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The challenge is balancing competing incentives: you need the infrastructure to be built, but you also need people to consider EVs as their next vehicles. The
by nrr 3y ago
The challenge is balancing competing incentives: you need the infrastructure to be built, but you also need people to consider EVs as their next vehicles.
The additional challenge is building the trust in the infrastructure required to make a lot of folks, myself included, satisfied that they'll be able to charge when they need to. My experience here in the Bay Area is that it's hit-or-miss as to whether the chargers actually work, let alone whether they're duly occupied for that purpose.
With some hope, now that there's a potential for profit motive, we'll start seeing the level of service improve to meet expectations as required to make people like me migrate away from burning hydrocarbons.
I very desperately want to like EVs, but so far, the appetite hasn't been there because of issues, nay, subscriptions like this.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoIt's why Tesla built Superchargers; no one would buy EVs if they were beholden to non Tesla fast DC charging financial fundamentals and user experience. Electrify America built their network as part of VW's Dieselgate settlement. They had no incentive to make it work, only to spend the money and build it. https://supercharge.info/map https://supercharge.info/map https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-superchargers-us-dc-ev-fast-charger-ramp/ https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-superchargers-us-dc-ev-fast-... https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/13/electrify-america-ev-charger-broken/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/1...
- nrr 3y agoBingo, but Tesla also likely wouldn't have built those without sizable grants to do so, just as Electrify America did with settlement money. I'm unsure whether that's a high-enough margin part of their business to warrant that kind of outlay for charging infrastructure otherwise. It minimally isn't something I'd build out as a loss leader unless I had additional financial support to make it work.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoTesla spent ~$1B of their own capital to build the global network without including subsidies.
- nrr 3y agoOut of curiosity, where did that number come from? I can't verify it.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoTesla has 20,000 chargers in the US. All of Tesla's competitors spend more than $100k per charger.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoTesla has also substantially improved its costs, as it manufactures it's own chargers. Circa 2017, it cost them ~$250k per station from UBS' report [1], although it turns out UBS was wildly wrong about what the total cost would be for Tesla to reach the desired network density. [1] https://neo.ubs.com/shared/d1N4RjMdUf/ https://neo.ubs.com/shared/d1N4RjMdUf/
- nrr 3y agoDo they have 20,000? Where are you getting that figure from?
- toomuchtodo 3y agoUS Dept of Energy. > There are 1,974 Tesla Supercharger stations in the U.S. housing 21,852 Tesla Supercharger ports, according to data collected by the U.S. Department of Energy. That’s roughly a quarter of all DC Fast (the quickest type of EV charger) EV charging stations in the country and nearly two-thirds of all DC Fast EV charging ports. https://www.fool.com/research/tesla-supercharger-stations/ https://www.fool.com/research/tesla-supercharger-stations/ https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html#/find/nearest?fuel=ELEC&ev_connectors=TESLA https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html#/fi...
- bryanlarsen 3y agoTesla started building their network many years before they received any subsidies for station building.