I agree with Benedict Evan's point that electric charging will become a commodity: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2018/8/29/tesla-soft...

But other car manufacturers, for whatever reason, don't get this. They build their compliance cars with a modest investment in EVs, but honestly, they aren't very good. The Leaf has its niche-- it's a good city car with low range and low cost. The Bolt really is one of the first non-Tesla players with a decent range, yet you can't drive it from Seattle to Yosemite because the lack of chargers and GM isn't investing anything in them. The same goes for BMW.

Volkswagen is forced to build chargers due to the diesel settlement, but ironically without their cheating and forced investment in EV, there would be fewer chargers out there than there are today (or in the near future).

Maybe I'm wrong and hydrogen or some other form of fuel will win, but if EVs do, car manufacturers will be scrambling to catch up and invest in chargers. I don't think this will happen soon, but maybe in 5 years they'll start thinking about it. Really, if they wait until the Model Y in 2020 and Tesla starts eating their lunch in the biggest segment in the US (CUVs), it might wake them up sooner.

Meanwhile, the closest Tesla superchargers are nearly double-digit miles away, far from the freeways, so at best 30 minutes away without traffic and up to 3 hours away with traffic. And since there are so few of them, you basically cross your fingers and hope that one of them is free when you get there.

That means that even with absurd 6mph traffic that takes 3 hours to get 30mi, you might still finish charging first on the SuperCharger (15min vs 3hours).

I have no doubt the'll start building chargers but I think the ramp up will be slower and the power levels will be lower than what people think. Most cars can't even charge at 350kW because their batteries are too small. You'd damage the batteries.

I have no doubt that they are serious and ambitious, but they are so far behind Tesla that it‘s not likely that they will catch up until 2020. Also, they are planning to place their fast chargers only 120 Km apart to accommodate for a wider range of vehicles, which puts them at a disadvantage too.

I don't think it will take more than a couple of years for well-maintained superchargers to be ubiquitous, and that's if you give away the power for free with government subsidies. If you charge customers for the energy, it might happen even faster.

Or about 1/7th of a windmill.

So far I have heard a lot of announcements about great cars and great charging networks from these companies but nothing they have actually done gives me any confidence.

People also said that the other car makers will switch the electric and start building electric cars in mass easily and quickly. So far however most of these projects have seen delays and other problems.

I would also say that all the 'lower' level chargers will benefit Tesla equally to everybody else, so its no intensive to buy a non-Tesla.

It is why teslamotors.com is now tesla.com

CHAdeMO is the better standard for fast charging, IMHO, since it allows bidirectional charging.

They choose not to make such an update though...

To the contrary, user experience at Tesla superchargers is great. There are enough of them, evenly distributed, that I never have range anxiety, they work, they are usually not over crowded (although getting busier), they are free or at cost, they are high powered, usually located near nice amenities, and they are simple - pull in, plug in and wait 15-45 minutes. I don't see anything on the horizon from other manufacturers that will even remotely approximate what Tesla offers today with supercharging. Partnership/expansion of for-profit networks will never get there.

So people believe that Tesla is going to upend the entire auto industry, but can't believe that some company will figure out how to build nice charging stations?

So many contradictions in the arguments here. Yes, the Supercharger network was, basically, necessary for Tesla to reach a critical acceptance level. But operating and maintaining those stations is not free.

The idea that the major fuelling stations won't start adding fast chargers is incredibly naive. They already have the infrastructure and real estate. It's a no-brainer. If/when EV demand reaches those levels, it will happen.

I think you're underestimating Tesla's first-mover advantage. My father works for a city in LA county and when Tesla decided to build a supercharger there, they initially asked the city to not only provide free real estate and grid connection, but to pay them to do it. Now, the city didn't pay, but it did incentivize in the form of free spaces in a prime shopping center because both city and property owner knew superchargers will bring a steady flow of well-to-do captive audience customers. I'm guessing this scenario is repeating itself all over the country wherein Tesla is building out superchargers for very low upfront and recurring cost.

No other charge network or automobile manufacturer has this type of leverage, nor will they for likely many years. If Electrify America were to approach that same city with the same request they'd likely have to pay/lease real estate, or install in sub-optimal locations (like Walmart parking lots), because they will not bring even remotely close to the same amount of traffic and economic activity as superchargers.

If you don’t have an electric car (I have two, a Volt with no quickcharge and a Leaf with a quick charge), it’s hard to understand just how strong Tesla’s position in the market is here. It’ll probably be a decade before others catch up. Less if they partner with Tesla.

But here’s the thing: the market for electric cars is enormous, as big as the market for regular ICE cars. It’s not a niche. That’s why the “Tesla killer” argument is dumb: if your target is Tesla, you’ll lose because you’ll always be behind, fighting over a niche that Tesla created. Because Tesla wasn’t targeting other EVs, or even hybrids, they are targeting the entire market. If your target is ICE vehicles, then you may win because there will be plenty of market to go around.

The only chance to beat Tesla is to beat ICE cars.

Do they?

I was under the impression most fueling stations had standard single-phase 200A hookups to the grid.

So, at minimum, that would mean an electrical upgrade, no?

I've never heard charging speeds referenced in this way, but it's a really clever way to take into account the charging rate and vehicle efficiency, while being very intuitive! Is this a common "unit" in the EV space?

> One question posed during Wednesday's Tesla quarterly earnings call involved allowing other manufacturers to access Tesla's supercharger network and Elon Musk's response was surprising.

> "This is not a walled garden."

> By that Musk means that he's open to allowing other EV manufacturers to configure their vehicles to be able to use the Superchargers. He stipulates that these manufacturers would have to pay their fair share of the costs and would have to either adopt Tesla's plug standard or include an adapter in their vehicles.

But people tend to be dominated by edge cases instead of giving up a small amount of mobility.

What is this based on? I know several people with electric cars and none of us take planes and rent cars on trips unless they're to another country. I drive to California and Austin all the time and the Tesla is the first car that I don't have to stay the night charging for.

This is the "everything is Silicon Valley" view of the world.

Another hilarious one is: "why doesn't everyone just bike to work?"

The biggest difference here is that electricity, thankfully, is the same in any form, and the key differentiator is the speed at which you can deliver it. I definitely hope that we can agree on better, faster, common, charge delivery formats, but I wouldn't want to put a hamper on innovation, particularly when the electrical automotive industry is so nascent.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/gm-engineers-dis...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#Later_life_...

> Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL, in which he poured TEL over his hands, placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose, and inhaled its vapor for 60 seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems.

Hotels have facilities that aren't used after breakfast until the evening, however they still have to have a lot of staff on-site during these hours.

You could have nice food and coffee instead of motorway service station junk, with booking facilities so you can have that coffee ready as you walk through the door and your parking spot for the charging reserved.

This could work really well in the more scenic parts of the world where there is a lot of the infrastructure built out already, just the right plugs with the right volts and amps needed.

I've been out wine tasting and have run into Tesla destination chargers.

Let's be real here. I just did a 2500 mile road trip in my brand new Model 3. While it is true that 20-25 minutes will give me enough range to drive for 120-160 miles, 20 minutes does not give me a full charge. Charging my Model 3 from ~10% SOC to 80% SOC takes 40 minutes at a Supercharger. The car charges quite quickly from 0% to 50%, but slows down dramatically after that. If you pull in to a Supercharger with 10-20% SOC, 20 minutes will get you up to 50-60% SOC at best.

That being said, I generally didn't mind this. I came to like the slower pace of stops. I know my wife is looking forward to the first road trip we take together in the car, as she always wants to stop and stretch her legs more often than I do.

I just wish more Superchargers had convenient access to 24 hour bathrooms.

So, even if I just charged every time to the daily limit, I'd still have about the same range as a gas car and I can't fill up my gas car at home on a regular basis. That benefit alone outweighs the cons of a slightly longer trip for me.

PS. Slow down. ;). If you're only getting 160 miles from the daily charge, you're driving pretty fast or using up power in some other way.

What I mean to say is, every product that is used by almost everybody will become a commodity at some point. That is not the question. The question is

a) How long can you keep it from not becoming a commodity?

b) How can you build your business model as market leader around it being a commodity?

E.g. gas stops can be considered a commodity at this point, but the powerhouse oil companies still own the whole thing and make hundreds of billions out of gas sales. If Tesla can use their leverage and tech-know-how to get into that position for electrical gas stations they might be in a good position to take that leadership position for a generation or two in providing electricity for the cars, making more money than with actual car sales.

So for Tesla, as much as for the not-yet-existing space station business, the fact that they will become commodities at some point is more of a strategic detail than a kill factor.

Alas, I would have thought the same for ISPs. Any reason why EV charging won't naturally evolve into a similar overpriced, regulator capturing, locale-by-locale monopoly?

I'm talking about the subset of the EV owners without home charging. Currently this number is small, but as battery prices drop and EVs become the de-facto 'regular car,' there's ~60% of the population who have no "at-cost" home charging (being locked-in to whatever exclusive vendor their apartment complex chooses).

In this respect EVs are very different from gasoline vehicles, and I say this as a big supporter of EVs. I can drive across town to buy gas, but I can't park my car across town overnight.

The problem with competing firms is that eventually someone wins.

That's why the fight for net neutrality is so important.

Not for the tenants themselves.

Tenants need permission from the owner to install charging infrastructure, and the owner has little incentive to allow competition because the vendor gives them a cut of the [overpriced] charging fee. Even California's progressive tenant EV charger law[1] doesn't apply if 10% (!) of parking spots already have chargers.

Your example of pay laundry is instructive. In theory laundry service remains interchangeable (after all, "water/electric service is already running to the buildings"), but in practice the owner simply forbids tenants from installing their own laundry machines (typically citing flood risk).

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

https://shop.tesla.com/ca/en/product/vehicle-accessories/mod...

It’s not that hard for Tesla to adapt to a new standard, too. The power electronics are the same, just a different plug and protocol. Tesla’s can connect to a CHAdeMO charger with a relatively cheap adapter.

1) Charge rate is 50kW peak, less than half of Supercharger’s 120kW.

2) Leaf battery is small, so you need to stop like every hour or so to charge.

3) 1st gen Leaf battery has no cooling. That’s right, none. Not even air cooling. It relies on thermal mass of the battery & very slow leakage of heat through the structure of the car. This is sufficient for daily commute usage, but Quickcharging produces heat. After 2 or 3 quickcharges, the battery is hot so quickharging rate reduces to more like 15-20kW to reduce heat production (power lost to heat is proportional to current squared, so halving charge rate halves the total heat per unit energy). Teslas and Bolts don’t have this problem as their batteries are liquid cooled.

So you end up only being able to travel 200-300 miles in a day even with Quickcharging. And because of the small battery, Nissan needs a lot more chargers to enable a given trip.

The new Leaf is supposed to have a >200 mile battery and 100kW charger. So about where Tesla was in 2012. But the existing charger network for CHAdeMO is only 40-50kW. Not too bad for an emergency stop, but if your whole trip is that slow charging, it’s significant.

BTW, Teslas can use Chademos with a $500 adapter since the CHAdeMO standard is the basis for the Supercharger standard. Also, CHAdeMO is capable of bidirectional charging, so it’s possible to do vehicle-to-grid with a Nissan Leaf. CHAdeMO is a better standard than the CCS one, but unfortunately most other EVs are using CCS.

And one big advantage Tesla’s Supercharger has is the plug is much smaller (and I believe cheaper to make!). CHAdeMO and CCS plugs are huge and unwieldy. And no one seems to be seeking a more sleek design like Tesla’s.

Fortunately, though, it’s not TOO expensive to provide both a CHAdeMO plug and CCS plug, since the expensive power electronics are the same, just a different protocol and plug, so many DC fast charging stations have both.

Disclaimer: I am long TSLA

I hightly doubt other car companies are gonna do this in a reaonable time frame (3-4 years). They will rely on the dealer network to build out the chargers and suck up the setup cost. Now dealers can potentially finance this with debt and get this done, but I doubt GM or any car company will be able to get consensus from the dealers and roll this ouut fast.

https://www.electrifyamerica.com/our-plan

I live in the southeastern US. I have been saying for two years now that Cracker Barrel should be adding DC Fast chargers to each of its restaurants' parking lots. Who cares if the car takes 45 minutes to charge if I can grab a nice meal while I wait.

I used this strategy on my recent Florida-Texas roundtrip in a Model 3. The Baton Rouge Tesla Supercharger is located next to an Acme Oyster House location. I ate a nice lunch while the car charged. I pulled in with a 10% charge and pulled out with about a 90% charge. It was a heck of a lot nicer than eating a hamburger while driving.

In that regard Tesla is having, fir now, clear advantage over traditional car makers. Until, that is, these car makers agreed on a common standard for charging their cars. Once that standard is established (supercharger-like solutions) the risk for third parties to set up charging networks comparable to gas stations became very low.

It is great to see Tesla turn a profit. But it seems to have some down sides, quality for example. Lets hope it is sustainable. I for my part am not convinced it is. We will see who is faster, Tesla at getting mass production right or competitors getting EVs developed and sold.

Laughable, isn't it? Once second of Google would prove it wrong. People literally don't care about reality when it comes to this company. Some PR site says it, and it becomes "fact". The list of things people claim Tesla has done/can do that has no basis in reality is long and growing longer.

For all the talk about "range anxiety", it is a real concern that only Tesla seems to be actively working towards eliminating.

I've needed to drive across the country every year for the past 4 years, and allocating extra days to stop and charge was never an option. That's one aspect where my cheap Honda beats most electric vehicles. For EV to go truly mainstream, that should not be the case.

A long road-trip is not an edge case. It's the most affordable - and one of the most popular - ways to have a vacation[1]. National parks alone get over 300 million visits, but they're by far not the only destination. Overall, road trips account for an astonishing 39 percent of vacations[2].

As both articles note, the reasons to choose a road trip over flying include economical considerations; most people travel in their own cars.

Does it mean that EV aren't good? No. But to prevail, EV need to be better than ICE cars at the same price point. And as of today, they are really not the best vehicle for most people, by far.

Without the supercharger network, EV are not practical for most. See this thread[3] for examples of when Tesla owners use ICE cars.

All that is to say that how good an EV is for most people is determined a lot by the available infrastructure. So good on Tesla for being way ahead of the competition here.

[1]https://skift.com/2018/05/22/how-driving-defines-us-the-futu...

[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/travel/road-trips-in-the-...

[3]https://www.quora.com/Do-Tesla-Model-S-owners-and-primary-dr...

If you plot "number of long road trips per car per year", the mode is probably zero and I'd wager that fewer than 10% of cars are taken on a long road trip more than one time per year and fewer than 5% more than two times per year.

Taking your one-year figure of 39% of vacations as road trips, that's still fewer than one road trip per car per year. There's little over 1 car registered per adult in the US. Assuming an average 1 week vacation 1 time per year, with 39% being road trips, and 2 adults per road trip, that's one road trip per year for every 5 cars. If the average car is driven 8000 miles per year (lots of cars driven under 1000 miles to offset the more typical 12-15K/yr figure) and a road trip is 500 miles, it's about 100 miles of road trip usage against an average of 8000 miles, or about 1.25% use for road trips. Considering most of the road trip car use would be on cars used a more typically 12-15K, it's under 1% of usage.

It would take some significant errors in the Fermi estimates above to suggest that road trip usage is a typical use. If you have a battery electric and don't want to or can't road trip in it, rent a gas car one week a year. If you do more frequent road trips, a gas car or hybrid is a better bet probably.

Here's some quotes from their plan:

"Electrify America is investing in roughly 900 charging stations across the United States by mid-2019. These stations have multiple dispensers with more than 5,000 charging ports available."

"Electrify America’s DC Fast EV charging stations will be located along high-traffic corridors in 39 states, including two cross-country routes. Locations will accommodate between four and ten chargers, with charging power levels up to 350kW available at every station, capable of adding 20 miles of range per minute to a vehicle. Nationally, each planned station site will be located no more than 120 miles apart and, on key East and West Coast highways, planned locations average only 70 miles apart."

Don't get me wrong. There are gaps in their planned build-out, but they should be able to quickly build out to a point where their charging network suffices for the vast majority of Americans typical long distance driving needs. For everything else, rental cars are still an option, and the future should bring even more DCFC infrastructure build-out.

Given that the amount of Teslas on the roads is growing exponentially these months, Tesla will probably have to grow the supercharger network too. Until recently, there were around 300,000 Teslas on the roads worldwide sharing some 11,000 charging points at 1,350 super charging stations. Soon there are twice as many Teslas on the roads. Next Christmas maybe close to 1 million Teslas in total. They will need to expand with new locations, more charging points per location and faster charging times.

Also, in 3-4 years there will be millions of old Teslas with today's "short" range that still will have to be serviced by super chargers.

Most importantly, many apartment dwellers, i.e. the younger buyers in the cities that will constitute a great deal of the core customer base for Model 3 and Model Y once prices drop to $35,000 or below, may find it more convenient to use super chargers in stead of charging at home. This is especially true, if charging times can be reduced a bit.

Going forward, Tesla can use the charging stations for all kind of things like promoting other products (solar tiles, powerwall batteries etc.) and even selling third party products, just like regular gas stations.

There's nothing exponential about the rate of growth of Teslas. Fast != exponential.

On a side note, I doubt that you would ever find a growth rate in business or economy that truly followed a mathematical function.

[0]: https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/regionale/syd/europas-foerste-supe... In Danish

That's assuming they don't become travel centers themselves.

That's actually another advantage. If they build travel centers around their superchargers, anyone with free supercharging (which is a large fraction of the current installed base) would prefer theirs over ones they have to pay for. But then they get all the people milling around buying coffee, burgers, phone chargers, sunscreen, etc.

For that matter they could go into business with the truckstop companies. Supply the charging hardware and expertise to install/operate/maintain them at the truckstops in exchange for a share of the overall take.

Several of the Tesla superchargers I use are at independent gas stations just opposite the gas pumps.

Once store owners see the value and demand, they'll likely support infrastructure for EV clients.

Its electric scooters rather than electric cars but Gogoro in Taiwan has built out a network of charging stations for the vehicles they sell. 810 "gostations" according to their website.

https://www.gogoro.com/smart-energy/

Plus, what about the Bolt, Volt, i3, Soul EV, or any number of other EVs? They wouldn't be comfortable or possibly even welcome at a Nissan dealership to charge.

Only teslas can charge on the supercharger network afaik. And, Nissan dealers will let other manufacturers car's charge if you pay, ymmv but it happens.

Listen, I'm not defending Nissan's setup, I'm just countering the point that there's only the supercharger network.

Where I live we have 2 Nissan dealers and zero Supercharging stations.

First, I said they're not as accessible.

Second, not all journeys are between cities. In fact...

For normal usage you charge at home.

Not everyone lives in a house with dedicated electrical outlets.

Yeah. Only time I got stranded was because the only reachable station was a Blink one.

Sometimes I wonder if the name wasn't deliberately chosen.

If your route allows, you can also take advantage of what Tesla calls "destination chargers" - Tesla chargers at hotels that are free-to-use for patrons.

As somebody who will be in the market for a EV in the coming months, I've already discounted Tesla as an option for this reason.

I understand if this drives you away on principle, but you’re not representative.

Now. The fact they do it at all is cause for concern.

50 cents says there is some terms you have to agree to that gives them the ability to blacklist for any reason.

Why would anybody want to buy a car where the primary and sometimes only source of filling it up can blacklist your car world wide.

Because it's not prohibitively expensive, Model 3 owners will use them fairly regularly, but not to replace home charging in a way an S/X owner might. For the most part.

Right before our 3 arrived new superchargers went in within 5mi from my house; 1 in East Palo Alto and 1 in San Carlos. They're virtually everywhere around the bay area now, so they've been pretty good at quick rollout of urban superchargers, and it FEELS LIKE they can keep up with demand, here at least. When I check on the map they're busy but never full.

Their response is to build more, of course, and to expand the current ones. I agree with the sibling that this is a good problem for Tesla to have, particularly as new Teslas are paying into those costs.

Besides using supercharger is not free as well. As more and more cars go electric, charging stations are going to be as common as gas stations and there will be competition with pricing etc. Not sure if I want to rely on one company's charging network.

So every time you go on a road trip, what do you do? Get a ride to a rental car place, initial a stack of paperwork denying a half-dozen $10-25/day charges on top of whatever base rate you agreed to, finally get the keys to a super-bare-base-model of some car that looked good from the outside, drive it back to your house, then load everything up and hope for the best?

Or would you rather just load up in the car you already own, and are comfortable and familiar with driving, and not need to budget an extra hour or two on either end of the drive for rental company nonsense?

> Besides using supercharger is not free as well. As more and more cars go electric, charging stations are going to be as common as gas stations and there will be competition with pricing etc. Not sure if I want to rely on one company's charging network.

Tesla's supercharger network is a huge advantage precisely because no one else has anything like it. It also now has a fair amount of redundancy along major routes. It would be wonderful if competing networks actually existed, but they meaningfully don't. Tesla realizes that you actually need the network, and that having it allows a Tesla car to be your only car. Everyone else just thinks they can sell something with X miles of range, wipe their hands, and thinks spending 8 hours at a ChargePoint station in a grocery store parking lot is actually acceptable.