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
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Readit News
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.
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.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/27/23775208/tesla-nacs-elect...
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.
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.
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.
----
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/27/23771407/ford-f150-lightn...
[1]: https://youtu.be/JdId8tXiJIo
[2]: https://youtu.be/WNWYk4DdT_E
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:
- https://fastnedcharging.com/hq/fastned-and-evbox-join-forces...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4ZWN_-a2j4
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.
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 doesn't mean a Supercharger experience. Tesla's tight integration will continue to yield fruit for at least a few more years.
https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2023...
Allegedly once a physical adapter comes out all existing CCS Fords will be able to access the Supercharger network with Plug and Charge.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is there a reference for this somewhere? I didn't know this was a problem.
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.
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?
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.
[1] https://electrek.co/2023/01/09/heres-how-many-ev-chargers-th...
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/06/27/tesla-ele...
(AIUI, the comm protocol is (will be?) CCS/IEC 61851?)
Something like that [1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/06/27/tesla-ele...
Is Volvo properly described as a European car maker? I thought it was owned by Geely. (EDIT: Missed the merger being called off [1].)
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/25/business/geely-auto-volvo-int...
https://www.cars.com/research/volkswagen-id.4/recalls/