EVs are still overwhelmingly charged overnight at home. As they percolate to lower price points, that will change somewhat, but ultimately the total spend on charging stations is just too low to be much more than a distraction for a company the size of Tesla. The reason they built the supercharger network was that it was needed to sell cars, and now that they have it they might as well make money with it. I doubt it's much more than that.
You hinted at this, but a significant % of the population lives in either rented or multi-family housing, so home charging may not be feasible (at least in the short-to-medium term).
While I own my home, I don't own my parking space (community property, assigned to me via HOA rules). While we're allowed to install a chargers, it's only possible for homes with assigned spaces directly in front of the home (albeit pricey, as it involves concrete work to run cables under community sidewalks). Some homes have spaces offset by a fair distance, or across community street, so installing a home charger is either extremely expensive or impossible.
The people who can charge at home still make up more than 50% of the market, though, and there's a few more years before that really becomes a limiting factor in sales. That's plenty of time for most places to get L2 chargers available.
But, it is a problem that needs solved. We're firmly within the "buy a new EV" demographic otherwise, but the cost+hassle of installing a charger at home definitely contributes to our "meh, we'll keep the ICE another year or two" mentality.
And in a few years, charger availability might start to impact resales. Maybe. Mostly just thinking aloud.
First reaction: I think you are right. Not only will a large portion of all chargeups happen at home, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the margin is lower.
Second reaction: Maybe there's a business model where most of the profit from a charging station comes from things other than charging (e.g. onsite coffee shop, store, gym, etc) that gives people things to do while charging.
That seems foolish from a business perspective. The one thing they're most successful at is cars. They built an incredible first-mover advantage in EVs, but that isn't at all true in the power market. They're just a blip in the battery market. And while superchargers are great, there's no moat there at all.
If they're smart, they'll double down on cars like the Model 3 & Y, and instead of making them sillier (no stalks?!) they'll make them ever more appealing and cost competitive. They're the Toyota of the EV world right now, and if they play this right they'll be the Toyota of the whole market in 10 years. They would need a proper truck, though, to make that happen.
Tesla was always closer in vision to an energy company than auto maker.
Wouldn’t surprise me if they leverage the healthy EV competition to growing their battery, supercharger, and energy generation capabilities. With these one day overtaking car sales revenue.
What battery capability? Do they even make the top 10? And superchargers are pretty sweet, but there is no moat at all there, anybody can make a NACS fast charger. EA hasn't done great, but that doesn't mean anything other than EA kinda sucks, there are plenty of manufacturers capable of building reliable DC chargers.
Tesla's Nevada plant makes 37 gWh per year and is currently expanding to 100 gWh per year. 100 gWh would put that at #2 if it was operational today, however the current leaders will also continue to grow rapidly so it's unlikely they'd go above the middle of the top 10 list.
Despite being one of its most visible operations, the supercharger network is an utterly minuscule part of Tesla's overall business. It's unlikely to ever represent much more than 1% of Tesla's profit.
There's never going to be big money in vehicle charging because the vast majority of charging occurs at the owner's premises, and there's no technical impediment stopping the remainder from being a highly competitive industry.
The impediment is that it takes a huge amount of technical knowledge and execution, plus a huge amount of capital, plus the ability to operate a huge service and maintenance team.
If there is already a very large first rate infrastructure, then replicating that is very difficult.
Your statement sounds to me like 'trains are technically easy' there is not reason we can't have highly competitive industry in cargo transport from Chicago to New York. But yet there is only one company really operating that infrastructure.
Charging is not as extreme of a case as trains, but putting in huge capital investment for minimal profit just doesn't make a lot of sense.
We can see this today, EA is losing money. Non Tesla charge companies all lose money.
If charging is all pay per use and not a subscription (especially not a subscription you get included with a vehicle), there's no need to operate on a large scale; it's like gas stations: most are franchised chain stations, but there's tons of independents.
Electrify America is the product of a court settlement; it doesn't really need to earn money, it just needs to keep VW out of court.
Electrify America has already spent the money from the court settlement, they need raise money like any other company and make a profit.
> If charging is all pay per use and not a subscription (especially not a subscription you get included with a vehicle)
Those things are already happening on large scale.
The logic you suggest is only true if an independent can easily make a competitive station. The problem is Tesla is mass producing super charges at prices that simply can't be matched by other producers.
There are also economics of scale in terms of routing cars and achieving higher utilization.
Private franchises need to actually make a good profit to be worth setting up. In EV charging the money goes to the equipment provider or the electricity producer. You might make some money with additional services like a shop or a cafe. But in that case you might as well make a deal with a large player like Tesla to put up a station.
Also if your station breaks, you need an repair person to show up quickly. And company that sell charging equipment they mass produced are usually not good at providing those services.
You will also have the disadvantage that the biggest fleet will simply route people to their own stations. Driving down your utilization.
I think most charging networks will be large not individual. We see very few individual DC fast chargers.
Lithium stores energy. If Tesla is Exxon they also need to vertically integrate and source actual energy, which I suppose they do to some extent with SolarCity.
Tesla has been the the vertical integration and power supply business for a while now. Or at least has wanted to be. See the Tesla PowerWall and Solar Roof projects.
