The thing about how this is affects Tesla is "compared to what?"
Compared to the historic status quo where there were no other chargers, and Tesla had exclusive access to a large-ish proprietary charging network, it looks like Tesla giving up their advantage, and seems bad.
But the forward-looking status quo was going to be a gigantic network of CCS chargers that makes Tesla's proprietary network look small, with every other car maker using CCS. In that world, Tesla would have had to switch their cars over to CCS eventually and retrofit their existing chargers to CCS, and people who bought Teslas with the proprietary plug have a terrible UX of needing adapters everywhere.
Compared to _that_ status quo, this is a huge win for Tesla (and one that back-foots every other carmaker, which -- if NACS does take off -- need to do their own migration to a new charging port and strand their existing customers with the adapter life, making their earliest adopters angry and frustrated). So yeah, this is a great move for Tesla, and GM and Ford in enabling it are total idiots. (Rivian is just going along with the semi-inevitable at this point.)
Also one other detail: There's a hell of a lot more money in the car 'fuel' industry than the car making business. R&D costs are way lower, you don't need that many employees, and you can always charge these third party automakers more. Tesla is going to make bank off these adopters.
Most EVs charge at home most of the time, so there isn't that much money in the "fuel" industry, they are mostly needed for long distance trips (and so crowd up on holiday weekends), not daily driving.
Umm, there's a significant chunk of the world's population who will likely never be able to charge at home, because they live in apartments and park on-street.
"EV owners who live in apartment buildings and park on the street will rely heavily on public chargers—in 2021, 42 percent of European EV owners living in cities had no access to home charging points."
Public chargers =/= DC fast chargers (like Tesla superchargers).
I've already seen level 2 chargers that drop down from light posts in my city. Roll those out to every light post near apartment buildings and throw in some curb-side stalls if you need more capacity. Most people won't need to charge every night with 200/300mi+ range, so you won't need a 1:1 mapping of chargers to cars. This way, people charge passively overnight at stations that are cheaper to build than DC fast chargers.
Apparently LED can use less than 100W, and before LEDs streetlights would use 250-400W . The really bright sodium ones were 1000W, but those probably weren't over your neighborhood sidewalk.
I wouldn't make investment decisions on that kind of prediction. Slower (cheaper) chargers will take much of the load, and unless outlawed, are going to heavily bite into fuel station margins. The best they can do is charge more for DC fast charging when it is needed (during holiday weekends).
In the US, most apartment dwellers park in a garage, which can and will be retrofitted with chargers. Street parking is the major challenge. In Park Slope Brooklyn, I often see a lone cable coming out of a brownstone out to a Tesla on the street. :-)
What is your stats for most apartment people Park in a garage? Where I live garages cost a hefty amount extra and the apartment complex doesn't even have enough for more than a quarter of the residents anyway
On street parking is very much allowed only in some countries, the biggest one being the USA, but much of western Europe it is disallowed (or at least, you pay for it by the hour). Many countries require proof of parking spot before they will let you even buy a car.
Even in that case, it isn't hard for cities to put out L2 charging pylons at each on-street parking space. They can just combine it with street light infrastructure or whatever (they would also be able to monetize street parking at that point, which is inevitable anyways).
> Even in that case, it isn't hard for cities to put out L2 charging pylons at each on-street parking space.
How does this work for physical logistics? e.g. I’m a two-car household that can’t practically reduce to a single car, with a driveway that only fits one car. (That my partner uses.) I street park in front of my house, and there’s street/sidewalk/lawn. The only place I can think of to put a charging station is in my lawn with some kind of arch over the sidewalk to reach my car. Also becomes problematic as street parking spots aren’t reserved. (I could potentially remove a tree from my front yard and pave over it to provide another parking space, but that’s not a very appealing solution.)
Are your electric lines all buried? I guess if they are that would make it much more difficult. Otherwise, you have poles or something to keep the lines in the air.
I'm just amazed America has so much free parking still. People buy houses, even if they have garages, they use the garage as storage and park their car on the street. Having lived in other countries where that simply can't happen, its like this country practically gives away parking spaces for free.
Yes, utilities are all buried. Electrical doesn’t even come from the street side of the house, it comes in from a utility corridor behind my house.
Also have a garage, but isn’t practical to park in it for various reasons, some more fixable than others. (It’s set up as a home gym which I view as essential for my health, it’s single car and parking in the driveway would block in the garage, it doesn’t have a floor drain or appropriate slope for draining which is fairly important for winter snowmelt, and it doesn’t have an automatic door opener.)
Seattle has lots of garages like that, so much so that they no longer dig basements for new housing (lots of old garages are basically a decline to a basement with a garage door). Seattle is one of those cities that doesn't enforce parking minimums, so street parking is otherwise over prescribed by new dense housing projects going up (unlike say LA).
I don't think street parking is sustainable. We build denser, and without parking, it is eventually going to fall apart where too many people are going to be fighting it out for too few street parking.
Depends. In Japan you're only allowed to buy a car if you have a free parking space on your property. A police office will come by your home to verify that the number of parking spots on your property is enough to house all the cars you plan on having. So in this case you would just have to deal with only having one car, or pave over the lawn to fit another parking spot.
At least in Germany, most city areas where people live are "Anwohnerparken", so people who live on the street are allowed to park on the street, nobody else.
I offered to pay for a charger to be installed in my spot, and the hoa board flat out refused. Granted, they're old, and are probably still upset about the switch to unleaded gasoline...
The latest rounds of gas convenience stores have gotten more square footage than earlier generations. I suspect they are anticipating indoor seating for charging customers at some point.
I’ve also started seeing joint ventures where it’s a proper coffee stand or in one case I can think of an A&W root beer.
Gas stations tend to be physically separated from pastimes (what Burger King owner wants diesel fumes in their store?), and someone at least is hedging their bets that won’t always be the case. I don’t know if they’ll see the fruits but their kids absolutely will.
I've been seeing some of these as well in recent years.
The most memorable one was down in Louisville, where there was a gas station/bait shop/bar. The bartender sold me some whole-hog pork sausage at $2/lb. which he kept in a duffel bag in the ice box. Totally on the up-and-up.
Another is a well-known BBQ joint / convenience store out by Kansas City (I forget the name).
Most common, I think, is having a Subway inside the convenience store. I've seen Burger Kings as well.
That is a very astute observation! Thank you. I have wondered why more and more convenience stores are getting into not just quick, pick-up snacks, but full blown fast-food style sit down environment.
Recently when I drove around in the USA, I saw Sheetz, Wawa, Royal Farms, Rutter's, and High's. These are substantially larger with lots of amenities compared to the standard gas stations. Nothing compared to Buc-ee's, but still getting up there.
Not sure about the others, but at least for Wawa and Royal Farms: many locations have offered fast-food style options for a very long time, like 25+ years, maybe more.
Wawa has always been known for quality. I remember years back when there was a romaine lettuce shortage, they put up deeply apologetic signs about how they're temporarily substituting iceberg lettuce in their sandwiches.
Meanwhile Royal Farms is known for their fried chicken. Although, the one near my college in Baltimore was more known for being a frequent target of robberies :/
On a road trip, I recently ate at a Sheetz in central PA that had Electrify America chargers. Good food selection, similar to Wawa. Not the best overall experience though -- an unhinged lunatic flipped out at me for leaving a single unused napkin on my table (which lacked a napkin dispenser, and the place had no recycling can). I avoided that charging location for my return trip...
Sheetz, Wawa and Royal Farms all already have Tesla chargers. Wawa has a location in Virginia with no gas pumps but Tesla chargers. So yes they are already planning for this future.
In poking around with PlugShare in the Seattle area, I'm seeing Arco gas/convenience stores with chargers. "EV Connect" is what is marked on the map. One is near the office that I don't go to anymore, but next time I'm that way to pick up hardware, I'll check it out. IIRC, there's no real room to build out the lot, but maybe the store could expand.
Gas station stores are moving in on grocery stores.
There's a huge war brewing that most people don't even know about, but once grocery stores started imitating Costco and offering gas, the convenience stores have been firing back by undercutting grocery stores on staples.
Around here they'll even undercut Walmart on dairy and select produce.
I think this alternate future of a gigantic CCS network is a really long ways off. Have you ever tried to use non-Tesla DC fast charging? It's a mess! There aren't a lot of stalls, one of them is usually broken, and the payment processing is a mess! I thought people were exaggerating until I experienced it first hand. While I think they will eventually get their act together, I don't think it's unreasonable to claim that the terrible DC fast charging experience is a huge deterrent to non-tesla EV buyers right now. This ultimately creates a chicken and egg problem that results in such slow progress in the EV charging world (outside of Tesla.) It's why Tesla's US EV market share is around 60%.
I actually think this is great for Tesla in other ways in the nearer term. With other automakers switching to NACS, this removes a huge concern for would be non-Tesla EV buyers. Now you may think this would erode Tesla's market share, but I think it will convert far more ICE customers than Tesla customers. The net effect is a faster EV adoption, faster cultural acceptance of EVs, and more people considering Tesla in the near-mid term.
I fail to see how this negatively affects Ford, GM, and Rivian. They can retrofit the charge port relatively cheaply or deal with an adapter. Yes, it affects resale value of early customers. But that's how it goes with new technology, and buyers are naive to think otherwise. Besides, when compared to their ICE counterparts, they're probably still coming out ahead on maintenance.
> In that world, Tesla would have had to switch their cars over to CCS eventually and retrofit their existing chargers to CCS, and people who bought Teslas with the proprietary plug have a terrible UX of needing adapters everywhere.
They've switched to CCS in Europe and as far as I can tell it's going just fine for them. Not sure what would motivate them to pull this risky move besides an insane love for their customers' UX (which ... I doubt).
> In that world, Tesla would have had to switch their cars over to CCS eventually and retrofit their existing chargers to CCS, and people who bought Teslas with the proprietary plug have a terrible UX of needing adapters everywhere.
It should be noted that in any case Tesla will have to support CCS, though in its CCS2 version. It is the de facto standard in Europe and is in the process of making their chargers in Europe fully compatible since the M3 comes with CCS2 by default here. And it is unlikely to change any time soon, CHAdeMO is dying here and all the other networks are using CCS2 (which seems to be much better than CCS1 if I trust the complaints about CCS1 I read on HN).
In fact Type 2 or Combo2 (CCS2) is an EU requirement for the charging stations so while you can offer alternatives, all new charging stations must offer of those two.
Yes. CCS2 has not technically won yet as being the default port for all EVs in Europe, but any other option would have to have significant advantages over CCS2 to win, features that a potential CCS3 version would not be able to support.
My friend who is not an EV driver got stuck with an EV rental (Bolt) for a semi-rural trip and boy was that a ton of drama.
I’ve been thinking hard about an EV myself and now I’m looking at PHEVs instead. I’ve gotten a crash course in EV charging around here and it’s not good. Level 2 chargers are not for spontaneous trips and level 1 chargers are fucking pointless. It estimated two and a half days to charge from 40-80% at my house. My house was wired for level 2 charging by the previous owners but the plug is 220 3 prong rather than the NEMA 14-50 plug that seems to be de rigeur lately. At least I could probably get an electrician to fix that cheap.
If anything the non CCS chargers are made by idiots.
What they say is dead on -- EVs are great, but getting an EV in a rental situation that's not optimal for an EV without notice and without planning for it is a terrible, terrible situation.
Level 2 chargers are great in your garage, or in a place you're going to park for a long time anyway (hotels, say), but for quick top-offs on a road trip, yeah, not good.
I have a hybrid, basically get 30 miles on a charge. It’s frankly perfect!
To put it simply, there are two types of modes I drive - short & in town or long (100+ mile round trip).
There is absolutely zero chance I’ll be using an EV to drive over 100 miles as there’s a risk I get stuck for hours or even need a tow.
For in town trips, 20-30 miles is more than fine and I never even switch to gas. There’s very little trips in between.
Tesla holds a decent spot for suburban regions where you drive 10-120 miles round trip. Arguably that’s probably fine for half of America. Particularly, if you have two cars (one gas, one electric) as most households with EVs do.
Dumb you're getting downvoted, because the charging infrastructure is bad. I was "EV curious" and recently rented a Kia EV with a 250 mile range for a trip to Northern California. I had two purposes - drive to/from San Francisco and Sacramento. Drive all around the Sacramento metro area. I figured California, probably having the best EV infrastructure, would make the experience a good one. I was wrong.
1) Half the stations we attempted to charge at were broken for various reasons. Sometimes it was the payment system. Sometimes it was charging as a whole. sometimes the CCS side was broken, sometimes the Tesla side was broken. Sometimes the screen was broken. The point is these are not-simple machines with massive amounts of electricity going through them. Many things break.
1/1 Davis
2/4 Davis
1/2 El Dorado Hills
0/3 Palo Alto
1/1 Palo Alto
2) Vendors. All terrible. All except one municipal L2 required you to download their app. Thankfully all allowed guest charging, but if I was evil, I'd require users to register. Good chance they're desperate, and good chance you're the only charger in the area.
The experience didn't put me off on EVs, and I'm still considering getting one because I can charge at home. Relying on infrastructure, though, is a terrible idea.
You just need a good EV. PHEV is like buying a typewriter with a screen when everyone is already buying computers. I have had a pure EV since 2019 and never had charging problems like that and I drive a lot. I have the 14-50 at home and it charges quickly, every morning I’m at 80% charge. Spend $100 to get an electrician to fix that for you.
Different people have different driving patterns and different needs.
Some parts of the country have less (and crappier) charging infrastructure. Those parts of the country coincide with areas where places are further apart and you need more range. For some of us who happily live in flyover states, a PHEV is an awesome in between.
I'm glad that an EV works out for you. Hopefully charging times (and charging infrastructure) will improve so that an EV works out for me as well. Until then, a PHEV works well for me and is far more efficient than a pure ICE.
I lived in a rural location and now in suburbs and still never had any issues, even 4 years ago when there were far fewer chargers. Here is a map of the level 2+ chargers in the country:
With 300 miles of range all you have to do is get to the next charger and if you're willing to spend 5 minutes in advance to plan your road trip it really doesn't add any extra time if you stop to charge while eating, using the restroom, etc. I like the extra cargo space not having an internal combustion engine gives me.
I've done 300 actual miles with my model 3 (long range) and now with my X as well. I've heard the Ioniq has good range as well and I'm sure more models are being released every few months from other brands with actual ranges over 300
> I lived in a rural location and now in suburbs and still never had any issues, even 4 years ago when there were far fewer chargers. Here is a map of the level 2+ chargers in the country:
As he said, different circumstances can shift the solution point. What you have someone that doesn't have a data plan on their phone, or doesn't carry a smartphone and thus doesn't have access to a mapping app? Or the charge point requires a smartphone app that I don't connectivity to use with?
For me as well an EV is questionable. My gas burning SUV is $1100 a year to insure, tax included. A Tesla Model 3 at the same level insurance would could me $6014 a year before taxes. I don't drive enough to save $5000 in gas and maintenance a year.
Then there's my garage. Long story short, the best it can do right now is 120V 6A charge speed. To properly upgrade my garage to support a full EV would cost an additional $2500. Assuming if I also have to upgrade the electrical mains from 100A to 200A, it's $15,000 to $25,000. And my electricity costs 20 cents a kilowatt hour.
Does buying an EV it still make sense after all that if you were in my circumstances?
You need fast charging at home, end of story. If you can only get 120V at home, forget it. That being said once you do get it, it's so nice never having to stop at a gas station again.
As for insurance, you should shop around. Not sure what's on your driving record, but it was $90/mo for me to insure my brand new model 3 when I had that vehicle. But I don't have any tickets/accidents or large claims.
I just got on Intact’s website and got a quote for one John Smith, 18 year old male from Branford, Ontario. John wanted a quote on a Tesla Model 3 Performance. Their quote was $3200/year.
You want to try and explain why it is that you are getting quotes that are twice that of the highest risk drivers?
You are right. I mistakenly failed to pay the parking meter on time 7 or 8 years and was issued a ticket. Of course I threw myself at the mercy of the courts; a simple mix up of days I pleaded. It was not the statutory holiday I thought it had been that would have waived the parking fees. And I paid my ticket immediately. But they would have none of it. So unforgivable was my crime, so heinous, so far murder or rape, that there could only be one punishment that could be appropriate for my sin; to be executed.
I await on death row now. The chosen method of execution is to be killed by old age 60 or 70 years from now, being withered and worn by the ravages of time. Most cruelly in the interim, I am expected to work a 37 hour work for 48 weeks out of the year in grueling conditions. A climate controlled office with an ergonomic chair in front of a computer with Visual Studio Code open.
Sometimes it seems like if it would not have been kinder to simply kill me there and then. Those days I ask myself why they keep me here. Just to suffer?
tl;dr
No accidents, no claims, no criminal activity on record except the one parking ticket. I don't pretend to comprehend why the quotes are that way for me.
In comparison my current SUV is $1100 a year same level of coverage as that quote. Just for fun I got a quote for an 2022 Acura NSX a while ago and it was $1500 a year, and the NSX is quite a bit more expensive then a Model 3.
For a 33 year old driver, single, male, unmarried, with no tickets/accidents/etc., living in Sudbury, ON:
Intact Insurance:
2022 Tesla Model S LR 4DR: $178.17/mo [1]
2022 Acura NSX Hybrid 2DR AWD: $535.08/mo [2]
TD Insurance:
2022 Tesla Model S LR 4DR: $232.42 [3]
2022 Acura NSX Hybrid 2DR AWD: "CALL" [4]
Rather than calling I went to BrokerLink, which lets you get quotes from different sources. The average quotes given by BrokerLink for each vehicle were:
2022 Tesla Model S LR 4DR: $360/mo [5]
2022 Acura NSX Hybrid 2DR AWD: $520/mo [6]
So no, I do not believe you are being honest. There is no reason to believe that.
You must have a terrible record or something. No one is getting quoted $6k/year unless they have a felony hit and run on their record or something equally as egregious. Not even in Canada.
I don’t have either, but it seems to me a PHEV is a great EV alternative for people who do a lot of local (city) driving and also occasionally need a vehicle to do weekend trips for camping, etc, where charging is not available or an inconvenience.
The part of my brain that doesn’t understand how photovoltaics work really wants solar panels on EVs but aside from keeping the cabin at ambient, which does in fact have some mileage value, all they would really achieve is keeping self discharge at bay.
If you parked it with a 50 mile range and came back a week later, it might still have 50 miles of range.
My household has an EV, a home level 2 charger, and I still wouldn't mind getting an PHEV. Not even for the weekend trips, but just because it's cheaper than another full EV, and I don't really drive enough to need the range beyond the battery on a PHEV.
As for your plug, that's cheap and easy to replace (literally the homeowner can do it in most jurisdictions, be safe) - the question is the size of the breaker/wire routed to the plug.
If your breaker is fifty amps, then changing for NEMA 14-50 shouldn't be more than $100-200 even if you hire a master electrician.
If the breaker is NOT fifty amps, then you have to carefully check that the wire is the sized correctly all the way from the box to the outlet (it can LOOK right coming out of the breaker box, and look right going into the outlet box, but somewhere hidden in the walls it changes to an incorrect size).
What do you mean by this? Do you mean "public L2 chargers" or private in-home L2 chargers? If public, I agree--it would take 4 hours to charge your car on a road trip, but if private then just keep your car charged to 80-90%.
> My house was wired for level 2 charging by the previous owners but the plug is 220 3 prong rather than the NEMA 14-50 plug that seems to be de rigeur lately. At least I could probably get an electrician to fix that cheap.
There are multiple NEMA 3-prong 220V standards, at least one of which is 50V and at least Tesla sells charger adapters for all of them. If you're buying an EV though you may as well shell out the extra $500 + labor and have an electrician install the dedicated charger (so you can keep your portable charger in the car for traveling).
> If anything the non CCS chargers are made by idiots.
I'm not sure what this means either. The Tesla charger isn't CCS and I haven't had any problems with it. Also, plenty of CCS chargers suck (at least one of the CCS standards is exclusively L2).
For the large majority of driving PHEVs are superior. They offer identical efficiency for short (<50 mile) trips at a large cost savings. They can handle longish trips where a BEV would wind up dead on the side of the road. Even in the rare circumstances where BEVs are better the advantages are slight.
There are downsides: extra weight of a gas engine, more mechanical complexity, and weird maintenance, especially if its an gas engine your not using very often. The person I know who has one went a couple months without using much gas. Does gas go bad?
Eh, it's not great but it's totally doable as long as it isn't winter. My understanding is that a Nissan Leaf is much much worse than a Bolt for road trips...
I just did an NYC to Cleveland trip in my Bolt EUV, along a route with only a few DC charging locations, and never once had to wait for an available charger -- even on Memorial Day.
That said, if you need to use the heater, then yeah it's not viable for a road trip. No heat pump, so major battery drain.
The other key to a Bolt road trip is to avoid speeding too much. There's an absolutely tremendous difference in range when going 65 mph vs 80 mph.
> My understanding is that a Nissan Leaf is much much worse than a Bolt for road trips...
As a Nissan Leaf owner, yes. Because of CHADeMO (that is going to be a big problem in a few years, as existing stations fail and don't get replaced) and because of the passively cooled battery pack. I can do one DC fast charging no problem without much change in battery temps (CA weather). 2 or 3 in the same day? Might get toasty.
That said, all EVs have issues during winter(Tesla included, their EPA ranges are way overstated). It's just that, for a Tesla, it's easier to find a supercharger.
The consumption difference due to speed affects all cars, no matter their drivetrain. For ICE, that burns a hole in your pocket as it causes you to stop at gas stations more often.
re: winter range, my understanding is that EVs with heat pumps (including Teslas) tend to have much more efficient heaters than ones without heat pumps (e.g. Bolts).
re: speed and consumption, for sure. But because the Bolt's DC fast charging rate maxes out at a fairly lame 50-55 kW, and speeding => reduced range => more charging time required, so on a long Bolt road trip there's diminishing returns from speeding a ton. I suppose it depends a lot on terrain and climate though, since e.g. speeding can be more beneficial if it means you're running the heater for less time.
Oh it was terrible even by proxy. It would drop estimated range at about 2 miles per mile. Took all day to get between two metropolitan areas. Spent several hours at a level 2 to ensure they didn’t get stuck in the woods with crap cell coverage.
If your commute is less than 100 miles, you have nothing to worry, if you get a proper charger at home. Owned Tesla for 3.5 years with 60 mile commute, it has been very nice.
For fun, I just looked up my route tomorrow using public transportation.
I typically leave around 6:30am, drive 45 miles and arrive at work about 7:15am.
Using Google and a host of websites to plan, I could walk a mile to catch a regional bus, ride and arrive there 1 hour after I began. I can then walk to another bus station, ride a local bus to a the main bus station, connect to another bus that drops me off pretty much at my workplace. I'd arrive 2.5 hours after I began this journey. The earliest I can get to work by this route is 9:30am. The regional bus system doesn't run any earlier.
Alternatively, if I take our non-ev, it's the same time, but costs 5x as much as our Model Y. The ICE car cost about the same as the EV.
Plenty of people drive a car for short trips and those in rural areas will likely continue to do so. Also, consider company vehicles for workers transporting heavy equipment or delivery vehicles. All within the range of current EVs for a full day. EVs won't fix car traffic issues in cities, but public transit won't cover 100% of cases effectively.
Assuming Ford and GM are not inept and their adoption of NACS is driven by necessity rather than choice. This implies a significant lead by Tesla in charging technology. Essentially like Android adopting lightning connectors. Huge, long term positive impact to Tesla as market leader.
Compared to the historic status quo where there were no other chargers, and Tesla had exclusive access to a large-ish proprietary charging network, it looks like Tesla giving up their advantage, and seems bad.
But the forward-looking status quo was going to be a gigantic network of CCS chargers that makes Tesla's proprietary network look small, with every other car maker using CCS. In that world, Tesla would have had to switch their cars over to CCS eventually and retrofit their existing chargers to CCS, and people who bought Teslas with the proprietary plug have a terrible UX of needing adapters everywhere.
Compared to _that_ status quo, this is a huge win for Tesla (and one that back-foots every other carmaker, which -- if NACS does take off -- need to do their own migration to a new charging port and strand their existing customers with the adapter life, making their earliest adopters angry and frustrated). So yeah, this is a great move for Tesla, and GM and Ford in enabling it are total idiots. (Rivian is just going along with the semi-inevitable at this point.)