7 ms·

Tesla's Supercharger cost revealed to be just 1/5th of the competition in bid (2022)

54 points by belltaco 3y ago

jamiek88 3y ago
Vertical integration is one hell of an advantage. These mega companies that are contractors all the way down are like microservices - useful for some situations but probably not yours.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Didn't we go through some phase where many companies were vertically integrating and then somehow that went out of fashion and everyone reversed that. I vaguely remember learning this in a business class, but no details.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    Unless you can do everything cheaper than the market cost, and better than what is on the market, forever, it’s going to become a problem at some point. (Hint: You cannot.)
  - losteric 3y ago
    Yeah, like all the old American companies went through that process... Ford and GE come to mind. It's a good way to externalize some risks like labor and capital investment, and ramp faster by delegating some optimizations to natural contractor competition. There's a clear cost when it comes to all-up cost and velocity of innovation of tightly-integrated components.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    With JIT style supply chain, didn't we recently learn the dangers of sending everything out to subcontractors?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - admax88qqq 3y ago
      What are the dangers exactly? That a once in a century event can disrupt your supply chain? Is that actually a reasonable thing to try to guard against?
      - dylan604 3y ago
        Why do you think that a global pandemic is the only thing that can cause disruption? The ship stuck in the Suez canal was not pandemic related, and that kind of issue can happen at any time. What happens if the Suez or Panama canals are not functioning? Panama is already concerned about the water levels available. What about trade relations going to the extreme side and blocks all commerce with a major supplier? What if union dock workers all go on strike? Thinking that it can never happen again is just wearing blinders
        admax88qqq 3y ago
        I'm not saying these events can't happen I'm saying they're rare enough that trying to prepare for them is wasteful. As you illustrated there's all sorts of things that can go wrong. Trying to anticipate them all is a fools errand. And if you spend the capital to try to protect against the rare supply chain disruption all your competitors will just roll the dice and save the money and odds are they will come out ahead.
  - jandrese 3y ago
    What happened is big businesses wanted to get away from unions and pension obligations so they started outsourcing everything they could get away with. But this came with a loss of efficiency in the long run and ended up biting them in the butt.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > Didn't we go through some phase where many companies were vertically integrating and then somehow that went out of fashion and everyone reversed that. I vaguely remember learning this in a business class, but no details. The primary advantage to vertical integration is when you need something but the market for suppliers is broken somehow, e.g. there isn't enough competition and then the suppliers behave like Comcast or Qualcomm. In that case entering the market yourself can be an advantage if you have the resources to do it, because you can cut out the crummy suppliers. The risk of this is that you become the crummy supplier. The internal supplier has a captive customer because they're the same company, which means they're not exposed to competitive pressure. Corporate politics takes root, internal processes become wasteful and inefficient, but there is pressure to use the internal solution even if a third party offers something better. Internal systems become so integrated with each other that you can't switch to a competing supplier even when you should. One part of the company isn't allowed to improve their product in a way that cannibalizes the margins of another business unit, when non-vertically integrated competitors have no such constraints. Basically it works well in the early years but then the lumbering dinosaur goes extinct at the next meteor because it loses the ability to adapt. The secret is to enter the other market but then spin off the internal subdivision before the whole company becomes a festering bureaucracy. Or create an internal preference for the smallest suppliers in the other market to help them gain a foothold and increase their competitiveness, or provide them with startup capital or publish open source software that makes it easier for startups to enter that market etc. Commoditize Your Complement.
  - blackoil 3y ago
    Intel is a recent example, where internal fabs were clear advantage till it wasn't then it became clear disadvantage. Ford at one time owned coal and iron mines.
    - jamiek88 3y ago
      Fun fact: ford used to sell bbq grills and bags of coal from their dealerships!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- userinanother 3y ago
  It’s not vertical integration it’s that’s they have significantly less bureaucracy and overhead compared to legacy companies. That advantage won’t last forever but for 10-20 years it will propel them ahead
  - schiffern 3y ago
    That, and vertical integration. Tesla also benefits from horizontal integration, sharing a common charger module between vehicle and Supercharger. This improves scale and cost.
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    I'd say it is that, plus the fact that they built their charger designs at a time when they had to do them cheap. They had very little capital, and they knew that they couldn't sell cars without a charging network. So they put all their efforts into reusing as much as they could from their high volume cars to improve economies of scale. Noone else had the same incentives. That part is changing fast, though.
ProfessorZoom 3y ago
The competition can't even install them right... https://twitter.com/itskyleconner/status/1723070535540564076 https://twitter.com/itskyleconner/status/1723070535540564076
- BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
  The cable would clearly reach their vehicle's charging port just fine had they parked normally and not like an idiot, as shown in this other photo from that thread: https://twitter.com/Jimotheous/status/1723098742306263384/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Jimotheous/status/1723098742306263384/ph...
  - jcrash 3y ago
    I think this picture actually shows that the way it's meant to be used is really unintuitive. How can you see that and not agree it's a confusing design?
    - BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
      I agree that it could be confusing for people not adept at spatial reasoning (though one could question why such a person should be allowed to operate something so inherently dangerous to others on public roads), but I immediately understood the geometry and still think that it's a completely reasonable design for the intended vehicles (while probably intentionally hostile to other vehicles that don't have their charge ports at the front left corner).
      - jcrash 3y ago
        Glad you understood it instantly. Now maybe work on your social skills
  - glitchc 3y ago
    It is flipped 180 degrees tho, innit?
dangbackup 3y ago
[flagged]
GreedClarifies 3y ago
Elon is a magician.
simonbutt 3y ago
This feels like the start of a lawsuit. If Tesla is state of the art and requires 5x less funding per charger than competition; what is the reasoning behind picking the competitors?
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Why a lawsuit? Here’s a better question. Is Tesla leveraging their market cap and cash reserves to capture a monopoly position on chargers? I’d want to make sure that market competitiveness is a thing. Otherwise you have a company that turns its behavior on all fronts into rent seeking.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    I don’t doubt their efficiency and scale effects stack up to an enormous advantage. Absolutely their ability to finance impacts the unit costs of chargers very few if any other company could match. However: * being extraordinarily well positioned to compete isn’t a crime or legally anticompetitive. It might be if they had a non competitive market monopoly in another market they’re leveraging in this market. But they don’t. * lose leading isn’t illegal or sanctionable unless it fits fairly narrow constraints in antitrust law * probably most importantly they have the only proven ability to deliver a critical national infrastructure to meet national energy, environmental, and security goals. They will be afforded remarkable leeway for some time. * they’re actually weakening their grip on the EV market by opening the charger adapter spec and licensing access to competitors. If the supercharger network were plausibly their money maker eyes might squint. But it’s not. It’s an enablement to the entire industry, including their competitors. And it’s not reasonable to say the EV market lacks competitors. That doesn’t mean this won’t change in the future. But I fully expect a Standard Oil world where EV charging is owned by Tesla. Then, legal market remedies would be squarely on the table.
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      > being extraordinarily well positioned to compete isn’t a crime or legally anticompetitive Actually, using profits in one sector to dominate a second is pretty classical monopolist behavior. I’m fine with competition but if the bid is insincere because they’re not going to do the work for that number - the winner typically pays what the 2nd bidder bid typically in such contracts - or because it’s to capture a monopoly position and recoup the rest of the investment through rent seeking over the long term, these are negative behaviors we should discourage through various means. > And it’s not reasonable to say the EV market lacks competitors. That was true of the internet too. Yet somehow we ended up with a handful of major tech companies. > But I fully expect a Standard Oil world where EV charging is owned by Tesla. Then, legal market remedies would be squarely on the table. Wait. So you agree this strategy that Tesla is employing is likely to cause a problem in the future but your position is to remedy it in the future after it’s obviously an even bigger problem with jobs tied to it making it more politically risky, the legal and political climate being a joke on antitrust at the moment? Also the rest of what you wrote is basically “there’s no law against it”. I’m saying there should be laws against predatory pricing and simple ones like your penalty is paying a fine which is based on what a fair price would have been and how much you’ve cost the economy through that behavior which government regulators and academic economists get to determine independently (& pick the highest price). You don’t need to do this for all companies - just ones who have enough cash flow that such behaviors are possible in the first place (a startup that’s not turning over a billion or so per quarter has a hard time pulling this kind of shit). Oh and treat fundraising like revenue a bit in that it counts towards you being regulated (eg if you’re market cap in a private market is >1B you can’t have any loss leading products).
cma 3y ago
> Now the program has announced the distribution of the grants, and unfortunately for Tesla, it didn’t make the cut and it’s not clear why. Having just moved its headquarters and new factory to the state should have at least levelled the playing field. But the linked article does explain why: it was first come first served and only around $20 million for the program in Texas, as part of a settlement for dieselgate. If moving their factory and headquarters into the state gave them higher priority in line wouldn't that be against the settlement terms that created the program? It would be weird for a settlement to have a provision like that. This is the linked Forbes article that seems to be the earlier source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/04/14/teslas-texas-charger-grant-applications-fail-its-bad-for-texas-but-reveals-teslas-super-low-costs/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/04/14/teslas... Some numbers show in there that it gets cheaper the more stations are in one place (N-plex), and Tesla's applications had the highest at 17-plexes of chargers. They also mention a 20% limit on electrical service upgrades, though I don't know if that would effect the 17-plex differently, or if it was already in a place with enough service, if they overprovision.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dylan604 3y ago
So if the max request could be 70%, does that necessarily mean that Tesla is asking for all 70%? It seems like it would be a natural think to request the most free money possible, but it could done intentionally to obfuscate the actual costs (as unlikely as that might be). Also, one has to wonder why the others are charging so much. I know less than nothing about other companies involved. Does Tesla sale the chargers at a loss intentionally? Are the others just so out of touch? Are the others just grifters?
- inemesitaffia 3y ago
  You're making several errors with your assumptions because you seem not to understand the market, or how subsidies work
  - dylan604 3y ago
    "as unlikely as that might be" would indicate to me that it's not the direction of my understanding. so other than that, care to actually respond with something that moves the conversation along with the other questions regarding why the vast disparity between vendors?
    - inemesitaffia 3y ago
      Tesla has economies of scale because they manufacture more or less the same equipment globally. They are passing less money to suppliers. And they have more technicians going around so they can use connectors that are replaced more frequently. They don't have screens and have starlink for backup comms and car comms. When they lose connectivity with the mothership they charge at full speed for free. Regardless of that, if thier costs are the same, by asking for less money for more outlets they are more likely to get money. When you show you're willing to put up your own cash or just ask for less money in general while offering equal or better performance, you're more likely to win bids. Politicians prefer to say they brought 10000 chargers than 4000. The subsidy request is just you asking for money and doesn't represent your costs just what you want to ask for. You can ask for more than you need i.e make a profit on building costs The question is how much do you want to do this, not how much will it cost you
akira2501 3y ago
This is not a good article. It makes an extrapolation that's not justified. Tesla made 4 separate grant applications. Two of them included "17 activities" and requested $500,000 as eligible reimbursements. Two of them included "9 activities" for around $375,000. This makes one project have a ratio of "$30,000 reimbursement request per charger." The other has a ratio of "$41,000 reimbursement request per charger." So there's two very different rates based on circumstances that are not in the published table. This is a one time program using settlement money. You're only going to get 60% to 70% of the funding through the program. It's not clear what Tesla's goal was here or if these program numbers truly reflect a wholesale price of the charger for them.
- junofan 3y ago
  A cost is a price paid to acquire, produce, accomplish, or maintain anything. It would appear these chargers cost $30,000 and $41,000 respectively. The article makes no mention of the wholesale price of Tesla chargers—only that the author have seen prices above $100,000 for some charges.
  - Guvante 3y ago
    Does it? Say the program normally awards to small companies to improve competition. Tesla could underbid reducing their take home if they win but given they don't think they would win that isn't a problem. Similarly if they want to contest the result underbidding gives them justification. All hyperbole of course.
jellicle 3y ago
This is a 2022 throw-away rewrite article about a 2022 article about a grant program that ended in 2021. There's no evidence at all that Tesla's costs were any less than the competition, only that they were asking for less in subsidies, possibly because they were interested in establishing a network effects setup and were happy to subsidize it themselves.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
spikels 3y ago
A more recent article in the WSJ mentioned Tesla’s charging sites were both cheaper and offered more chargers: > Five states—Ohio, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Maine and Colorado—have selected winners at this point, and full details on sites and designs aren’t yet available. Tesla’s bids averaged around $392,000 a site compared with an average of $795,000 from others. > In most cases, Tesla plans to install 8 chargers, and in some cases a dozen. Most companies are sticking to the minimum required by the federal government—at least four fast-charging ports at a station. Tesla: $392k/8=$49k Others: $795/4=$199k 49/199 is roughly 1/4th Non-paywalled version: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tesla-leads-race-to-draw-federal-money-for-charging-networks/ar-AA1g8o8b https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tesla-leads-race-t...
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
The Nation Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Project spawned by the Federal Highway Administration and the Build America, Buy America Act has picked open standards required for federal funding, but articles like this make me wish government would also fund open innovation to create open infrastructure knowledge how & solutions. The government is funding installations, who in most cases buy and have some role in deploying typically off the shelf solutions. It just seems like it's been such a long sad slow movement, with so many reports of flakey reliability and poor systems. It doesn't feel like the industry is really on a positive treadmill or whatever towards success, towards getting better. Private industry doesn't seem like it's doing a good job serving this infrastructure need. I kind of just want the government to fund some open research & development with public access clauses to figure out how to do the job well and cost effectively. A couple hundred million spent making the industry not suck & have an healthy open baseline for competing atop seems like it's quasi necessary if EV charging is going to ever mature past the stagnancy point it's been stuck at for so long. That said, it's been 9 months since the FHA passed the rules for how charging systems need to work for federal money. Maybe the industry can self correct, will be incentivized to muster up, and can start meeting reliability requirements specified for funding. Maybe these incentives are enough. But it sure seems like something that feels uncompetitive, that Supercharger alone is playing to win & most of the rest of the industry has accepted meh only sort of works deeply un-integrated barely effective multi-organizational hacking it out.
demondemidi 3y ago
Is it because of govt subsidies?
- inemesitaffia 3y ago
  This article is showing there's subsidies available for everyone. But Tesla is asking for the least because they are cheaper

54 points by belltaco 3y ago

Vertical integration is one hell of an advantage. These mega companies that are contractors all the way down are like microservices - useful for some situations but probably not yours.

ajmurmann 3y ago
Didn't we go through some phase where many companies were vertically integrating and then somehow that went out of fashion and everyone reversed that. I vaguely remember learning this in a business class, but no details.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Unless you can do everything cheaper than the market cost, and better than what is on the market, forever, it’s going to become a problem at some point. (Hint: You cannot.)
- losteric 3y ago
  Yeah, like all the old American companies went through that process... Ford and GE come to mind. It's a good way to externalize some risks like labor and capital investment, and ramp faster by delegating some optimizations to natural contractor competition. There's a clear cost when it comes to all-up cost and velocity of innovation of tightly-integrated components.
- dylan604 3y ago
  With JIT style supply chain, didn't we recently learn the dangers of sending everything out to subcontractors?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - admax88qqq 3y ago
    What are the dangers exactly? That a once in a century event can disrupt your supply chain? Is that actually a reasonable thing to try to guard against?
    - dylan604 3y ago
      Why do you think that a global pandemic is the only thing that can cause disruption? The ship stuck in the Suez canal was not pandemic related, and that kind of issue can happen at any time. What happens if the Suez or Panama canals are not functioning? Panama is already concerned about the water levels available. What about trade relations going to the extreme side and blocks all commerce with a major supplier? What if union dock workers all go on strike? Thinking that it can never happen again is just wearing blinders
      - admax88qqq 3y ago
        I'm not saying these events can't happen I'm saying they're rare enough that trying to prepare for them is wasteful. As you illustrated there's all sorts of things that can go wrong. Trying to anticipate them all is a fools errand. And if you spend the capital to try to protect against the rare supply chain disruption all your competitors will just roll the dice and save the money and odds are they will come out ahead.
- jandrese 3y ago
  What happened is big businesses wanted to get away from unions and pension obligations so they started outsourcing everything they could get away with. But this came with a loss of efficiency in the long run and ended up biting them in the butt.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > Didn't we go through some phase where many companies were vertically integrating and then somehow that went out of fashion and everyone reversed that. I vaguely remember learning this in a business class, but no details. The primary advantage to vertical integration is when you need something but the market for suppliers is broken somehow, e.g. there isn't enough competition and then the suppliers behave like Comcast or Qualcomm. In that case entering the market yourself can be an advantage if you have the resources to do it, because you can cut out the crummy suppliers. The risk of this is that you become the crummy supplier. The internal supplier has a captive customer because they're the same company, which means they're not exposed to competitive pressure. Corporate politics takes root, internal processes become wasteful and inefficient, but there is pressure to use the internal solution even if a third party offers something better. Internal systems become so integrated with each other that you can't switch to a competing supplier even when you should. One part of the company isn't allowed to improve their product in a way that cannibalizes the margins of another business unit, when non-vertically integrated competitors have no such constraints. Basically it works well in the early years but then the lumbering dinosaur goes extinct at the next meteor because it loses the ability to adapt. The secret is to enter the other market but then spin off the internal subdivision before the whole company becomes a festering bureaucracy. Or create an internal preference for the smallest suppliers in the other market to help them gain a foothold and increase their competitiveness, or provide them with startup capital or publish open source software that makes it easier for startups to enter that market etc. Commoditize Your Complement.
- blackoil 3y ago
  Intel is a recent example, where internal fabs were clear advantage till it wasn't then it became clear disadvantage. Ford at one time owned coal and iron mines.
  - jamiek88 3y ago
    Fun fact: ford used to sell bbq grills and bags of coal from their dealerships!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
userinanother 3y ago
It’s not vertical integration it’s that’s they have significantly less bureaucracy and overhead compared to legacy companies. That advantage won’t last forever but for 10-20 years it will propel them ahead
- schiffern 3y ago
  That, and vertical integration. Tesla also benefits from horizontal integration, sharing a common charger module between vehicle and Supercharger. This improves scale and cost.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  I'd say it is that, plus the fact that they built their charger designs at a time when they had to do them cheap. They had very little capital, and they knew that they couldn't sell cars without a charging network. So they put all their efforts into reusing as much as they could from their high volume cars to improve economies of scale. Noone else had the same incentives. That part is changing fast, though.

ProfessorZoom 3y ago

The competition can't even install them right... https://twitter.com/itskyleconner/status/1723070535540564076 https://twitter.com/itskyleconner/status/1723070535540564076

BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
The cable would clearly reach their vehicle's charging port just fine had they parked normally and not like an idiot, as shown in this other photo from that thread: https://twitter.com/Jimotheous/status/1723098742306263384/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Jimotheous/status/1723098742306263384/ph...
- jcrash 3y ago
  I think this picture actually shows that the way it's meant to be used is really unintuitive. How can you see that and not agree it's a confusing design?
  - BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
    I agree that it could be confusing for people not adept at spatial reasoning (though one could question why such a person should be allowed to operate something so inherently dangerous to others on public roads), but I immediately understood the geometry and still think that it's a completely reasonable design for the intended vehicles (while probably intentionally hostile to other vehicles that don't have their charge ports at the front left corner).
    - jcrash 3y ago
      Glad you understood it instantly. Now maybe work on your social skills
- glitchc 3y ago
  It is flipped 180 degrees tho, innit?

dangbackup 3y ago

[flagged]

GreedClarifies 3y ago

Elon is a magician.

simonbutt 3y ago

This feels like the start of a lawsuit. If Tesla is state of the art and requires 5x less funding per charger than competition; what is the reasoning behind picking the competitors?

vlovich123 3y ago
Why a lawsuit? Here’s a better question. Is Tesla leveraging their market cap and cash reserves to capture a monopoly position on chargers? I’d want to make sure that market competitiveness is a thing. Otherwise you have a company that turns its behavior on all fronts into rent seeking.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I don’t doubt their efficiency and scale effects stack up to an enormous advantage. Absolutely their ability to finance impacts the unit costs of chargers very few if any other company could match. However: * being extraordinarily well positioned to compete isn’t a crime or legally anticompetitive. It might be if they had a non competitive market monopoly in another market they’re leveraging in this market. But they don’t. * lose leading isn’t illegal or sanctionable unless it fits fairly narrow constraints in antitrust law * probably most importantly they have the only proven ability to deliver a critical national infrastructure to meet national energy, environmental, and security goals. They will be afforded remarkable leeway for some time. * they’re actually weakening their grip on the EV market by opening the charger adapter spec and licensing access to competitors. If the supercharger network were plausibly their money maker eyes might squint. But it’s not. It’s an enablement to the entire industry, including their competitors. And it’s not reasonable to say the EV market lacks competitors. That doesn’t mean this won’t change in the future. But I fully expect a Standard Oil world where EV charging is owned by Tesla. Then, legal market remedies would be squarely on the table.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    > being extraordinarily well positioned to compete isn’t a crime or legally anticompetitive Actually, using profits in one sector to dominate a second is pretty classical monopolist behavior. I’m fine with competition but if the bid is insincere because they’re not going to do the work for that number - the winner typically pays what the 2nd bidder bid typically in such contracts - or because it’s to capture a monopoly position and recoup the rest of the investment through rent seeking over the long term, these are negative behaviors we should discourage through various means. > And it’s not reasonable to say the EV market lacks competitors. That was true of the internet too. Yet somehow we ended up with a handful of major tech companies. > But I fully expect a Standard Oil world where EV charging is owned by Tesla. Then, legal market remedies would be squarely on the table. Wait. So you agree this strategy that Tesla is employing is likely to cause a problem in the future but your position is to remedy it in the future after it’s obviously an even bigger problem with jobs tied to it making it more politically risky, the legal and political climate being a joke on antitrust at the moment? Also the rest of what you wrote is basically “there’s no law against it”. I’m saying there should be laws against predatory pricing and simple ones like your penalty is paying a fine which is based on what a fair price would have been and how much you’ve cost the economy through that behavior which government regulators and academic economists get to determine independently (& pick the highest price). You don’t need to do this for all companies - just ones who have enough cash flow that such behaviors are possible in the first place (a startup that’s not turning over a billion or so per quarter has a hard time pulling this kind of shit). Oh and treat fundraising like revenue a bit in that it counts towards you being regulated (eg if you’re market cap in a private market is >1B you can’t have any loss leading products).

cma 3y ago

> Now the program has announced the distribution of the grants, and unfortunately for Tesla, it didn’t make the cut and it’s not clear why. Having just moved its headquarters and new factory to the state should have at least levelled the playing field. But the linked article does explain why: it was first come first served and only around $20 million for the program in Texas, as part of a settlement for dieselgate. If moving their factory and headquarters into the state gave them higher priority in line wouldn't that be against the settlement terms that created the program? It would be weird for a settlement to have a provision like that. This is the linked Forbes article that seems to be the earlier source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/04/14/teslas-texas-charger-grant-applications-fail-its-bad-for-texas-but-reveals-teslas-super-low-costs/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2022/04/14/teslas... Some numbers show in there that it gets cheaper the more stations are in one place (N-plex), and Tesla's applications had the highest at 17-plexes of chargers. They also mention a 20% limit on electrical service upgrades, though I don't know if that would effect the 17-plex differently, or if it was already in a place with enough service, if they overprovision.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dylan604 3y ago

So if the max request could be 70%, does that necessarily mean that Tesla is asking for all 70%? It seems like it would be a natural think to request the most free money possible, but it could done intentionally to obfuscate the actual costs (as unlikely as that might be). Also, one has to wonder why the others are charging so much. I know less than nothing about other companies involved. Does Tesla sale the chargers at a loss intentionally? Are the others just so out of touch? Are the others just grifters?

inemesitaffia 3y ago
You're making several errors with your assumptions because you seem not to understand the market, or how subsidies work
- dylan604 3y ago
  "as unlikely as that might be" would indicate to me that it's not the direction of my understanding. so other than that, care to actually respond with something that moves the conversation along with the other questions regarding why the vast disparity between vendors?
  - inemesitaffia 3y ago
    Tesla has economies of scale because they manufacture more or less the same equipment globally. They are passing less money to suppliers. And they have more technicians going around so they can use connectors that are replaced more frequently. They don't have screens and have starlink for backup comms and car comms. When they lose connectivity with the mothership they charge at full speed for free. Regardless of that, if thier costs are the same, by asking for less money for more outlets they are more likely to get money. When you show you're willing to put up your own cash or just ask for less money in general while offering equal or better performance, you're more likely to win bids. Politicians prefer to say they brought 10000 chargers than 4000. The subsidy request is just you asking for money and doesn't represent your costs just what you want to ask for. You can ask for more than you need i.e make a profit on building costs The question is how much do you want to do this, not how much will it cost you

akira2501 3y ago

This is not a good article. It makes an extrapolation that's not justified. Tesla made 4 separate grant applications. Two of them included "17 activities" and requested $500,000 as eligible reimbursements. Two of them included "9 activities" for around $375,000. This makes one project have a ratio of "$30,000 reimbursement request per charger." The other has a ratio of "$41,000 reimbursement request per charger." So there's two very different rates based on circumstances that are not in the published table. This is a one time program using settlement money. You're only going to get 60% to 70% of the funding through the program. It's not clear what Tesla's goal was here or if these program numbers truly reflect a wholesale price of the charger for them.

junofan 3y ago
A cost is a price paid to acquire, produce, accomplish, or maintain anything. It would appear these chargers cost $30,000 and $41,000 respectively. The article makes no mention of the wholesale price of Tesla chargers—only that the author have seen prices above $100,000 for some charges.
- Guvante 3y ago
  Does it? Say the program normally awards to small companies to improve competition. Tesla could underbid reducing their take home if they win but given they don't think they would win that isn't a problem. Similarly if they want to contest the result underbidding gives them justification. All hyperbole of course.

jellicle 3y ago

This is a 2022 throw-away rewrite article about a 2022 article about a grant program that ended in 2021. There's no evidence at all that Tesla's costs were any less than the competition, only that they were asking for less in subsidies, possibly because they were interested in establishing a network effects setup and were happy to subsidize it themselves.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

spikels 3y ago

A more recent article in the WSJ mentioned Tesla’s charging sites were both cheaper and offered more chargers: > Five states—Ohio, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Maine and Colorado—have selected winners at this point, and full details on sites and designs aren’t yet available. Tesla’s bids averaged around $392,000 a site compared with an average of $795,000 from others. > In most cases, Tesla plans to install 8 chargers, and in some cases a dozen. Most companies are sticking to the minimum required by the federal government—at least four fast-charging ports at a station. Tesla: $392k/8=$49k Others: $795/4=$199k 49/199 is roughly 1/4th Non-paywalled version: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tesla-leads-race-to-draw-federal-money-for-charging-networks/ar-AA1g8o8b https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/tesla-leads-race-t...

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

The Nation Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Project spawned by the Federal Highway Administration and the Build America, Buy America Act has picked open standards required for federal funding, but articles like this make me wish government would also fund open innovation to create open infrastructure knowledge how & solutions. The government is funding installations, who in most cases buy and have some role in deploying typically off the shelf solutions. It just seems like it's been such a long sad slow movement, with so many reports of flakey reliability and poor systems. It doesn't feel like the industry is really on a positive treadmill or whatever towards success, towards getting better. Private industry doesn't seem like it's doing a good job serving this infrastructure need. I kind of just want the government to fund some open research & development with public access clauses to figure out how to do the job well and cost effectively. A couple hundred million spent making the industry not suck & have an healthy open baseline for competing atop seems like it's quasi necessary if EV charging is going to ever mature past the stagnancy point it's been stuck at for so long. That said, it's been 9 months since the FHA passed the rules for how charging systems need to work for federal money. Maybe the industry can self correct, will be incentivized to muster up, and can start meeting reliability requirements specified for funding. Maybe these incentives are enough. But it sure seems like something that feels uncompetitive, that Supercharger alone is playing to win & most of the rest of the industry has accepted meh only sort of works deeply un-integrated barely effective multi-organizational hacking it out.

demondemidi 3y ago

Is it because of govt subsidies?

inemesitaffia 3y ago
This article is showing there's subsidies available for everyone. But Tesla is asking for the least because they are cheaper