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.
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.)
Legacy American car companies have been fully non-competitive with foreign brands for decades. Their continued existence is completely due to tariffs, and it’s not close. I see no reason to think congress would suddenly allow them to be threatened by Chinese companies.
I find it entertaining when my US colleague come visit and are amazed at all the options. I drive a new Toyota Hilux, and they weren't even aware they made them anymore. For a country that once prided itself on being the land of the free market capitalist, it's a shame the decision makers are so scared now of competition.
For long trips to unfamiliar places, not so much.
Oh they won't have any trouble. They may lose international market share but the US government will keep raising tariffs ad infinitum to protect the US automakers no matter how far behind they get, or how expensive the vehicles get. We already are giving them 100% tariffs against BYD/etc. You might think that's absurd but the steel industry has received tariffs up to 266% against Chinese steel, so there's a lot of headroom left to continue to price out international competition.
There's really no pressure for the US automakers to do better or innovate or actually compete.
Open factories in NA and make their cars here. If the US companies are so incompetent they should still be able to outcompete them while paying several times higher wages and not getting any subsidies from the CCP.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
NACS is so much better and having a single standard will smooth out so much in the future.
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.
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.
But they are? Diesel nozzles in the US are significantly larger than in Europe.
https://exchange.aaa.com/automotive/car-care-repair-and-main...
But then truck stops have giant nozzles for the giant tanks on semi trucks. Those won't fit in a regular car.
Being something you practically always don’t take with you when you travel, as long as we’re standardized by continent what would even be the benefit?
There are still people doing world trips. We might collectively decide they need to keep using diesel forever or stop doing world trips with vehicles altogether but that is still currently a thing, even though it is very very marginal.
Also, the USA has borders with 2 countries with I imagine people crossing the border daily on both side to simply go to work. It seems weird to me that these 3 countries would not talk to each others about standards.
Also, with everyone on the same standard, all companies have an incentive to optimize their hardware to accomodatte it.
It might not be that important short term but it is on the medium to long term to complete a proper transition.
This has certainly happened in China and arguably manifests itself as scooter/motorcycle culture in places like Taiwan, Vietnam and Indonesia. (In Shenzhen, the scooters were almost universally electric when I was there last month)
Imagine the container-ship car - packed efficiently and treated like any other international good that can be ordered online.
The manufacturer produces them ready for the world market in 2 technical variations, right and left - everything else is personalized. (The motorcycle avoids even the right/left problem) Essentially I don't think we're at the end game of the Toyota Production System.
So it's more about being compatible with a vision of how we'll be interfacing vehicles 10-20 years from now. That's when making these decisions wrongly will really start to bite us - after the infrastructure is rolled out and long established.
Or who knows, by then there might be an even newer plug and we'll all be on a single system.
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.
This makes me happy. I worked on "standard" charging infrastructure for a while and those plugs are fv*king heavy and clunky by comparison. Also talked to an old Ford guy I worked with years ago who was involved in the standard development process - he seems content to "understand" what the politics and compromises were to the extent he couldn't look at the thing and say "this sucks". Going beyond the physical clunkiness: There is no reason to have a powerline PHY in there. None. It's stupid and costs extra and isn't even used on the high power conductors.
(VHS was better. Not only was it cheaper, Betamax's smaller cassette meant that feature length movies used a slower tape speed than VHS, negating claims of a better picture.)
What I really came to say is that the current reality is worse. In this analogy, not only did BetaMax win, neither BetaMax nor VHS came to Europe, but instead Philips 2000 won there. (US Teslas don't fast-charge in Europe.)
NACS is CCS with a different plug on the end. Tesla's charging standard is to die off, CCS will be the standard going forward.
Here's a real world demonstration of a charger with J3400 plugs (aka Tesla's plug):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3-0xRTduPI
It works on a Chevy Bolt because it is CCS.
I know Teslas were already CCS in Europe, so I wouldn't be surprised if the software is already basically there.
Version 2 superchargers do not speak CCS and won't ever be opened to non-Tesla vehicles and there are certain routes where that's quite annoying. My most common road trip has 5 supercharger locations along the way with 3 of them being V2, including the most isolated charger. Even once the NACS changeover happens taking a non-tesla on that journey will be a real pain.
Tesla has not put any resources into converting V2 sites into V3s. Some of the locations have been expanded with the new additions being V3, but I haven't seen much in the way of switchover.
A little bit of pain when there aren't that many vehicles is fine if it makes things quite a lot better going forward.
I still struggle to see how this ends up favorable for Tesla in the long run. They did not charge licensing fees for the connector, and even if they charge a premium to charge non-Tesla vehicles, now owners of Tesla vehicles are going to run into situations where a Chevy Bolt has to double park to use a Tesla fast charger at <=50kW, doubly driving down utilization.
https://insideevs.com/news/715644/tesla-supercharger-network...
They're expanding their customer-base by maybe 2x or more. Those new customers will be be giving recurring payments to Tesla. For vehicles that Tesla didn't build. How is that not favourable?
I think they opened up the Supercharger network to ensure that the US didn't establish CCS as the standard and overtake Superchargers, such that Teslas have a competitive dis -advantage, but I don't think they're particularly thrilled to have all these other companies using their chargers.
People seem to think they're raking it in with the Superchargers, but distributing electricity is a low margin business. Same with gas stations where the money mostly comes from the convenience store part of it and such.
So far, sure, but that can change. When most customers are non Teslas, it makes no sense to keep prices low.
This is misleading and not entirely true.
Older Tesla chargers did not use CCS to communicate. My 2019 Model 3 doesn't support CCS at all. When I plug into a Supercharger, it's not using CCS to communicate with the charger, it's using Tesla's proprietary CAN bus protocol. Teslas made before 2021 need an ECU retrofit to support CCS.
I could easily see EV charging stations approach the level of saturation of gas stations in the next 10 years.
Yes, today people are going to stop wherever there's a nearby charging station. But that's going to change, and fairly quickly.
If there are an average of 4 to 6 pumps per station, EV has a lot longer to go.
Did they mean 17,800 supercharger units or 17,800 locations with super charger units. Because I've seen those numbers interchanged before.
The problem with chargers (and I say this as an EV owner) is that many people mostly charge at home, so they aren't using them even weekly. However, everyone goes for a road trip say around memorial day, and the EV chargers are PACKED. It is just a huge disparity between normal and peak usage. Or you go on a road trip and you need one in the middle of nowhere Idaho on the way from Seattle to Yellowstone.
Thankfully L3 charger units at least are cheaper to buy/install/maintain (in theory, if people didn't think the coords had copper worth scrapping) and can be installed in more locations than gas station pumps (like super market parking lots).
Given the disparity in peak usage, it makes sense, at least, to compete on availability rather than price, since even if you are paying $60 to charge up, it is only a few times a year. It is much more important that the chargers be where you need them, and to have free units when you need them, oh, and they should be working! ... than to be the cheapest price.
They mean 17,800 DC fast charging plugs open to GM cars (and say so in the article). Tesla has 2,397 DC fast charging sites (or stations) in the US and a total of 27,711 plugs.
I get a lot of gas in supermarket parking lots, several supermarket chains put gas stations in the parking lot of some stores.
Even when chargers become more common in cities, there will always be some places like smaller villages or long roads where you only have one option; that option possibly being a Tesla charger.
So even if it loses significance, the difference will still be there. And maybe it will be sufficient to retain Tesla being known for being cheaper long-term (because of charging).
Whether that's realistic: I don't know.
Sure, and that's exactly the case for gas stations today, and I'm sure the lone gas station on the long stretch of road has more pricing power than the one in the middle of a city with competition.
And yet gas stations don't charge based on what kind of car you drive. Tesla shouldn't be permitted to do so either, as this market develops more.
I’ll have you know my Bolt EUV can get 53, maybe 54 kW, for 5, or maybe 10 minutes, thank you very much.
But seriously while the max Bolt charge speed is rather slow I rarely ever fast charge. We recently took a road trip that required multiple charging stops and it was fine.
I understand it could be inconvenient for drivers who have cars that with a higher charge speed who could have to wait but I’ve never encountered this.
This will allow the rest of the charging infrastructure to become Tesla compatible. That may reduce the load on Teslas network, which they only built so their EVs could go cross country.
This summer, I drove from MA to Washington DC and every other rest stop had chargers; sometimes multiple brands. I also drove from MA to Montreal and there were plenty of chargers.
Basically, every time I needed to pee there was a charger 5-10 minutes ahead of me. Plugged in, went to the bathroom, and then I had more than enough charge to go to the next bathroom.
In this rural area, there's generally more gas stations near the chargers than there are plugs at the chargers (like within a 1/2 mile or whatever).
Within one mile of my house, I have access to 4+8+12+10+8=42 gas pumps.
There are 129 "public" chargers total in my metro area, and a decent number are at car dealerships (presumably mainly for use for vehicles left there for service) or hotels (overnight stays). I don't know how actually public the chargers are.
It's more simple. The delays have been because Musk threw a tantrum and fired the whole supercharging team:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/inside...
> I still struggle to see how this ends up favorable for Tesla in the long run
Standardization gives Teslas more access to more chargers. It will also drive up utilization of Tesla's charging network because more cars will use more of Tesla's chargers more of the time.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/28/22596337/tesla-supercharg...
Tesla's chargers have been open to all brands for a long time in Europe. Here's a Kia charging on a V4 charger with no app and no Tesla account just as Nature intended:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yflZN0dLT8s
Tesla is just one charge point operator among many in Europe. Tesla's chargers are behind the state of the art. They still don't work well for 800 volt cars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEJ2KtzMeh8
The Cybertruck is an 800 volt platform and charges faster on Electrify America than on Tesla's own chargers:
https://x.com/itskyleconner/status/1775014705222070331
EV charging standardization in Europe has driven investment in and deployment of charging infrastructure. The US has 193,000 public AC and DC charge points:
https://www.carscoops.com/2024/09/americas-ev-charging-infra...
Europe has over 900,000:
EDIT - at least in Ford's case they've stated that they aren't https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/29/ford-tesla-supercharging-par...
Gas stations don't charge different amounts for gas depending on the type of car, and EV charging stations shouldn't be permitted to do so either.
I don't have an EV, but I agree that Tesla has a much much better reputation for reliable, working charging stations in the US. If people will actually pay more for that experience, then sure, Tesla can charge more than a competing charging company. But they should be required to charge the same amount regardless of vehicle.
The only exception to that, I think, is that they should be able to charge differently based on charging speed, which is related to the type of vehicl. All gas cars will fill up at more or less the same rate, but with EVs it depends on the battery technology and the car's electrical system. Taking up space at a charging station for a longer amount of time to consume the same amount of energy is a cost to the operator (and an annoyance for anyone waiting in line), and it seems reasonable to charge for that. So I think it would be fair to charge $X/kWh + $Y/min.
The top comment said something that every EV enthusiast knows. There are two wildly different charging experiences: Tesla, and everyone else.
Can you have a good experience with a non-Tesla? Sure! But with a Tesla, having a good experience is nearly guaranteed. With anyone else, it's a gamble.
You go to a Electrify America or some other charging network location, and you'll likely find only 2-4 stalls, and likely 1 or more of them are broken. Go to a Tesla Supercharger, and there's usually 8-16 chargers, all working. Even with a broken stall (It happens), you've got more available. And with so many stalls, and so many locations, it's exceptionally rare to get to a charging location and finding all of them in use.
This last week I took a road trip in my Model 3 from Portland to San Diego. 2,400 miles round trip. Never ran into a charging issue. I did see that a couple locations had a stall that was out of order, but with so many stalls, it wasn't an issue at all.
I'm in a similar boat, my electricity is I think 11 cents/kWh. $8.25 to completely charge my battery, which will then get me ~250 miles. The cost-per-mile is equivalent to getting over 125 mpg.
Obviously it’s more convenient if you can charge at home or work, but I disagree that such a thing is mandatory to own an EV.
But, if you can't charge at work nor at home, EV car isn't worth it.
On the other hand, I'm happy we're not heading down the path of shitty walled gardens of charging, eventually Tesla owners will also benefit from being able to charge more easily at 3rd party chargers. For humanity this is a good thing, and increases overall efficiency of infrastructure greatly.
That may be why. In low use areas it may be a nice ROI.
I’ve heard in high use areas things could already be bad from the increase in Teslas sold and piling Fords, GMs, and Rivians in isn’t going to lighten the load any.
> This funding opportunity is made possible by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s signature EV charging investments: the $2.5 billion Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) Discretionary Grant Program and funds from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program that are set aside for strategic grants to states and local governments to deploy EV chargers.
It seems like Tesla's behavior has been much better in Europe, and I'm not sure what explains the discrepancy.
The US had no such law and has refused to make one. We’ve gone with the traditional carrot approach where they wouldn’t get funds to built more superchargers without doing this due to the infrastructure law. But it was their choice and they didn’t have to.
They could have given away their connector 10 years ago and saved everyone a huge and expensive mess. But that’s in their interest. So instead dozens of companies wasted huge amounts of monies installing a bunch of cables that all have to be replaced.
Or the government could have seen that they had a better option and simply taken it and said it was the standard. But of course that wouldn’t be the American way.
So we suffered through a giant mess instead wasting time and money.
Tesla chose not to fix this until the damage was done and their benefit was small enough to be worth giving up.
[1] https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q1-2024-ev-sales/
Superchargers were the best product, yes. But then Tesla fired its entire supercharger team, demonstrating how little they care about it right now. They've been simultaneously dragging their feet on allowing third parties access to the network, as originally promised.
The Hyperloop was indeed intended to stop California extending its rail network - Elon himself admitted as such: https://x.com/parismarx/status/1571628269555826688
Next you'll need to enter a credit card, and then X out of the confirmation screen. Finally you'll get a link to order the adapter, which you can only access in a web view inside the MyChevrolet app.
The web view will show multiple discount codes regarding parts, but none of the %-off ones do anything for this order, only the free shipping one works on this. Also don't click the outermost X during the order process, since this will close the web view and make you start over. At times you'll need to click an "inner" X below that. It's one of the worst order interfaces I've ever seen.
Oh, and the first time I actually made it through the full checkout process, it gave me an error and said to try again later. But it wouldn't let me try again later (couldn't resubmit my order/cart) so I had to start from scratch for like the third time.
Also the adapter is already on backorder, so there's no estimation of when this will actually ship.
I think I'm never buying a GM car ever again.
It asked me if I wanted to fill out a customer satisfaction survey, but the form to enter my phone number was broken so I was not able to.
Way to blow their early mostly decent efforts in EV territory.
I'd pick up a second hand Bolt if it wasn't for the fact that the fast charging situation with them is... not competitive.
Granted, I could probably just drive my wife's Outlander PHEV in that case. But seeing as she just totaled my Volt...
How do I know? I bought one. The first issue I had was they claimed the unit was available to ship when I purchased, but did not ship even though they sent me a tracking number that simply stated "package hasn't been dropped off at UPS" when looked up. When I inquired they said it would be shipping "this week" for 3 weeks. I had also paid for expedited shipping and the company refused to refund this. After collecting screenshots I told them I would be reversing the charge through my CC company. That same day the product was shipped.
Then I experienced the design issues with the product first hand that everyone has now beaten to death on the Internet. Next I spent another two weeks trying to get the company to refund my money and take back their product. I ended up reversing the charge and only after I did that did they issue me an RMA to send the unit back, because now they wanted it back since my CC company reviewed all of my screenshots of their claims and reversed the charge.
Do not waste your time with Lectron!
At least at a gas station I'm only there for 5 minutes, it's not at the back of some dark parking lot, and I can start the car and drive away if I had to.
The worst experience I have had while charging late at night in a remote area was being accosted by an over-enthusiastic Tesla fan who just wanted to talk talk talk about the car and where it had gone. That was very unpleasant, but certainly not criminal.
Industry is already figuring out magsafe like solutions for Tesla Car chargers, it’s something else that Tesla is suing them for it lol.
Also, considering car chargers are likely to have many cars being charged, thieves would rather find it easier to steal parked out in the open cars outside people’s homes, than car charging spots which can easily be targeted by police to catch thieves red handed.
Not to mention, you’ll see more Magsafe charger implementations for Cars soon.
[see this](https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/2/24212160/tesla-evject-laws...)
As a Tesla owner, I see this as a straight up loss in nearly every category. I never have used a third party charger, so even if those chargers move to the NACS standard it won’t improve my life in any way.
I’ve already had to deal with Rivian or Ford owners taking up several stalls at the Superchargers (because they weren’t designed to fit correctly, and Rivian drivers are incompetent) and taking over twice as long to charge as Teslas are able to.
I am an OG in the sense that I had FSD at $2k and have seen the evolution of “full self driving”. It sucks. It’s a gimmick that I would not trust with the lives of my family. I trust myself enough to use it when it was just me driving. Good for highway driving in middle lane, but other cars do that as well..
Also in my friend group it was just me who had FSD nobody else had it.
I sold my Tesla long ago when Elon start short circuiting his brain with brainrot.
However the prevalence and reliability of supercharger is unmatched.
It certainly makes more sense for the name.