Discussion of EVs and the technology around them
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.
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?
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.
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
This is tragic. The infrastructure for CCS1 far exceeds NACS on a location count basis and having manufacturers switch to this plug type is anti-progress.
12,000 superchargers is counting stalls, not locations. Why are we counting fuel pumps instead of gas stations? That's not how strong network coverage is defined.
There's less than 2,000 NACS DC fast charging locations in the US & Canada but there's over 6,500 CCS1 DC fast charging locations in that same area.
You can see the lack of infrastructure NACS offers on a state-by-state basis here: https://public.tableau.com/views/EVFastChargingPlugStandards/PublicDCFastCharingPlugs
I think with Ford and GM adopting NACS, CCS1 is dead in the US. It's just a matter of time until CCS plugs will be replaced and older cars will need to use an adapter.
I'm just happy that there will be a single standard. I'd have preferred that it wasn't the one that tesla can exert some control over, but it is a more user friendly connector.
It makes no sense to replace 75% of the infrastructure.
To be fair, they're not all gonna be suddenly replaced. The manufacturers are going to start producing cars in 2025, and it'll be a fair few years on top of that before the majority of cars on the road are actually using NACS plugs, long enough that a good chunk of the infrastructure will have to be replaced or modified anyways.
While Tesla should've just backed down and adopt the existing standard like in other markets, I don't think this is the worst thing in the world.
Replacement happens at the stall level, not location level. There are a lot more NACS stalls than CCS.
The number of stations is important, because if there's one station at one location and it's already occupied... You're boned until that person is done... And my car takes 2h to charge at a 50kW station.
I did a 5000km trip across the north shore of the St. Lawrence, and thankfully I only had to wait for a charger twice... But it was a pain in the ass to wait 30-45 minutes for the person before me to finish charging so that I could charge for an hour or two so I could make it to my next destination.
With an 8-stall supercharger station, there's someone completing their charge every 8 to 10 minutes... With a 20-stall supercharger station, it's usually less than 5.
I'm trying to say that location count is more important than stall count. Stall count is still important, but a wait is a minor inconvenience in compsrison to not being able to travel on the north shore of the St Lawrence too far north of Baie-Saint-Paul because all the northern charging stalls are concentrated in that one location
Having driven all the way to Havre Saint Pierre with many, many detours on route, it's less of an issue than you'd think. There are 50kW chargers every 50km or less, and L2 chargers in every tiny town.
I get that this is about Tesla and Superchargers, but their network will continue to expand at an insane rate, because now every station they install will mean more revenues for Tesla -- each and every day/week/month -- now, and in the future.
Replacement happens at the stall level, not location level. There are a lot more NACS stalls than CCS.
now THIS is the win Tesla was looking for. Availability of NACS chargers at non Tesla stations is one thing but greater adoption of the plug by other companies means way more.