this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Electric Cars
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Man this is awesome. I bought my Model 3 mostly because the CCS charging situation in the couple hundred miles around me is dreadful. I leased an ID.4 for a year and felt stuck because any trip I would plan would require me to stop at every single charger on the route, some of which were known to be super unreliable.
I adore my car, but I don’t know that I would have bought it if I had had any other options that could supercharge
I live in the NW and there's plenty of charging options around here. I've never had a problem finding a charge driving my polestar around Oregon and Washington. That said this is probably a good move. The NACS connector is easily to handle and understand. I'm surprised that tesla is giving up their competitive advantage though.
Is it giving up any competitive advantage? They will now make millions licensing out NACS to Volvo and this begins the dominos of other companies adopting the standard as well thus even more money. Would you rather be the guy selling the product, or the guy selling the necessary parts to make that product.
Their advantage to Tesla is charging non-Tesla owners a premium and profiting off cars they didn't manufacture. Honestly, it was dumb of them not to open the standard sooner -- it could have been the dominant charging adapter for a decade already.
I don't think trading their profit margin on cars for the profit margin on charging is worth it, but I guess we'll see. A lot of people bought teslas for their charging network.
Their profit margins on cars will continue to shrink as competition in the electric space heats up. There's also a point at which Elon's general lunacy will start affecting Tesla sales.
Owning the fast charging space will pay dividends on money spent on building infrastructure over the last decade. If charging a Tesla is 10 cents a kilowatt hour, and charging a Ford/Polestar/etc is 12 cents an hour, that's earning something for literally nothing.
I'm interested in purchasing a used EV. Would you recommend the polestar for Oregon/Washington?
Yeah, and it is getting better everywhere. I’m in the greater Pittsburgh Region and at least in 2021 (I haven’t paid much attention to CCS lately), I literally couldn’t visit my parents a bit south of Erie in the winter because there were no chargers between here and there and the range was so bad.
I too am surprised they gave up the advantage as well although I assume these companies are all paying for access