacturers are far better at making an actual _car_ than Tesla. Build quality, quality control, durability, comfort, noise, etc.
Unless Tesla is so confident that their manufacturing skills will give them a continuing and durable cost advantage - that makes up for the fact that they haven't innovated or even improved their basic vehicle design for the past 10 years - I don't see how this works to their advantage.