Agreed, and locating them at dealers is often an impractical choice for drivers: they are not consistently located strategically next to highways, sometimes they put them in an area that is not physically accessible outside of business hours (e.g., fenced yard), and the incentive to maintain them is less.

VW is building out chargers as part of the diesel scandal settlement.

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

Funny enough, that's the one current huge investment outside of Tesla in charging infrastructure. If it takes a car company cheating on emissions and being forced to invest in electric, then all of them are going to be doomed to playing catch up.

For sure. I personally think that Electrify America is a stop gap. In the longer term, I would expect to see businesses that already exist near highway exits start to build out DCFC to lure potential customers.

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.

Yeah, and they’re slow rolling it and plan to charge high prices. It’s frustrating to me as an EV owner. But perfectly logical if you want to appear to be doing something while in fact protecting fossil fuel car sales.

Having a proprietary charging system and network was necessary to get EVs into the market in the first place. A little bit like ICE powered cars. Back the day fuel could ibly be bought at pharmacies.

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.

The current situation with dealers sucks for non-tesla EVs, they're often inside and not accessible. They have other cars parked in the way, the people at the dealer don't care, there aren't enough chargers etc.

Yeah, dealers regularly park cars in EV charging spots.

Porsche said they will "plan to" install 500 DCFC chargers at... Porsche dealers.

This is the same as what Nissan has done. It means cities are well covered but interstates are not.

All the other companies combined probably have fewer EVs on the road than Tesla. Building a charger network for 200,000+ Teslas makes sense, but building a similar network for 20,000 BMWs doesn't.

I'm not sure where you get your information, but Tesla has 360k vehicles produced as of Q2 3018. The leaf alone is at 350k, making it "world's all-time best-selling highway-capable electric car in history". I think it's clear that Tesla comment is not true.

>I'm not sure where you get your information,

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.

It is not as straightforward a process and TSLA has a huge head start on this regard.