It is somewhat amusing timeline wise as a choice since the Manhattan Project ran from 1942 to 1946:

Jan 1942: Roosevelt authorizes the atomic bomb

Jul 1945 (55 months later): Trinity

Aug 1945 (56 months later): Little Boy

By comparison:

Nov 2021: IRA becomes law

Feb 2025 (40 months later): <250 charging points

But this would take 120 months to complete. What an interesting comparison.

“Things happen fast in wartime” is perhaps not the novel discovery you think it is.

Zero bombs in early 1945. What a waste of money!

Ah, so if they had the extra year they would have had charging stations everywhere. What a pity. All that money wasted because we didn't wait till August.

They invented a novel weapon in half the time your heroes dreamed of building a charging station.

Well, maybe if the government declared a War on Climate Change or War on Lack of Charging Stations.

Haha, a tremendous idea. If war works, then use war.

There’s also the matter that the Manhattan Project was under one authority. As an ancestral comment mentioned, there’s multiple automakers involved. It would be trying to build a bomb and dealing with not only the gun type design vs. the implosion design but a bevy of others, whose proponents all have equal influence over Oppenheimer to stymie the effort.

> They invented a novel weapon in half the time your heroes dreamed of building a charging station.

It's a plan to build tens of thousands of charging stations, by 2030.

In all 50 states, with the states and local administrations being responsible for contracting, permiting, buying land, utility work, etc. Most of the work is not on the Feds here.

It should not be at all surprising that 10k+ little building projects take some time to get going. Even from the folks who credulously believed the President could end the Ukraine war in 24 hours.

So they came up with an overly complicated plan with little outcome and this is supposed to be amazing?

Oh hang on, I can do better. I have a plan to build 3 billion teleportation machines by 2045. This makes for a great mad libs set.

I have a plan to build thousands of Super Star Destroyers on Exegol by a long time ago.

I don't know how to explain to you that EV chargers exist, unlike teleporters and Star Destroyers.

But we have a plan, ceejayoz. We've got a plan. And ten years from now we'll have a plan and maybe one shed where we can build a teleporter, but always remember the bomb: in early 1945 there was no bomb.

The Interstate Highway System took like 36 years to build, wouldn't that be a better analogy, since it's an entity that exists in many different places at once? Whereas the bomb was built on eminent domain-seized property so you didn't have to deal with local jurisdictions or landowners.

That is a better analogy, yeah, and much more convincing. If this is delivering at an equivalent pace (same year had a state complete their I-70) then I am convinced.

I think your other comment about it being harder because it's an overly complicated plan doesn't convince me. The complexity and feasibility of a plan are also characteristics of its quality.

But this comment I buy. Color me convinced.

I didn't mean it was overly complicated so much as it's probably got more bickering stakeholders, as it involves private industry who presumably don't want Tesla to be able to dictate the standard.

Coming up with one would have been a reasonable outcome. Using Tesla's would also have been reasonable. They managed to sort out who to give EUV tech. But in any case the space of disagreement here isn't large enough to be worth arguing.