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I tried the reverse recently, charging my Model 3 at third party CCS chargers with adapter (and CCS compatibility retrofit). It is bleak out there. The chargers

I tried the reverse recently, charging my Model 3 at third party CCS chargers with adapter (and CCS compatibility retrofit). It is bleak out there. The chargers are few and far between, half of them are broken, and even the ones that aren't broken have compatibility issues so they may not work anyway. The required apps are unreliable and annoying. I remember 5+ years ago Superchargers were a lot less common and also frequently broken. But those days are long gone. Tesla has really figured out reliability and maintenance, and there are plenty of stations for all but peak times. And the charging experience couldn't be simpler, park and plug in, unplug and go. No tap, no app. Crazy how no one else could figure this out.

tw04 2y ago
>The chargers are few and far between Where are you that the CCS chargers are few and far between? While I agree it's annoying to have to potentially use multiple apps if you aren't in a car that has a consolidation play (like fordpass), there are far more CCS chargers in the states I've visited than Tesla counterparts. With gas station chains like Pilot, 7-eleven, Wawa, Circle-K, and others building out their own networks, and Tesla firing basically their entire charging network staff, non-Tesla chargers will only continue to grow at a faster pace than what Tesla has to offer. At least we've standardized on J3400 plugs so we can (hopefully) move away from the game of "do you have the right adapter"?
- modeless 2y ago
  I guess it's more "few" than "far between". There are a decent number of locations in e.g. grocery store parking lots but they usually only have 2-4 fast chargers and one or two are broken. So you'll show up and someone got there before you and took the last one. Meanwhile I don't think I've ever seen a Supercharger with fewer than 8 stalls and many have 20+.
- infecto 2y ago
  Non-Tesla charging locations can be hit or miss. As others have mentioned, many spots only have 2-4 stations, with at least one often out of order and others occupied by cars that have been sitting there for a while. If you manage to find a working charger, actually paying for it can be a hassle. I’ve had situations where I skipped the wait at Tesla chargers and tried another network, maybe EA. Despite having the app and using it before, it wouldn’t work. My credit card didn’t go through either, so I used my bank card, which worked for half the charge, but then stopped working for the rest.
hackernewds 2y ago
Crazy how Tesla vastly outperformed the govt investing billions into making 8 chargers
- epistasis 2y ago
  The government investment is just getting started with deployment, and frankly waiting to standardize on NACS instead of deploying with CCS was the smart choice, even if it delayed deployment by a year or so. NACS is so much better and having a single standard will smooth out so much in the future.
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    But globally it's not a single standard. I believe with NACS, the US once again, sits alone, like it does so often. Basically every other country is doing CCS, the US was deploying CCS but then the government said "nah, let's go with this other one". I remember when I saw companies switching to it, I seemed to be the only person who thought it was a bad idea. On the side of International Standardization it's me, a couple crickets, and a bunch of people telling me how wrong I am.
    - tw04 2y ago
      That’s not really accurate. Europe uses CCS2 which is completely different and incompatible with CCS1 which is what we have in the US. Recently the US agreed to move to J3400 for dc fast charging with the expectation CCS will eventually go away. China uses a fourth standard GB/T which is incompatible with any of the above.
      - kristopolous 2y ago
        Right, China and Japan are different. Here's an older map: https://insideevs.com/news/333637/european-ccs-type-2-combo-2-conquers-world-ccs-combo-1-exclusive-to-north-america/ https://insideevs.com/news/333637/european-ccs-type-2-combo-... The US went NACS instead of CCS2. Canada and Mexico haven't made a commitment either way. It would be nice if we could work together and do just one in the same way that we didn't have to worry about fuel pump nozzle geometry being country specific with ICE cars.
epistasis 2y ago
We had some visitors to California from out of state recently, and the rental car place gave them an electric car (not Tesla), without basically any education about how to deal with them. I'm a huge fan of electric cars, and will probably never buy anything except EVs in the future, but man are you right that the non-Tesla experience is bleak. Charging was incredibly stressful. Few CCS chargers, each with a tiny number of charging spots (4-8), with many chargers broken, and the rest fully occupied. I know it will get better, but I can't believe how bad it is at the moment, and can't believe that car rental companies are handing EVs out without much much more handholding. (Edit: plus, the car navigation system had zero knowledge of how to plan a long route with charging. That's table stakes for an EV, and criminally bad management that they'd ship a car that didn't have full knowledge of the chargers out there and also how to route. Traditional US car manufacturers are absolutely incompetent and will not survive competition with Chinese manufacturers unless they clean house on everything software related.)
- jahewson 2y ago
  It’s shocking. I’ve had a non-Tesla electric car for about 5 years and the public chargers have always been garbage. The new ones are garbage too. If they do finally work, they charge at 1/4 the quoted speed. I had free charging for a while and even that was not enough of an incentive to use it.
  - short_sells_poo 2y ago
    Same experience in the UK. Just within London you have a dozen charging networks, they all have their own shitty apps, they require you to add your credit card and create an account and half the time they simply don't work and just give you some garbage error message like "charging failed". Don't even get me started on Oxford. We arrive to a charging station and it turns out it is exclusively for electric taxis. No mention of this anywhere online. It boils down to trial and error, and then remembering which specific charging points tend to work. For a completely new piece of infrastructure with no legacy cruft, the industry has made a complete and utter mess of it.
    - 2y ago
pkulak 2y ago
Well, for another anecdote from the PNW, there are dozens of combo chargers in the 300 miles North of me and 6-8 in the 300 miles south. They seem to mostly work, more are going in, and old, unreliable ones are getting swapped out. It’s not perfect, but it’s fine for me. Of course, 99% of my charging is at home.
yieldcrv 2y ago
I have a Mustang mache specifically because of the Tesla supercharger authorization and compatibility It’s still bleak-ish, but is right on the cusp of getting better Tesla’s schizophrenic behavior makes the promised adapter to have an unknown delivery date The bootleg adapter works decently, tricky at first though I had to learn there are multiple versions of tesla superchargers, and even of the V3 ones they are not all the latest version that I’m supposed to use. This is undocumented. Then, of ALL of them, the charging cable is too short and in the wrong place for my vehicle. I have to take up two spots unless I’m next to another vehicle with my ‘affliction’, rare I dont want a Tesla I want the supercharging network Now, knowing all these things and altering my life just a little bit around the local ones, things are great CSS charging stations are pathetic and often have long lines, while the Tesla stations are massive, don't have a line, all while an additional doubling is occurring in a roped off section Fortunately, you don't have to supercharge and its ill advised to do it often.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
__m 2y ago
> Crazy how no one else could figure this out. Tesla obviously didn't figure out how to do it with third parties either. It's about cooperation and politics, not so much about the technical implementation.
- aydyn 2y ago
  They are talking about the user experience. Charging from a Tesla supercharger is completely frictionless. From a non-Tesla charger... have you ever tried it?
- iknowstuff 2y ago
  Interoperability sure, but the chargers breaking left and right is a separate issue.
jasoncartwright 2y ago
This situation sounds like Europe (& the UK) two or three years ago. Plentiful well maintained, fast and convenient chargers have sprung up since from a wide variety of operators (electricity companies, oil companies, startups, plus Tesla). We standardised on CCS a while ago. Many chargers are even faster than Tesla Superchargers whilst supporting the plug-and-charge standard ISO 15118. They are often surprisingly cheap too.
- zelos 2y ago
  I was surprised just how good charger provision is in Europe. On a recent 1600 mile road trip we never had a problem finding 350kW chargers. There were always plenty of spaces free and I saw one broken charger the whole time - it maxed out at ~70kW instead of 230kW - but I just moved to the next charger in the row.
  - pornel 2y ago
    The EU charging infrastructure is pretty good now. Tesla has no advantage here, except maybe good car navigation integration. Most Tesla Superchargers are still 400V v2 which are slower than 300kW/800V Ionity and Fastned chargers.
euroderf 2y ago
> The chargers are few and far between, half of them are broken, and even the ones that aren't broken have compatibility issues so they may not work anyway. The required apps are unreliable and annoying. This also describes a lot of modern American life. I am constantly impressed by people saying how reliable the Tesla charger network is. This level of quality should be held up as an example at every opportunity. My 0.02€
sandworm101 2y ago
>> The required apps are unreliable and annoying. The requirement of an app to fuel a car is ridiculous and is one of the largest barriers for many people. Too much of our lives are already dependent on our phones. The idea that any random issue with my phone will then cause my car to not work ... that is just unacceptable. This is why airplanes don't have keys, let alone apps. (My secure work phone is currently bricked due to an issue with my email address being moving between departments. That sort of thing is why I would never trust a phone for vital things like fueling a vehicle.)
cbm-vic-20 2y ago
> the [Tesla] charging experience couldn't be simpler, park and plug in, unplug and go. No tap, no app. Crazy how no one else could figure this out. Agreed. I don't know why the vehicle and charger manufacturers didn't settle on a system that would let a user store credit card credentials or some other token in the car itself. When you pull up to a charger, plug in, and the charger and car do the handshake, and the car requests that a PIN be entered to release the credentials to the charger. The charger could still support their own cumbersome apps or CC entry system (if you're trying to charge someone else's vehicle, in a rental scenario for example), but the default experience should be: pull up, plug in, enter PIN/Passkey, walk away.
- zelos 2y ago
  Fastned chargers do plug-and-charge using CCS. Works pretty well in my experience, I believe it's an open standard.
- vel0city 2y ago
  I don't have a Tesla. Almost all my DC fast charging experiences have been plug and charge.
appendix-rock 2y ago
It’s not that Tesla has uniquely worked it out. It’s that the other options in your country basically only exist out of spite. We know how to do charging networks now. Eventually, someone in the US will see the worth in it.

tw04 2y ago

>The chargers are few and far between Where are you that the CCS chargers are few and far between? While I agree it's annoying to have to potentially use multiple apps if you aren't in a car that has a consolidation play (like fordpass), there are far more CCS chargers in the states I've visited than Tesla counterparts. With gas station chains like Pilot, 7-eleven, Wawa, Circle-K, and others building out their own networks, and Tesla firing basically their entire charging network staff, non-Tesla chargers will only continue to grow at a faster pace than what Tesla has to offer. At least we've standardized on J3400 plugs so we can (hopefully) move away from the game of "do you have the right adapter"?

modeless 2y ago
I guess it's more "few" than "far between". There are a decent number of locations in e.g. grocery store parking lots but they usually only have 2-4 fast chargers and one or two are broken. So you'll show up and someone got there before you and took the last one. Meanwhile I don't think I've ever seen a Supercharger with fewer than 8 stalls and many have 20+.
infecto 2y ago
Non-Tesla charging locations can be hit or miss. As others have mentioned, many spots only have 2-4 stations, with at least one often out of order and others occupied by cars that have been sitting there for a while. If you manage to find a working charger, actually paying for it can be a hassle. I’ve had situations where I skipped the wait at Tesla chargers and tried another network, maybe EA. Despite having the app and using it before, it wouldn’t work. My credit card didn’t go through either, so I used my bank card, which worked for half the charge, but then stopped working for the rest.

hackernewds 2y ago

Crazy how Tesla vastly outperformed the govt investing billions into making 8 chargers

epistasis 2y ago
The government investment is just getting started with deployment, and frankly waiting to standardize on NACS instead of deploying with CCS was the smart choice, even if it delayed deployment by a year or so. NACS is so much better and having a single standard will smooth out so much in the future.
- kristopolous 2y ago
  But globally it's not a single standard. I believe with NACS, the US once again, sits alone, like it does so often. Basically every other country is doing CCS, the US was deploying CCS but then the government said "nah, let's go with this other one". I remember when I saw companies switching to it, I seemed to be the only person who thought it was a bad idea. On the side of International Standardization it's me, a couple crickets, and a bunch of people telling me how wrong I am.
  - tw04 2y ago
    That’s not really accurate. Europe uses CCS2 which is completely different and incompatible with CCS1 which is what we have in the US. Recently the US agreed to move to J3400 for dc fast charging with the expectation CCS will eventually go away. China uses a fourth standard GB/T which is incompatible with any of the above.
    - kristopolous 2y ago
      Right, China and Japan are different. Here's an older map: https://insideevs.com/news/333637/european-ccs-type-2-combo-2-conquers-world-ccs-combo-1-exclusive-to-north-america/ https://insideevs.com/news/333637/european-ccs-type-2-combo-... The US went NACS instead of CCS2. Canada and Mexico haven't made a commitment either way. It would be nice if we could work together and do just one in the same way that we didn't have to worry about fuel pump nozzle geometry being country specific with ICE cars.

epistasis 2y ago

We had some visitors to California from out of state recently, and the rental car place gave them an electric car (not Tesla), without basically any education about how to deal with them. I'm a huge fan of electric cars, and will probably never buy anything except EVs in the future, but man are you right that the non-Tesla experience is bleak. Charging was incredibly stressful. Few CCS chargers, each with a tiny number of charging spots (4-8), with many chargers broken, and the rest fully occupied. I know it will get better, but I can't believe how bad it is at the moment, and can't believe that car rental companies are handing EVs out without much much more handholding. (Edit: plus, the car navigation system had zero knowledge of how to plan a long route with charging. That's table stakes for an EV, and criminally bad management that they'd ship a car that didn't have full knowledge of the chargers out there and also how to route. Traditional US car manufacturers are absolutely incompetent and will not survive competition with Chinese manufacturers unless they clean house on everything software related.)

jahewson 2y ago
It’s shocking. I’ve had a non-Tesla electric car for about 5 years and the public chargers have always been garbage. The new ones are garbage too. If they do finally work, they charge at 1/4 the quoted speed. I had free charging for a while and even that was not enough of an incentive to use it.
- short_sells_poo 2y ago
  Same experience in the UK. Just within London you have a dozen charging networks, they all have their own shitty apps, they require you to add your credit card and create an account and half the time they simply don't work and just give you some garbage error message like "charging failed". Don't even get me started on Oxford. We arrive to a charging station and it turns out it is exclusively for electric taxis. No mention of this anywhere online. It boils down to trial and error, and then remembering which specific charging points tend to work. For a completely new piece of infrastructure with no legacy cruft, the industry has made a complete and utter mess of it.
  - 2y ago

pkulak 2y ago

Well, for another anecdote from the PNW, there are dozens of combo chargers in the 300 miles North of me and 6-8 in the 300 miles south. They seem to mostly work, more are going in, and old, unreliable ones are getting swapped out. It’s not perfect, but it’s fine for me. Of course, 99% of my charging is at home.

yieldcrv 2y ago

I have a Mustang mache specifically because of the Tesla supercharger authorization and compatibility It’s still bleak-ish, but is right on the cusp of getting better Tesla’s schizophrenic behavior makes the promised adapter to have an unknown delivery date The bootleg adapter works decently, tricky at first though I had to learn there are multiple versions of tesla superchargers, and even of the V3 ones they are not all the latest version that I’m supposed to use. This is undocumented. Then, of ALL of them, the charging cable is too short and in the wrong place for my vehicle. I have to take up two spots unless I’m next to another vehicle with my ‘affliction’, rare I dont want a Tesla I want the supercharging network Now, knowing all these things and altering my life just a little bit around the local ones, things are great CSS charging stations are pathetic and often have long lines, while the Tesla stations are massive, don't have a line, all while an additional doubling is occurring in a roped off section Fortunately, you don't have to supercharge and its ill advised to do it often.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

__m 2y ago

> Crazy how no one else could figure this out. Tesla obviously didn't figure out how to do it with third parties either. It's about cooperation and politics, not so much about the technical implementation.

aydyn 2y ago
They are talking about the user experience. Charging from a Tesla supercharger is completely frictionless. From a non-Tesla charger... have you ever tried it?
iknowstuff 2y ago
Interoperability sure, but the chargers breaking left and right is a separate issue.

jasoncartwright 2y ago

This situation sounds like Europe (& the UK) two or three years ago. Plentiful well maintained, fast and convenient chargers have sprung up since from a wide variety of operators (electricity companies, oil companies, startups, plus Tesla). We standardised on CCS a while ago. Many chargers are even faster than Tesla Superchargers whilst supporting the plug-and-charge standard ISO 15118. They are often surprisingly cheap too.

zelos 2y ago
I was surprised just how good charger provision is in Europe. On a recent 1600 mile road trip we never had a problem finding 350kW chargers. There were always plenty of spaces free and I saw one broken charger the whole time - it maxed out at ~70kW instead of 230kW - but I just moved to the next charger in the row.
- pornel 2y ago
  The EU charging infrastructure is pretty good now. Tesla has no advantage here, except maybe good car navigation integration. Most Tesla Superchargers are still 400V v2 which are slower than 300kW/800V Ionity and Fastned chargers.

euroderf 2y ago

> The chargers are few and far between, half of them are broken, and even the ones that aren't broken have compatibility issues so they may not work anyway. The required apps are unreliable and annoying. This also describes a lot of modern American life. I am constantly impressed by people saying how reliable the Tesla charger network is. This level of quality should be held up as an example at every opportunity. My 0.02€

sandworm101 2y ago

>> The required apps are unreliable and annoying. The requirement of an app to fuel a car is ridiculous and is one of the largest barriers for many people. Too much of our lives are already dependent on our phones. The idea that any random issue with my phone will then cause my car to not work ... that is just unacceptable. This is why airplanes don't have keys, let alone apps. (My secure work phone is currently bricked due to an issue with my email address being moving between departments. That sort of thing is why I would never trust a phone for vital things like fueling a vehicle.)

cbm-vic-20 2y ago

> the [Tesla] charging experience couldn't be simpler, park and plug in, unplug and go. No tap, no app. Crazy how no one else could figure this out. Agreed. I don't know why the vehicle and charger manufacturers didn't settle on a system that would let a user store credit card credentials or some other token in the car itself. When you pull up to a charger, plug in, and the charger and car do the handshake, and the car requests that a PIN be entered to release the credentials to the charger. The charger could still support their own cumbersome apps or CC entry system (if you're trying to charge someone else's vehicle, in a rental scenario for example), but the default experience should be: pull up, plug in, enter PIN/Passkey, walk away.

zelos 2y ago
Fastned chargers do plug-and-charge using CCS. Works pretty well in my experience, I believe it's an open standard.
vel0city 2y ago
I don't have a Tesla. Almost all my DC fast charging experiences have been plug and charge.

appendix-rock 2y ago

It’s not that Tesla has uniquely worked it out. It’s that the other options in your country basically only exist out of spite. We know how to do charging networks now. Eventually, someone in the US will see the worth in it.