There is a private network of charging stations in our area. He has a few stories about them.
One time he arrives at a station that disconnects him after 5 seconds. He calls them. Customer service says it's functional and nothing is wrong with it. He asks them to look up the previous charges. They all disconnected after 5 seconds. Coincidence!
He goes to another broken station. He calls them. Apparently they're not aware of it being down right now, but tell him it's a recurrent problem with this one. Nothing else is done.
He breaks his own rules and takes his chances on a charging station without having enough charge to go to another one in case this one fails. Sure enough, it's broken. He call them. He has to get towed to the next station, and they will pay for it, but that doesn't include his own transport. He has to pay for a cab himself.
He gets to another non-functional charging station. He calls them. They tell him it's a compatibility issue with his car despite him having used the same ones for the past 5 years. There is nothing else they can do for him. He asks to speak to someone higher up and to pass on his complaint. He never hears back.
He wasn't even discouraged by the long recharge times. In the end, it's because he was tired of being late to appointments and having to worry about this crap all the time.
The reason is that the owner bought them from a random company, they installed it and do have a service contract - the problem is that the service queues are measured in weeks and spare parts are scarce.
The same thing is with chargers on the parking lots of some chain stores. Corporate has mandated that there has to be X charging spots - enter /r/maliciouscompliance - ok boss, here's the charger. Does it work? No. Do they care? No. Does corporate actually care? No, they can quote numbers of installed charging stations in their quarterly reports.
Meanwhile bigger operators standardise on one station provider, have their own trained staff and a stockpile of common spare parts. A few even frequent the local EV driver FB groups and interact with their customer base there.
Tesla on the other hand knows exactly what's happening on their Superchargers and share that data with their vehicles.
Not saying your points are untrue but for completeness you would expect less for a cheaper car. We can certainly point to the technology gap between the two being too wide but at the end of the day they are not at the same price point.
I can buy the cheapest, junkiest gasoline powered car and still have ready access to fuel anywhere I need to go. That's what EVs have to compete with.
I actually think Tesla propped up its resale values in the beginning with the guaranteed buyback price thing. They managed to maintain this until people started getting used to "tesla is expensive". (although teslas are more useful because of the large battery and charging infrastructure)
I am uncertain about this. They've tried this with phones, and it ends up that the cost gets bundled into a more expensive service. Also changes might be forced to get people upgrade more often and make the devices throw-away.
I think with ownership, there might be pressure on the manufacturers to focus on longevity.
For normal Tesla wall chargers, like one that might be installed at someone's house, I think there are adapters that might work for the Leaf, but I have no experience with them.
That said, other than Tesla, I think there is standardization. Especially with Electrify America. But, Tesla's network is so convenient and widespread that it is currently a big selling point for the brand, in my opinion.
A what now? I haven't seen anything CCS related in the US. Is that a European accessory? Don't all Teslas outside the US ship with CCS standard?
The US Teslas come with a J1772-to-Tesla adapter so you can use L2 Chargers.
There is a ChaDeMo-to-Teska adapter for $400. No idea why anyone would want this though, ChaDeMo is rare and, in my experience with my Leaf, often broken.
ChDeMo is a better connection in some regards (can feed energy back to the grid for example), but they are a lot fiddlier than CCS and Type2, which are just huge chunks of thick plastic.
Teslas outside of the US have shipped with CCS since early 2019. Older Teslas had the proprietary port.
What is a "Tesla Level 2"? There exists an adapter to convert CCS to the proprietary Tesla connector but that's not L2.
It is true that the V3 version of the Tesla destination charger (which is relatively new), which has a microcontroller/wifi/etc, has a config flag you can set to only charge Tesla vehicles and can whitelist by VIN, but it's still in the very early stage of release.
@vel0city: In response to your deleted reply to this comment, if legacy automakers want access to Tesla's supercharging network for their own EVs, they should be prepared to contribute towards the enormous capex costs Tesla incurred as well as the ongoing operational expenses. Otherwise, legacy automakers who made no material effort to transition to EVs are free riding off of Tesla's hard work to build the network they now desperately need to remain in business.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/destination-charging
[2] https://smile.amazon.com/Lectron-Tesla-Charger-J1772-Adapter...
While this seems very fair it also seems very problematic. They definitely should do that. But if they chose to not do that and build disjointed infrastructure instead the outcome will be worse for everyone and it will give Tesla an advantage that perhaps would not be unfair to them but at least would be unfair to consumers.
So there is an unnecessary difference between US and EU cars, even from the same manufacturer.
Tesla wants to profit off the fruit of their labor and extract some value from their product that is providing value to others and fund its development. It also is used as a sales vector since their charging network is a huge selling point for their cars.
Consumers don’t want to be stuck with two standards for no reason other than corporate politics and pay higher prices via those licensing fees. Or be locked out from certain charging stations just because of the model of their car.
And other automakers don’t want to be put at a competitive disadvantage because they have little choice but have to license the tech from Tesla.
And the world doesn’t want to put up with having to duplicate the massive human effort of setting up a charging network n times just because of corporate politics.
I always thought this was the basically the perfect situation for gov’t to step in and “fix” the market by just funding the development of the charging technology and providing it to all automakers for free/at cost so everyone gets the best charger on the cheap.
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-elon-musk-open-supe...
https://www.gearbrain.com/tesla-supercharger-accessible-othe...
He's even fine with them using adapters for Tesla's plug, they just have to pay "their fair share" to use the Tesla superchargers. Of course the devil's in the details who knows what a licensing agreement like this would cost.
If they think they can build a better infrastructure, they should. That's the free market.
I bet they can't, worst case Tesla can always buy these charging locations at a discount.
The problematic part is if they choose to shut out other players without any better reason than wanting to dominate the market.
Free markets aren't infallible and they can quickly become unfree when moats have been established. (Amazon feels like the obvious example of that. Competing with them is close to impossible.)
You aren't just buying a car with Tesla, you are buying an ecosystem that just works.
Legacy automakers had almost a century to create this network. And look at the current reputation and state of their dealership network.
This is the key.
You can just punch in a destination in a Tesla, it'll map out the correct route with chargers. Other cars can usually do this too.
The car will pre-heat the battery for optimal charging temperature before arriving at the charging location. Not all EVs do this, they should. Cold-gating during charging is a big deal when traveling long distances in below freezing temperatures.
A Tesla can also check if there are free spots in the charger. No other car does this as far as I know.
Inasmuch as GM had responsibility to help build Tesla’s supercharger network, I agree.
The fact that an SV startup managed to build itself what might be considered a moat by some regulators in a few years while being laughed at by the legacy carmakers is very ironic.
Buying Tesla is supporting vendor lock-in and proprietary standards instead of supporting open standards.
By this logic Tesla should be banned from using all other charging networks. Is that what you're proposing?
What should actually happen is that Tesla should switch to CCS Type 1 Combo plugs in the US and then they should open their chargers to all brands of EV. The way EV owners can contribute to Tesla's charging network is by simply paying for the electricity the charger dispenses, just like ICE vehicle owners pay for fuel.
Tesla switched to CCS type 2 Combo plugs in Europe:
https://insideevs.com/news/343728/most-tesla-superchargers-n...
Now the next step Tesla needs to take is to open their European chargers to all brands of EV.
A big part of the Tesla network is that there are only Teslas in there - vehicles that are guaranteed to have the ability to charge at 150kW+.
If every joe schmoe with a PHEV or Leaf would be hogging the HVDC chargers, the competitive advantage would go away and there'd be a lot more congestion.
Charging a 50kW max car from a 350kW charger is like driving a go-cart on a freeway. Yes, you can do it. Should you? Probably not. Will other people be annoyed by you? Definitely.
Ultimately buying Tesla is supporting vendor lock-in and proprietary connectors instead of industry standards. And what a joke, as if Tesla bothered to even offer such a thing to allow the other automakers to use their connector and signaling.
For one, there is now n+1 standards. For the more important point, tesla could have made their standard free instead of proprietary.
They are in it for the money. Not any "greater good" or "advancement of humanity" or any other such bullshit. Money. And it's obvious if you look and not listen to them (this includes apple and such).
Tesla is a part of "the industry".
Tesla offered access to their supercharging network, as well. Predictably, the traditional auto makers wanted nothing to do with it, not even as a stop-gap, and instead had committees design inferior plugs for a minuscule and fragmented charging network that reliably fails to charge any vehicle.
Tesla is distinctly not part of the traditional auto industry. Tesla management insight into engineering and the marketplace is a fundamental differentiating factor.
Let’s say you’re a traditional upmarket car maker with a reputation for engineering excellence, and you want to computerize your dashboard. What’s your approach? I can tell you exactly what you’d do, because I’ve seen it: license windows CE and break your requirements down into team-sized chunks. Each team makes its own windows CE device. The devices are all supposed to talk to each other, but the teams implementing them don’t need to talk to each other, because they have formal specs for their components. Shockingly, when all the systems are assembled together, doors lock and unlock randomly, headlights are unreliable, and it’s common knowledge that you better not roll down a window, because you may need to go to the dealer to raise it. So, you try and fail to improve for the next model year. This continues for a decade before you even consider a different approach.
Or, Tesla could adopt the industry standard so I don't have to tear out the charger on the wall every time I want to buy a different brand of car.
Its quite a joke that having vendor lock-in increases competition and innovation. If you've paid the thousands of dollars to have a Tesla wall charger installed, and you'll have to pay to get a different one for a different brand, do you think that'll weigh on your decision to buy another car even if the other car is technically better? Proprietary connectors lock people into the platform and increases friction to customers leaving for a different product.
If you don't want a Tesla, don't buy one. No one is forcing people to buy them, or to use their chargers (fast DC or otherwise). If jurisdictions desire Tesla to open their network for others, compensate them for their private investment they're demanding they open up.
Regardless, I appreciate the conversation and the perspective as an electric vehicle enthusiast.
Tesla could still differentiate themselves through better service and infrastructure (I saw other posts describing how bad Leaf charging stations were). But they wouldn't be able to hassle consumers with lock-in.
When did locking in consumers become a fair way to recoup investment?
Lets also look at it the other way in a theoretical to analyze the idea of widespread proprietary connectors and their connection to innovation. Say Nissan had a proprietary connector and made the big investment to deploy a massive charging network. The Nissan cars are technically vastly inferior to the Tesla cars, but because Nissan made a well-timed capex they've got a leg up on the chargers. People then tend to buy the inferior Nissan cars because of the brand presence and vast availability of chargers. While the Tesla cars are technically better, all of those owners already have proprietary Nissan connectors at home. Their offices have Nissan chargers. Their grocery store has Nissan chargers. The highway rest stops have Nissan chargers. Truck stops have Nissan chargers. Do you think the technically better Tesla wins? Imagine when new construction of houses starts to have vehicle charging connections common. If your house came with a Nissan charger and it'll cost you $500 to swap it out for a Tesla one, doesn't that raise the price of the Tesla $500 simply because of the cable in your home? Sounds terrible to me.
Obviously it would be better for consumers if all these companies got together and used a single standard and shared resources to build out a great network. Also better for consumers would be decoupling the charging network from the manufacturers, like ICE cars and mobile phones do (cables aside, in the latter case). No one is arguing otherwise, the discussion is about why this isn't better for manufacturers.
One way to make it better for manufacturers is to mandate a standard, leaving manufacturers who don't use the standard in violation of statute.
But another way is to wait until there are enough manufacturers of EVs, who actually care about their EVs and not just making compliance vehicles, and who actually care about building EV charging networks and not just building them to comply with consent decrees they're subject to thanks to past illegal behavior, and who as a result actually care about having a useful, usable, reliable network of fast charging stations for cross-country trips.
Right now, only Tesla cares about this.
Eventually, other manufacturers will too. Then, one day, it will make sense for both manufacturers and consumers to use a single shared plug, and all new installations will have it, and old installations will be retrofitted. It will take 10+ years here, but it's already happening in Europe thanks to mandates. In the meantime, mandating everyone follow some terrible standard and support other manufacturers' vehicles is just punitive to the manufacturers who do care, and punitive to future consumers who would like to use a functional system and not be stuck with the garbage that passes for fast charging outside Tesla's network in the US today.
</soapbox>
The industry standard answer to the Supercharger connector exists. Its available on multiple brands of cars today. The day for a single shared plug could be today if Elon says so. Retrofits for charging stations could start happening tomorrow. They could probably start cranking out CCS compatible cars for the US market within a quarter. But Tesla doesn't want a single shared plug, they want to own the market for chargers. They want to use the wide spread proprietary connector as a selling point to sell their cars. Which is exactly the concept in my "straw man" post. Its not really a straw man when its literally the exact scenario that's currently playing out in the market though, a car manufacturer using a dominant position in deploying chargers to push their cars. For evidence, see TFA. Do you think Tesla owners are installing J1772/CCS chargers at their homes and using adapters, or are they installing Tesla chargers? When someone sees an article like this, is that not convincing shoppers to look at Teslas first over other brands of electric cars? Seems less like a straw man and just taking a hard look at the objective reality of today.
Buying Tesla is supporting vendor lock-in. Its obvious to you that a single, open connector is better for the market and yet you'll continue to support a proprietary one.
> The thing is, Tesla wants to push their proprietary connector and have that be the dominant plug. Its their connector which will only be featured on Tesla cars.
Yes
> You really think Tesla would be going along with retrofitting in Europe if it wasn't for regulations? That they'd just willingly give up their market dominance position in charging network just because they feel like it and have some altruistic desire to embrace some future connector?
No, and no.
> The industry standard answer to the Supercharger connector exists. Its available on multiple brands of cars today.
CCS1? CCS2? CHAdeMO?
> The day for a single shared plug could be today if Elon says so.
Not exactly, but very close.
> Retrofits for charging stations could start happening tomorrow. They could probably start cranking out CCS compatible cars for the US market within a quarter. But Tesla doesn't want a single shared plug, they want to own the market for chargers.
Yes.
> They want to use the wide spread proprietary connector as a selling point to sell their cars.
The connector is only loosely related to the network. Tesla prevents other cars from using Superchargers both by connector and software. But the connector is irrelevant, really: they could just as easily prevent non-Teslas from using Tesla Superchargers with just software, as they do (for now) in Europe.
Given that they have a proprietary network, why not use a nice plug designed for this purpose, instead of a garbage monstrosity with a bunch of extraneous pins? (This is mostly directed at CCS1 and CHAdeMo. CCS2 is slightly less terrible.)
> Which is exactly the concept in my "straw man" post. Its not really a straw man when its literally the exact scenario that's currently playing out in the market though, a car manufacturer using a dominant position in deploying chargers to push their cars.
Yes.
> For evidence, see TFA. Do you think Tesla owners are installing J1772/CCS chargers at their homes and using adapters
Yes.
> or are they installing Tesla chargers?
Also yes. Anecdotally, in my neighborhood, I see a lot of both. More J1172's though.
> When someone sees an article like this, is that not convincing shoppers to look at Teslas first over other brands of electric cars? Seems less like a straw man and just taking a hard look at the objective reality of today.
Yes.
> Buying Tesla is supporting vendor lock-in. Its obvious to you that a single, open connector is better for the market and yet you'll continue to support a proprietary one.
Yes.
None of this has dissuaded me from the argument I made earlier, which is: other manufacturers, aside from Tesla in the US, need to care about charging networks in order for fast charging to become widespread, and for EV adoption to increase. Right now, they don't, and so Tesla is eating their lunch on EV sales and charging.
Let's be clear, the straw man argument you are arguing against is "The world as-is with proprietary Tesla connectors is preferable to consumers, compared with a single shared standard" -- and you are arguing "if you don't support mandated standards, that means you don't care about standards, and if you don't care about standards, you support a world of vendor lock-in that reduces competition and results in Tesla winning with their proprietary stuff."
It's a straw man because no one is saying "it's preferable for consumers for Tesla to have a proprietary connector". And it's not Tesla's desire for a proprietary network to support its EV sales that causes fast charging to be a disaster in the US for non-Teslas.
Let's be clear again why fast charging is a disaster in the US: it's not because of Tesla's proprietary connector, or proprietary charging network, no, it's that other manufacturers don't care! It's that they don't really care about EVs (or haven't, anyway, can't know if they actually do care now) and so don't care about charging networks, and Tesla has no incentive to play nice because it gains nothing from other EVs using their superchargers.
Obviously Tesla has a profit motive, obviously it's using the charging network to push its EV sales, but if any other manufacturer had a comparable network, or even if the others combined did, or if EV chargers were sufficiently available, it would be a no-brainer for all parties to agree to share: all their customers would benefit, and they would incur no real costs because a proprietary network is no longer a competitive advantage.
We want that world, not the world in which we force Tesla to use a crappy connector, and to open its limited supercharger network to other EVs, and end up with Tesla's near-capacity network becoming even-more-stretched, eliminating Tesla's incentive to keep building it out (since it doesn't provide a competitive advantage anymore), and also not incentivizing anyone else to build out a fast charging network that's well-placed, well-maintained, and available-—because they can just use Tesla's!
The US may at some point want to mandate a standard connector. But to do so now, without also making manufacturers care about building more fast charging, will just make the situation worse, not better.
And yes, Elon could easily say "Tesla is moving all production to CCS2, all future Teslas manufactured after today will be CCS2, all Supercharger stations will be retrofitted with CCS2 cables" and we would be living in that standard where pretty much every car on the road can receive power at pretty much every car charging station. Pretty much every car in the US sold with CHAdeMO also supports CCS1 (J1772), I don't know of a single model which doesn't. We don't live in this world because Elon would prefer for everyone to be locked into proprietary cables and a proprietary network. This is the *only reason* why. Sure, things were different 10 years ago when CCS was barely even on paper. As it stands in the market where I live there's many more CCS chargers around than Superchargers, and many more J1772 cables (going by data from https://www.plugshare.com/ ). And yet articles like this tell everyone that this is not the case, that if you buy a non-Tesla you're not going to be able to have any luck charging it out in the world, so no point in buying anything that's not a Tesla.
> It's a straw man because no one is saying "it's preferable for consumers for Tesla to have a proprietary connector". And it's not Tesla's desire for a proprietary network to support its EV sales that causes fast charging to be a disaster in the US for non-Teslas.
By buying a Tesla you're supporting the notion that proprietary connections are good. You're choosing to buy a car with a proprietary connector. You agree earlier that Tesla wouldn't move to an industry standard unless they were forced by regulators, and yet you also think they're not purposefully pushing their proprietary connector for vendor lock-in reasons. It seems you're trying to argue it both ways; that clearly it would be better for the consumer to have an industry standard connector and yet its a good thing for Tesla to continue to push their proprietary one continuing to split the market. You're supporting a proprietary connector and pushing for that in the market while suggesting that nobody is pushing for proprietary connectors. How is what I'm saying a straw man?
I do agree fast charging is a disaster due to poor investment by the incumbent auto industry. They were hoping the 3rd party market for DC fast chargers would grow faster. A lot of 3rd parties have been slow to roll it out due to not having as much capital and not having as much of a market to cater to, as a good percentage of electrics being made and sold today in the US are Teslas. But, don't you think if Tesla supported CCS2 we'd see a ton more third party CCS2 chargers spring up? Currently third parties are completely unable to build Tesla charging stations. You can buy a Tesla charger and freely offer it to your customers (and try and shoo away moochers), but you cannot build your own to sell electricity. There isn't a 3rd party market for Tesla chargers, all Tesla chargers exist to push the Tesla brand and push vendor lock in. Sure, you can use an adapter to plug in a J1772, but you'll never be able to use a CCS2 cable for fast charging and we're really talking about fast charging here. On top of that, I've known a few Tesla owners who were unaware they could use an adapter to plug in to J1772 ports; they saw the cables were different and assumed it didn't work.
An answer to the vendor lock-in exists today. Tesla can switch at any time. Continuing to support Tesla is continuing to support vendor lock-in. But they won't, because then articles like TFA won't scare people away from looking at anything other than a Tesla.
You continue to say this, but your evidence is nonexistent for this claim. Standards exist, Tesla doesn't use them for <reasons>, therefore if you buy a Tesla you disagree that standards are good.
I bought a Tesla, I agree standards are good, I wish Tesla would use a standard connector. They don't, because of vendor lock-in. We agree.
We agree that a standardized port is both good and possible. You keep arguing with me like I'm arguing against you on this point, I am not. That is the straw man.
Also:
> yet you also think they're not purposefully pushing their proprietary connector for vendor lock-in reasons
No, I know that they are doing this for lock-in reasons. That was literally in my prior post, perhaps you missed it.
What I AM saying is that the claim that eliminating vendor lock-in will make DC fast charging better for everyone is false. You're right that I care more about fast charging and increased adoption more than standards, because I think we will eventually have standards and it will all be fine.
I don't think that mandating standards now will make fast charging better, which is the thing I care about. I argued strongly for this and you did not refute any of it, instead continuing to argue that those who buy Teslas must not care about standards and are supporting vendor lock-in. Even if true (and I disagree), it's irrelevant.
If you care about standards more than about EV adoption, fast charging proliferation (which I think is a prereq for adoption), then sure, I disagree with you. I think the latter are net better for humanity than avoiding a fragmented charging ecosystem.
You seem to think that a fragmented ecosystem is what will suppress adoption, but I think you are wrong -- I think taking away the incentives of those who are deploying fast charging at scale (i.e., Tesla, for vendor lock-in) will do much more harm than good: in that world, no one will be financially incentivized to build fast charging without market intervention, which perhaps you support but are not arguing for.
And I think present-day vendor lock-in is a small price to pay for 10-years-from-now higher EV adoption.
>> By buying a Tesla you're supporting the notion that proprietary connections are good.
> You continue to say this, but your evidence is nonexistent for this claim. Standards exist, Tesla doesn't use them for <reasons>, therefore if you buy a Tesla you disagree that standards are good.
> And I think present-day vendor lock-in is a small price to pay for 10-years-from-now higher EV adoption.
You're literally making the argument that you're suggesting nobody is making. That ultimately its better for consumers if Tesla has a proprietary connector. Your reason for that line of thinking is because you assume if Tesla didn't have a proprietary connector there would be no market for fast charging at all, or that it would have been massively delayed. You even acknolwedge at some point in time in the future maybe we'll have a standard connector, but clearly there's some reason why it can't be done now and we shouldn't really be demanding for a standard. It took a few comments to draw that out, but as you can see clearly some people are making such an argument as that's ultimately the root of your postiion.
I disagree with that basic premise. Look at the massive amount of J1772 chargers out there in the wild. They're mostly J1772 chargers because when they were built several years ago CCS2 didn't exist except on paper and J1772 was seen as the industry standard connector in the US market. Now that CCS2 is a real standard and is on real cars driving on real roads, CCS2 chargers are starting to exist. Imagine a world where Tesla did open the connector back when CCS2 was just a spec on paper. Anybody in this market could have built a DC fast charger. Any other car company could have built a Supercharger compatible car, so there would have been more on the market. With such a wider possible market at both ends, do you think there would be more or less widely compatible fast charging stations? Note that Tesla could still have made up for other companies piggybacking on their initial investment of the chargers, as the earlier Teslas had free charging. I imagine the free charging wouldn't have applied to a Ford or VW or Nissan at a Tesla station. Or do the massively anti-consumer move of not allowing other brands to charge at their stations. So boom, there's the whole argument of "but why would Telsa want to invest if not for the vendor lock-in?"
If third parties could have manufactured Tesla/Superchargers or cars, I imagine there would be a lot more Tesla/Supercharger compatible chargers in the wild today.
I think you may be confusing an argument about a connector standards with an argument about proprietary networks. I'm saying the connector is basically irrelevant, and not the reason that Tesla's network is proprietary; I'm agreeing that that standards are better than nonstandards for all consumers today, and in the future. A standard connector would make the transition to shared, nonproprietary networks less expensive in the future, but this is basically noise as Tesla's transition from its proprietary connector to CCS2 in Europe shows.
Forcing Tesla to use the CCS standard in the US is a basically irrelevant move unless you also force Tesla to share its fast charging network. So, let's ignore the connector for a moment and focus on the network.
> Imagine a world where Tesla did open the connector back when CCS2 was just a spec on paper. Anybody in this market could have built a DC fast charger. Any other car company could have built a Supercharger compatible car, so there would have been more on the market. With such a wider possible market at both ends, do you think there would be more or less widely compatible fast charging stations? Note that Tesla could still have made up for other companies piggybacking on their initial investment of the chargers, as the earlier Teslas had free charging. I imagine the free charging wouldn't have applied to a Ford or VW or Nissan at a Tesla station. Or do the massively anti-consumer move of not allowing other brands to charge at their stations.
Except Tesla tried exactly this, to make its network shared in the past [0], in part to encourage cost-sharing and all those other good things, and other automakers were not interested. Why wouldn't the other automakers take up Tesla on their offer to share capital costs and join the largest-at-the-time fast charging network?
Because, again, in 2014 (and probably still today), the problem was not an incompatible connector, for which there could be adapters aplenty—it's that legacy manufacturers don't care about EVs, and don't want to spend money on fast charging as a result. Tesla still has a patent reciprocity offer for anyone who wants to support the supercharger connector—but the connector difference is a red herring.
Why would Tesla opening up its network to other vehicles have led to a larger fast charging station network? You are stating this as though it's obvious, but it implies that the only thing stopping anyone else from building fast chargers is that they couldn't use the Tesla connector—which makes no sense.
What has stopped every other manufacturer from building, or partnering, or funding, a fast charger network? Why did VW have to be forced to fund Electrify America because of Dieselgate?
Do you think that if VW honestly thought its future were EVs, and that the reason VW EVs weren't more popular is the lack of a fast charging network, that they would be behaving as they are now? Of course not—they would be building/funding fast chargers as quickly as possible. Instead, they are being dragged kicking and screaming into the EV future by regulation and by the market. They are not building a fast charging network because they do not care about selling EVs.
So, does Tesla benefit from vendor lock-in from the supercharger network and its proprietary connector? Sure. Would there be a larger more compatible network of fast chargers available today if Tesla had made their connector open from the start (i.e., 2011 instead of 2014)? If so, barely—Tesla was, for years, by FAR the largest fast charger network. Nothing prevented other networks from charging Teslas for a fee (and indeed they do now), but they still didn't build.
The reason is not the connector. It's the incentives—we don't have a wide, compatible fast charger network in the US not because Tesla selfishly had a proprietary network, but because no one else wanted to build a large network, and no one else wanted to pay Tesla to share theirs, because prior to 2019, no legacy automaker thought EVs were the future.
Forcing Tesla to open its network today without requiring a cost-sharing on capital expenditures would reduce Tesla's incentive to make its supercharger network larger, because there wouldn't be a competitive advantage anymore. You would have to also incentivize the industry to build fast charging as a whole, and provide capital to do it, and the EA example shows that this is easier said than done.
Hopefully this helps explain how I can support standards and wish everyone used the same plug, but also be ok with temporary vendor lock-in (via the network, not the connector) so that there's incentive for both Tesla and others to build more fast chargers. These are not mutually incompatible.
[0] https://insideevs.com/news/322223/tesla-to-make-supercharger...
CCS type 1 (J1772) and type 2 (aka "Mennekes" used in Europe) are not compatible? Both are described in IEC 62196-2 so I am not sure which other connectors could be compatible here.
> And yes, Elon could easily say "Tesla is moving all production to CCS2, all future Teslas manufactured after today will be CCS2, all Supercharger stations will be retrofitted with CCS2 cables"
This already happened in the European Union FWIW.
> You cannot charge any non-Tesla car from a Tesla connector
> [...] at a Supercharger station.
But I repeat myself.
If Tesla chargers continue to be only exclusive to one brand and take so much space in the parking lots on the motorway, not as much.
Ionity has a different pricing model for cars made by brands member of Ionity and other brands.
I mean, Android and iOS both connect to other devices over standardized NFC, Bluetooth, WiFi, and mobile data network protocols, but good luck using an Apple Watch or Airpods or Airdrop with a Samsung phone. Your Samsung phone's text messages will never be shared onto your Macbook Pro's iMessage, and your iCloud backups will never be visible in your Google account. Standardized connectors don't mean anything if the vendor controls all sides of the software stack and wants the pieces to only work with that vendor's products.
Tesla for better or for worse pursues Apple-like vertical integration to control the UX of every part of owning the car, from sales to nav to charging. While standardized connectors would be nice, it would mostly be nice for Tesla owners in that they wouldn't need a dongle to connect to public charging networks.
(Maybe you're arguing that Tesla should be forced to provide Supercharger access at no additional cost to non-Tesla owners. I am not certain I agree with the "no additional cost" part, since Tesla had to shoulder the capital burden of building the network in the first place. But the connectors are the least important part of that anyway; non-Tesla owners could worst case use dongles, if Tesla were forced to provide access to the Supercharger network, just as Tesla owners use dongles to connect to public charging networks today. Dongles are stupid, yes, but they're less important than Tesla just providing access in the first place.)
As far as home charging goes, personally I just use a standard 240V dryer outlet in my garage to charge; I plug the cord that came with my Model 3 into the outlet, and the other end of the cord (that has the proprietary connector) into the car. Any electric car would work with that setup, so the proprietary connector at the end of the cable doesn't impact me much; if I got a different electric car, I'm sure it would come with its own charging cable anyway that could be plugged into the 240V outlet.
Even though the plug is standard, you actually can't charge a non Tesla on a Tesla charger because the charger only accepts Tesla. Recently it has been possible to charge cars from other brands for free during a few days in Germany, some say it was a bug, some other say it was a trial.
Also unless it has changed recently, in the Tesla ecosystem the car is connected to internet and reporting the consumption to the paiement system, not the charger. This is not standard and Tesla would have to put some 4G/5G network equipment in their chargers if they have to support cars from other brands.
They may be required at some point in Europe.
The Nissan Leaf uses a Chademo plug which is another standard, more common in Japan and it's very unlikely to charge on a Tesla charger ever, unless someone hacks an adapter.
If I had an electric car I'd try to figure out the auth protocol, surely software-wise it's possible to pretend that a Tesla is plugged in (worst case is that there's a cryptographically secure key exchange, and someone would have to extract the key from a Tesla).
Hah, an adapter that pretends to be a Tesla that plugs between the supercharger and your car, that would fit in a cyberpunk-ish 2021.
In Europe, where there is only one DCFC standard, Tesla uses a standard connector but only allows Tesla cars to charge at superchargers (there is no way for drivers of other cars to pay or be billed for use of the station).
In the USA, where both CCS and Chademo are standards, Tesla uses their own proprietary connector (which is substantially more ergonomic than either CCS or Chademo). Tesla sells a Chademo adapter and a third party sells a CCS adapter, so Tesla cars can use third-party DCFC stations.
In both cases, only Tesla cars can use Tesla Superchargers.
On the other hand, the "user experience" of every Type-3 charger I've seen is terrible. The chargers are often in inconvenient places, the super thick cables are very short, and then you've got to try a couple of times to get the charger and the car to talk to each other and get the payment sorted out. Tesla wins on this hands down, and it's not even close.
Oddly enough, the Type-2 experience isn't nearly as bad. Other than requiring 6+ hours to charge...
Tesla Model 3 base model: 170kW
So not really the same league at all.
1) Often only had 1 high output charger. 2) The one they had was often either in use, or broken leading to very long charge times.
This combined with the less than stellar driver assist the would never get any better for the life of car made him almost instantly regret sticking with the leaf.
He owned it for about 2 months before trading it in on new Model 3.