Big, but not quite as big as it seems: Toyota is lagging badly in EVs, which made up only 2% of its sales last year, and even that's a big improvement on the previous 0.4%.
No, Toyota invested heavily in hybrid technology in order to keep their ICE core business alive and then tried to go all in on Hydrogen with heavy lobby to top it off.
They are not lagging behind, they made multiple bad calls, betting on the wrong horses and are now paying the price.
Are they lagging? EV demand has seemed to peak. EVs are still too expensive without govt incentives and / or carbon taxes. And let's not forget the culture wars supressing demand.
There's more to the world than the US. You can get an EV for $4500 in China, and surprise surprise, sales are going gangbusters: they sold more than the rest of the world combined last year.
How precisely? The taxes on profits from oil & gas related businesses are complex, but I honestly (as a computer scientist unrelated to oil & gas businesses) don't understand the claims that we subsidize oil & gas production. I know that the oil & gas industry is heavily taxed and there are numerous exemptions and complications to the tax regulations for that industry just as there are for other industries, but on balance it appears that oil & gas production pays billions to the US and state governments. See [1], for example.
Thank you, the paper you cite makes clear claims: that the environmental (climate change, air pollution, etc.) impact should be priced into the cost of petroleum based fuels. The paper states that 92% of the subsidies to the oil & gas industry are because of the price of fuel doesn't reflect the societal costs related to pollution.
The interesting finding presented in the paper are:
[p. 9] "Underpricing of fossil fuels is still pervasive across countries and is often substantial, especially for coal."
[p. 9] 18% of these subsidies go to gasoline
[p. 9] "The power generation sector is the largest recipient of subsidies"
[p. 10] "By region East Asia and the Pacific accounts for 48 percent of total energy subsidies"
[p. 7] China and India together had 3.4 Million premature deaths due to air pollution in 2020 (The USA had 0.1 Million)
From an economic efficiency point of view, I can understand that prices are important, but wouldn't we have to take account of the benefits of using petroleum fuels too? Like allowing developing countries to feed their populations? They clearly can't do this with solar powered agriculture and solar powered shipping.
Tesla can become the de facto charging station for all EVs which at a 100% markup on each kWh sold is a substantially higher margin than selling vehicles. Think of how profitable the oil companies with gas stations are. Tesla SuperChargers are miles better than the competition. If people are already going to buy and EV from the legacy automaker because of design or brand loyalty, etc. Tesla might as well make recurring revenue on selling them the energy to charge.
Yes, on the margin some people might prefer to buy a non-Tesla car if they know they can use the supercharger network, but the positive experience of the Tesla charger will influence more people to buy a Tesla vehicle.
The only downside is if there are queues at the superchargers because too many non-Teslas are charging too slowly…
But then, as others have said, it just creates an incentive for Tesla to build more chargers and capture more charging infrastructure market share.
+1 to all that. Having experimented both with non-Tesla chargers and non-Tesla EVs, the Supercharger experience is just head and shoulders better. With a Tesla, plug in and go; with a non-Tesla at a Supercharger, select the bay from the app, plug in and go.
But with non-Tesla chargers, half the time they're down or fully occupied because there's one or two stalls, not 4-96 like Superchargers. If you find a free one, you need to download some dinky app and validate your account and punch in your credit card details and then it fails half the time anyway. Gar!
Your experience mirrors mine. On a recent trip to the UK we rented a Tesla Model 3 and the Supercharging experience was a breeze; no trouble at all. However, there was not a Supercharger near the hotel so I had to use another vendor and the experience was terrible. Not only did I have to download yet another app, I had to pre-load the account with money. That was even before having to find the charger, activate it, make sure it worked, change to the other one when it didn't work, etc.
The whole experience was horrible and helped me understand why some people don't think electric cars will ever take off. In fact, I think that the non-Supercharging experience is so bad that it is actively harming EV adoption. So, the sooner that Supercharging can be adopted the better.
NOTE: NACS is a charging standard and not limited to Tesla Superchargers. My hope is that when other companies (ChargePoint, EVAmerica, etc.) adopt the standard and start providing NACS charging locations they won't screw it up as badly as they have with CCS.
The standard works on the other side as well. A Toyota with a NACS plug can charge on the supercharger network, but also other networks that are also adopting the NACS standard. A non-Tesla car that charges on a non-Tesla network doesn’t generate any obvious revenue for Tesla, unless there are licensing fees. We have not seen the agreements, but I have to assume Tesla gets something.
And Tesla’s ability to do enormous markups only works if they have monopoly pricing power. Perhaps the superchargers, by virtue of being first, will sit at the prime locations, giving Tesla some serious pricing advantages. Or maybe Tesla chargers will be better maintained and overall easier to use, so Tesla may have additional pricing advantages.
But that would fall short of full monopoly-level pricing power, and we see that people have the ability to respond to differentials in fuel prices by driving to cheaper stations. This will be easier in cars that integrate charging prices into navigation.
One thing I would like to know is: will Tesla allow their cars to charge on non-Tesla NACS chargers?
But if more chargers support NACS then Tesla cars can charge at more places. A rising tide lifts all boats. Tesla, as an exclusively electric car company, will only benefit from an increase in EV infrastructure usability.
Tesla was coming under pressure from the government and may have wanted to get ahead of potential regulation. Opening up their network also allows access to federal funding.
Tesla will never have 100% vehicle market share. Tesla benefits from there being a large network of superchargers. Having more vehicles support Superchargers will allow them to be viable in more places. More viable places for Superchargers means more superchargers, and more superchargers means more viable places for Teslas.
Could also be an interesting Pivot in the future - with more competition in the EV market (and a race to the bottom for pricing, combined with the need to get more and more batteries), maybe it's better for Tesla to get out of the car market (eventually) and into the "fuel" market.
The valuation gap between that Tesla and this Tesla would wipe the company out. Fuel (however good) is a commodity, and a commodity company which doesn't own its raw materials is not a trillion dollar company.
Tesla's car business doesn't exactly justify their valuation either, certainly not with their recent decline in profit margin. A comparison to other manufacturers makes them look ridiculously overvalued. The explanation, to the extent there is one, probably has to do with a (real or perceived) moat of expertise surrounding EV and battery technology that may allow (???) future innovation/expansion into new markets. I'd say there's a large chance it's all hot air, but they've pulled several rabbits out of the hat already.
Tesla owns a solar cell and storage battery business. This is owning the vertical integration of EV fuel. You don’t need exclusive access to the Sun any more than an oil company needs to monopolize all oil fields to succeed.
I think this stark advantage is mostly in the US, and mostly due to gross incompetence of Electrify America.
In western Europe there are Ionity and Fastned networks that are pretty reliable and faster than v3 Superchargers. Non-Tesla charging is generally becoming competitive and usable. Tesla still can offer better UX in areas where they have a good coverage, but other manufacturers are catching up to that too.
So maybe Tesla has realized their advantage won't last forever? Their first trial of opening up Superchargers was in the Netherlands, home of the Fastned network.
> I'm still not sure what Tesla gain from opening up SuperCharger for competitors.
They can actually charge for charging (rather than giving it away), and lots of people will pay for it, it also adds to their network effect (more customers for charging = more charging stations they can build).
I wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now the US government will declare Tesla a charging monopoly and split it away from the car company.
> I wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now the US government will declare Tesla a charging monopoly.
Just asking a stupid question: isn't setting up a charging station relatively easy?
I mean is the barrier to entry not pretty low?
Compared to say conventional gas stations, there are fewer dangerous things, etc.
The only barrier I see is that each charger network might want their own app, etc. Providing a poor UX.
But that's entirely fixable, I already see contact-less card payments at gas stations today -- other charging networks could do the same.
> The only barrier I see is that each charger network might want their own app, etc.
It is noteworthy in this regard that part of the EU mandate for a charger network is "without requiring an app or subscription"... "They must also accept contactless payment and provide full pricing and live charge point availability information through ‘electronic means’ such as an app or sat nav system."
Tangent, I would love to see more contactless card payments available at gas stations. Using the strip is incredibly insecure. Where I live there are constant stories of people getting their details stolen via skimmers. We even have a list of gas stations to avoid paying at pump because they are so notorious for it.
Unbelievably, half the time when the NFC symbol is available on gas station machines it doesn't even work. About the only time I can reliably expect to pay contactless at the pump in Texas is at huge chains like QT and/or travel stations like Pilot/Flying J
That would require some anticompetitive behavior, you can't simply split things up because they are a monopoly.
Future behavior not-withstanding, Tesla will (correctly IMO) point at the opening up of NACS standard and the supercharger network as a defining anti-anti-competitive move.
You can split them up if they become so successful that uncompetitive behavior just falls out of it. Like people who want to split away the app store from the iPhone (regardless of the fact that other phones and app stores exist: Apple's vertical closed ecosystem makes the iPhone more popular).
If you define your market small enough anything can be a monopoly. I bet Apple has a 95% market share on phones that cost more than $1500. I bet Google has 75% market share on phones less than $100. So what?
Apple's control of the app store makes the $1,000 phone more appealing. If they opened up the iPhone to other random app makers, the phone would be less appealing and they wouldn't sell as much.
Laws are laws. That they aren't enforced sometimes is a pity, but that doesn't negate their existence. The Sherman Antitrust Act is pretty broad, and even simply "dividing markets" can be a cause for action.
For those that dislike these laws so much they would rather pretend they don't exist, I wish they would spend some time reading and understanding the context under which these laws were passed. These types of arrangements, when allowed to balloon out of proportion unchecked, cause massive amounts of damage to the average american citizen and their individual and collective long term interests.
Lassez Faire style regulation was effectively tried and it was an unmitigated disaster for the citizen, who is, and should be, protected in our Constitution while our corporations must obviously be constrained to subordination by it.
Aside from the sweet sweet revenue, this feels like a preemptive regulation dodge. I don't think we as a society should allow closed charging networks. Imagine if the legacy car manufacturers could run gas stations that would turn away cars from other manufacturers. What a waste of space.
Tesla benefits in the short term because they already incorporate the charging technology which puts them ahead in the industry. In the long term, the entire industry benefits. This too is good for Tesla as it's a market leader and benefits if the industry grows. They have a strong incentive to continue to compete to gain market share as the pie gets bigger. This is also good for customers.
An EV without a charging network is worthless, so I'm sure that a good charging narrative is important to a potential customer. But, it doesn't stop there. Teslas make very impressive cars and have innovated not just the drive train but how the car is made. For example, the cars do incredibly well in safety tests.
The US government was going to phase out the subsidies from Tesla and their charging network unless they switched to the new open standard. Cheaper and better for them to just get their installed connectors made into the standard.
Revenue. Automakers did not build their own networks, so they must now contribute to have access to something required to encourage EV sales.
Gas stations (very roughly speaking! lots of Superchargers are colocated at grocery stores, malls, and other places humans can comfortably dwell for 15-30 min) don't want to front the hundreds of thousands of dollars per station for the equipment, so Tesla did. Paid for out of Model S and X margins early on, and more recently through profits from total sales. Remember, fuel sales are razor thin margins, pennies per gallon. The profit is on the snacks in the gas station store. Similar with fast DC charging, it is not a profit center due to demand charges (utility charges for pulling megawatts of power on demand) and charging infra capex [1] [2] [3]. But you must have this network to soothe range anxiety, as non Supercharger networks in the US are frankly garbage (as the Dept of Energy Secretary recently discovered on a PR EV roadtrip [4]).
> “To dive deeper into this sum-of-the-parts valuation, we modeled & projected out Tesla’s supercharger network, taking into account access & revenues from other OEMs using stations across the United States. Ultimately, we estimate that Tesla’s supercharger business will be roughly 3%-6% of total revenues, translating to a $10 billion – $20 billion business by 2030.” [5]
Also, not being abandoned. If the rest of the industry coalesced around CCS, Teslas would be at a disadvantage. Knowing the value of the Supercharger network, this guaranteed Teslas already on the road wouldn’t need an adaptor as often.
The DC+, DC-, and GND pins look to correspond. But NACS has 2 other pins. CCS1 has 4 other pins, and CCS2 has 6 other pins.
I assume there is some protocol on the other pins. A supercharger can read the car's VIN, for example. And some power/charge-state negotiation? Is all of this excluded from the NACS spec? Do CSS1 and NACS have compatible negotiation protocols?
The extra 2 pins on NACS are the ones that carry the CCS communications protocol. (CP and PP pins)
The CCS1 has the CCS communication pins, a big DC- and DC+ pin, and also three extra pins for AC slow charging (Line 1, Neutral or Line 2, and Protective Earth/communications ground). CCS2 has the DC pins, the communication pins, AC lines 1, 2, and 3, AC neutral, and protective earth/communications ground.
NACS has DC+, DC-, CP, PP, and a ground. Instead of sticking the bulky AC->DC converter in the car, NACS vehicles stick it in the charging station. That means an AC charger can't be as simple (it needs to convert to DC) but also that the car doesn't have to carry around something it only uses while charging.
NACS the DC+ and DC- pins are multi-purpose and can also support AC+/AC- (or, line1/line2. However you want to call it). There is absolutely no need to include a AC->DC converter in standard Level 2 chargers, and NACS does not do this.
NACS is slightly more complicated from a car perspective, as it requires the car to switch between DC and AC paths. There is literally no change from a charger perspective besides the handle, as chargers are not ever designed to be multi-purpose DC vs. AC.
I wonder how it's going to balance out with lost sales though. The supercharger network is no longer a Tesla-exclusive amenity, so one less reason to buy a Tesla.
Tesla has nothing to worry about. Their sales will soften due to the macro and cost of money, their margins might compress, but they are still ahead of the legacy auto folks by leaps and bounds. They can lean into energy storage and other related power control businesses, that is their strength: they are an energy and power controls company. Cars are only one of the products. Legacy auto is selling autos, and only autos. Charger access deals unlocks revenue for Tesla out of legacy auto's pockets today while legacy auto has to figure out how to sell their own EVs in the future, and what choice do they have but to pay up if they want to sell EVs?
> After a decade of being trounced by Tesla Inc., this was supposed to be the year that traditional automakers finally put up a fight for electric cars. General Motors was committing its biggest brands to a new line of electric models; Ford and Volkswagen were ramping up production of EVs designed for the masses. It was, many predicted, time for the automotive world order to re-assert itself.
> Things haven’t turned out that way. Ford’s vaunted F-150 Lightning has been outsold by the R1T from Rivian, a startup that sold its first vehicle just two years ago. GM’s lineup of new EVs has suffered crippling setbacks in battery manufacturing. In July, Volkswagen Chief Executive Officer Thomas Schaefer succinctly summarized his own company’s EV competitiveness: “The roof is on fire.”
> With just three months remaining, 2023 has been less a redemption story for legacy automakers than further evidence of their quagmire. In the US, Tesla has been expanding production about as fast as all of its competitors combined. The Austin, Texas-based EV maker accounts for 61% of fully electric cars ever sold in the US, making it more dominant in EVs than Apple is in smartphones.
Not only that, the market for electric cars is going to overtake the market for gasoline cars. They don't need to keep 61% of the market forever -- they probably won't -- but if they held 15% of the market once >90% of new cars are electric they'd be selling more cars than they do now.
Some form of charging standard was coming. Tesla had two options: (1) push for NACS to be that standard, or (2) allow another standard to come into play.
(2) would have been a terrible outcome for Tesla - all the money invested in existing stations, all existing cars, would have the "wrong" standard.
I dont buy Tesla because of too few variants in look
I dont buy other EVs because of poor charging speed and poor charging network
I will buy a luxury EV in 2025 because of this and look forward to using the existing supercharging network or expanded supercharging station via standard
Don't underestimate the value of constant foot traffic. You are nearly forcing drivers to visit locations and stay there for at least 15 minutes. The final step is just getting them to take out their wallet.
I expected it to go in reverse. "Charge your car at the supermarket. If you spend $X with your loyalty-club card, we'll deduct $Y from the charging bill."
The customer is captive for 15 minutes somewhere, but you can certainly give him reasons to choose to be captive for 15 minutes at your store.
EV infrastructure is probably easier to deploy than gas, so I'd expect to see a lot of new and smaller-scale charging sites. Instead of four gas stations at the corner with 8-12 pumps each, every store in every strip mall on that corner will have 1 or 2 charging stands each.
Part of me suspects this is why we're seeing an industry-wide attempt to make convenience marts less terrible (i. e. food you'd willingly buy). If you can no longer guarantee traffic from people fueling their vehicles, you have to raise the bar.
Vaguely sure that Musk commented on this. Tesla gains more from growing the EV market as a whole, and faster, than trying to dominate with proprietary technology.
Energy stations (gas) pay pretty well. Right now Tesla owns most of the electric world and even if their cars fail could become a dominant energy provider.
Do they? I don't know what the situation is in North America, but here the business model of fuel stations is to sell fuel at near-zero margin and make the profit from impromptu sales to fuel customers in the attached convenience store.
Margins are tight in the US, a typical gas station has margins comparable to a grocery store. Something in the neighborhood of 2% IIRC. Adding a convenience store definitely helps increase that.
Generally you aim for 1/3 gas, 1/3 tobacco, 1/3 snacks. While gas is by far the lowest margin, it is very high volume, with many people not buying anything else.
Probably, but since most charging will be at home, there will be a lot less total $ in play. Great gig if you can be on a route people travel long distances, but otherwise not much profit.
This applies to their PHEVs too, I would assume? Their Prime lineups have been pretty popular, albeit in smaller quantities than the market would probably like
> Toyota is lagging badly in EVs, which made up only 2% of its sales last year
Given how badly development of the charging infrastructure is lagging, and given Toyota is already making cars as fast as it can sell them, their slow rollout of EVs is probably a good thing for everyone.
Mandating more electric cars on the road than the infrastructure would allow would be... dumb? Not even an option? Economically catastrophic?
Automakers in the UK are flipping out because they recently pushed back their overly ambitious date for eliminating ICE cars, which the automakers were supposedly (I'm skeptical) already tooling up for. You can see how being early comes with its own risks and costs for a traditional automaker making the transition.
None of that justifies Toyota's effort spent farting around with hydrogen, of course.
What I am wondering is when electric car will become as cheap as ICE. I'm installing solar panels and even if I charge an electric car 100% at home, a similar ICE car is nearly 20% cheaper (factoring all costs). If you charge outside it's more expensive than gas. For example, a Renault Zoe, 50kWh about 40$ to charge here, 350km range (what manufacturer says), so about 11$ per 100km, my space star uses 4.5l per 100km or 8.5$ (actually measured consumption). But the space star was 14k new, Zoe is 33k. (Insurance and tax the same).
This is a genuine question, I have been wanting to go electric for long, but it is still a luxury. And I haven't even taken into account older cars you can buy for a few k $.
What is the strategy? Will government make ice more expensive? Ban them? EU is already backpedaling on goals for all electric.
I drove a Corolla for years (about a decade ago) and recently got to drive a Model 3 for a week. I disagree with your assessment of nicer and more comfortable. Model 3 wins there for me.
But in my long experience with a Corolla and short experience with a Model 3, I will agree with the Corolla being more reliable.
I took taxi rides in Corolla Altis. It is quite comfortable compared to Model 3 where I cannot even fit behind driver. I never drove any of these, speaking as a backseat passenger. What I also noticed Tesla 3 jumps on any road imperfection.
Sitting in the back seat of a Model 3 as a 6 foot person is a terrible experience. It is like this because of the rear of the car sloping downwards for aerodynamics. I avoid them whenever possible.
What do you even mean? This comment sounds like it's intentionally misrepresenting things.
You must know that if it costs you 80 cents per kWh that you have unusually expensive power. Not even in central Europe is the power this expensive.
Further, just from your own calculations in this comment you can see that it is cheaper to run an EV than an ICE if your power price is less than 80 cents per kWh, which is most of the developed world. Especially if you have dynamic pricing // off peak rates and charge at night.
I'm sorry I wasn't clearer in my initial comment, I was on my phone and it wasn't really clear.
My Mitsubishi space star did cost 14k new. A Zoe, which I picked because it is similar, cost 35k new. So it is 21k more.
There is the best scenario, where I charge only from home, power is 0.3$.
In this scenario, it cost about 4.2$ for 100km.
If I charge outside, power is around 0.8$ here, so it cost 11$ for 100km.
My ice car cost 8.5$ per 100km.
Best case scenario, EV cost 4.3$ less per 100km, to break even with the 21k more in the price, I need to do 488 372 km, which is about 40 years of driving as I do about 12 000km per year.
If I charge outside, this become even less and less interesting.
There is nearly zero used EV. I can buy a 2010 corola for 10k and do 100 000km on it, a tesla model Y is 45k.
Yes but I also factored 100% efficiency for charging. And it's not that much more expensive, everything engine related is free because of the service package I had with the car. With ev you still have to change breaks, and tires (which is the biggest maintenace cost) wear faster on ev because of the weight.
This is different for older used car, I give you that, but it does not cover the big price difference.
I meant tires were the biggest cost in my example, I looked at my invoice.
But anyway I don't want to argue either way, I have no love for ice any more than ev. But I wanted to buy an ev for a year and every time I do the math, I cannot afford it.
As another commenter mentioned, they're cheaper today. Factoring in gas savings, my Tesla Model Y pays for itself at 240,000 miles. Tesla's seem to have no problem lasting that long since they have 1/10th the moving parts of ICE cars to fail, and the car requires no regular maintenance. The break even point is much lower than 240k miles, especially when you consider that the Model Y seats 7, has a semi luxurious interior, and accelerates from 0-60 mph in 4.5 seconds.
On average, Tesla batteries are at 80% capacity at 200,000 miles. So no, I haven't factored in battery replacement cost. Electrical components typically fail early if they fail at all, so any replacements would be covered under the generous battery warranty.
And there are owners that haven’t even gotten to 70% at 300,000 miles. And where gas is more expensive, and electricity is less expensive, like Washington state, the repayment period is more like 100,000 miles.
From my research the battery holds up very well over a decade plus. If someone replaces a battery it’s because of a sudden failure just like if an ICE needed a new engine or transmission. They aren’t dwindling down to 0 miles.
Even if it does wear down and doesn't meet the requirements for vehicular use, there should be some possibility of re-use or re-manufacture for fixed use, as a home or grid-battery. That should give you a core credit on the battery replacement, reducing the cost significantly. At least one company is trying this already:
Plus battery technology is getting better and better. If the battery fails in my MX after 10 years I'm pretty sure that the replacement battery will be either cheaper or more performant, or possibly even both!
Cars in general are going to continue becoming more expensive (it's still functionally illegal for any American automaker to turn a profit on anything smaller than an SUV- gas or electric- the only automakers that still make normal cars are those that come from countries where trucks are largely impractical). Safety standards will increase to the point where cars simply cannot pass them, because electric SUVs weigh at least a half ton more than their gasoline counterparts hence even more accommodation will need to be made for them.
Additionally, electricity will become more expensive to match what gasoline used to cost. Remember, natural gas generation forms the overwhelming majority of new installations now (it's cleaner and cheaper than coal), and there's nothing stopping obscene taxes from being applied after the fact to that, either- especially since those generators are just replacing coal plants rather than increasing base load generation capacity. The whole "but my car can store power" thing is going to crater its battery longevity should that become necessary; developed countries should not intentionally make their grids as unreliable as South Africa's, but they're going to try anyway.
>EU is already backpedaling on goals for all electric.
Germany fucked around and found out that it's hard to run an industrial base without a steady supply of Russian natural gas or French nuclear energy. A government's concern about climate obviously takes a back-seat to concerns about not getting deposed by a population that values being able to afford to eat and keep the lights on today and tomorrow over slightly-cooler temperatures in 50 years, and "let's not destroy our money printing industrial base" is a perfectly valid conclusion for them to make when both of those inputs functionally disappear.
Theoretically, it will happen just once, because the local price of ICE will decrease as the local supply of EVs increases. In other words, the cost of ICE vehicles should slowly plummet to zero as the EV market replaces it. When will they eventually cross each other? Nobody really knows.
Is v2l really that big a deal to people? The house side of the system is VERY expensive. Light loads ARE a big deal, but can be handled out of a standard outlet (like Ford's ProPowerOnboard thing)
They can implement V2L in the exact same way they were going to do it with the CCS connector. CCS did not specify a single way to do V2L, and current implementations by Hyundai, Ford, etc. are not standardized or brand-interoperable.
While I would prefer an interoperable V2L standard, NACS is not a change for the worse in that regard. It does not prevent manufacturers from implementing whatever V2L system they wish on top of the NACS connector.
EDIT: I was wrong. Please see below for correction.
ORIGINAL COMMENT: That's not true. You can buy a generic Lectron V2L unit that will work for both Hyundai and Ford and other brands. It's based on J1772 and it's a simple adapter.
Because they offer free charging for financially literate customers. The customers are going to abuse it. In their typical corporate fashion, they don't use languages to communicate on that topic.
I wonder what kind of de-optimizations non Tesla makers are signing up for when their hardware gets used on Tesla owned charging infrastructure? (And vice versa)
As a thought experiment imagine a Ford gas station where the pumping infrastructure is the same but when a Ford car was present some advantage exists, like maybe optimized octane without extra cost or maybe the pump ran a little faster.
Or maybe another analogy would be Walmart running on AWS. Sure there are contracts, guarantees, etc, but there could be other data leaks that give a competitor advantage.
I doubt there will be any noticeable difference. NACS's communication protocol is the same as CCS, and adapters exist in both directions.
NACS's plug is smaller because the primary pins support both AC and DC. CCS uses separate pins for AC and DC. Also NACS locks the cable on the car side while CCS locks on both sides. That means with CCS, a malfunctioning cable can strand your car.
The main downside of NACS is that it doesn't support three-phase, but neither does CCS1, which is the version of the CCS standard used in North America and Japan (where household three-phase is rare). Europe uses CCS2, which is an even larger connector than CCS1 (due to the extra pin needed for three-phase).
A communication protocol is different from what is being communicated and what extensions might be implemented or discovered for the purpose of fingerprinting vehicles or models of vehicles.
For example, a robust PKI might make car theft just a bit harder. Or maybe if you farm kiwis you won't be able to charge your car anymore.
ISO 15118 outlines an ecosystem of digital certificates that need to be in place for Plug & Charge to work. This is where public key infrastructures (PKIs) come into play. A PKI is a tree-like, hierarchical structure of trusted third parties called certificate authorities (CAs). These CAs manage the creation, storage, distribution, and revocation of digital certificates.
> Also NACS locks the cable on the car side while CCS locks on both sides. That means with CCS, a malfunctioning cable can strand your car.
I'm just surprised they didn't consider when designing the standard that they're putting a critical moving part on the component most subject to handling and damage.
Public charging connectors get just beat up from constant handling from lots of different people, many of whom couldn't care less about the next person to use it.
Yes, CCS is the worst of the charging standards and Americans are fortunate that the government didn’t mandate it. Thanks to EU legislation, Europeans are now stuck with a comically huge connector that can leave them stranded if they get an unlucky cable. It’s the cookie banner of charging standards.
> The main downside of NACS is that it doesn't support three-phase
The other current downside is it doesn't support up to 1,000V like CCS does, which matters for the currently deployed 800v EVs out there. There's a revision to NACS to support this but it's not currently in the wild yet afaik. That's the next generation of superchargers
It's not a secret plan, it's just bad charger implementation. If Tesla doesn't improve the V4 charger then people will go to other charging networks with better charger hardware (like Aplitronic or Kempower chargers).
Many cars charge more slowly than Teslas, so Tesla will charge them based on time spent, not just power.
This aligns the incentives to allow people who foolishly choose to buy inefficient car brands help fund the further buildout of the network.
Because if this didn’t happen, the cars that charge fast (Tesla, Lucid, Rivian for example) would be waiting for the slow cars like VW IDs (if VW ever gets on board). That would not be ideal.
If chargers were set up like gas stations maybe but lots of them are not. There are no inside sales if the charger is next to a hotel, I’m not checking in.
The inside sales are also a lot more limited when I have to charge every 2 hours or so, god knows I have poor self control but not so much I’m buying overpriced snacks every time.
Where I live gas stations are starting to install chargers.
What the future looks like is a guess and thus nobody knows, but the following is my guess:
I expect hotels will limit their chargers to guests only (and likely move to slower/cheaper level2 chargers in all parking spaces). They want their guests arriving by cars to have a full charge in the morning, but they also want the discount from the power company that comes from not running high draw level3 chargers. They can probably get other discounts from the power company by limiting charging hours somehow.
I expect malls, grocery stores and the like will eventually give up on chargers. Most people coming to the mall are locals who are charging at home so there won't be much demand. This will depend on neighborhood, in middle class and above areas nearly everyone will have their charger at home and so not charge, while in poor areas landlords will be slow to install chargers so the poor will be charging in such areas for the next 50 years or so before it isn't worth it to have charging.
Along highways you see truck stop type chargers every 10 miles or so, both for people driving long distances (trucks and vacation travelers), about the same spacing as gas stations today. Land is cheap so they will have plenty of charging space, and they will try to get your inside while you charge with activities. Sit down restaurants (not fast food) that are not far from those highways will also have chargers to attract travelers to enjoy a nice meal while they charge, but they will be limited to customers only (or maybe high prices for the charge with a discount for food you eat inside making it a good deal only if you eat there).
Rural towns of 10k to 200k people will look like a highway regardless of location, since they need to provide options for farmers coming there for shopping who need a charge to get back home.
Large cities than more than one million people will have few chargers on the edges (where truck stops currently are), but once you get inside the city there will be no public chargers even on highways. Land is too expensive to waste on chargers for the few people who will use it. (there will be semi-public chargers where trucking companies open their private truck stop/maintenance facility to independent truckers)
Stellantis, which is the 4th manufacturer globally, still holding firm to evaluate a NACS switch. The evaluation phase has been done for them by every other manufacturer at this point. They need to jump or die.
It's probably difficult to retrofit. CCS provides different wire harnesses in the vehicle for AC and DC power. NACS requires shared conductors for AC and DC power from the charge port to some point that can handle switching between them.
External adapters are simple and will be available, since you can have different adapters for AC and DC charging to avoid needing active switching.
They added features over time. Tesla took a black-box approach. The CCS connectors were designed around a legacy AC charging connector at the top, then added the two DC ports below. Tesla said "let's use the same for both" and then had to design an internal circuit to separate them.
Technology Connections did an overview of this recently where I'm getting most of my info. It's a 45m video, but the history is only a few minutes, and I've included a timestamp in the link below:
I'm curious what the development process was behind standards like J1772, which is the basis for CCS type 1. It's not a great connector to begin with.
I've had both Teslas and J1772 EVs for a number of years. Plugging in the J1772 cars is always a little game to get the connector lined up and at the right angle to connect to the car. Sometimes it takes 5 or 10 extra seconds to get it just right. But the Tesla connector just slides right in and orients itself perfectly with no effort. Push the button on the handle, door opens, insert connector -- 2 seconds every time, reliably.
I have a hypothesis that the auto industry didn't believe EVs would catch on until relatively recently, so they half-assed things like the charging infrastructure thinking they were just checking a box to make the government and a few Tesla fanboy weirdos happy.
The internal combustion engine isn't just the thing that powers cars. In that industry it's practically a religious object. If it doesn't go vroom vroom it's not a car and your penis will fall off... or at least I think there's a whole generation of people in that field who feel that way.
The fact that EVs have tipped and the transition is not going away is just now starting to sink in.
Given Toyota Busy Forks and Subaru Solterra are effectively the same vehicle, I'm guessing Subaru will also tag along for the ride to the promised utopia of NACS.
> This document covers the general physical, electrical, functional, and performance requirements for conductive power transfer to an electric vehicle using a handheld conductive coupler capable of transferring either DC or single-phase power using two current-carrying contacts.
This is such a stereotypical tale: Europe mandated a universal plug for electric vehicles 10 years ago - without having any noteworthy EV manufacturers - in fact most of the big European car companies completely missed the shift to EVs.
At the same time in the US the largest EV manufacturer is slowly taking shape without the federal government taking any action at all to standardize chargers. Now it's 2023 - the Tesla connector is superior to the European standard, European EV companies still lag behind and the Tesla standard is being adapted by the industry without any government intervention.
The connectors between the North American version of CCS (CCS Type 1) and the European version (CCS Type 2) are different. The NA connector had some clear disadvantages, mainly in its locking mechanism.
The NACS standard uses CCS communication protocols. So it's as related to European CCS as CCS Type 1 was.
And in Europe Tesla uses CCS Type 2 without any discernible issues. In fact the Tesla/NACS connector would be a significant downgrade for the European market because Europe frequently uses 3-phase AC for charging and Tesla's connector does not have the pins to support that.
Tesla opening their connector last year in the US, branding it as the North America charging standard, and working with other manufacturers to get their support was driven by government intervention, namely the Infrastructure Bill which requires use of a charging connector used by multiple brands to be eligible for federal funding to build chargers.
I think Tesla's connector is great but you're missing a lot of context in your story.
They left off the multiple mis-steps with US charging stations trying to do J-whatever "level 2" connectors, and chademo (which was dead on delivery), and that CCS 1 in the US has for several years been able to deliver greater power than Tesla's.
Even calling it "great" is an exaggeration. It can't support anywhere near the power delivery CCS 1 or 2 can, when 800v architecture cars are now commonplace.
It's sheer fantasy calling it better than CCS2. What should have happened is someone should have mandated CCS2 for the US.
It's not that Tesla's connector is better (CCS1 has the same communication/payment stuff Tesla's does), it's that the US used a installation grants and legal settlement to build out a bunch of charging infrastructure with no requirements for availability/reliability. So, shockingly, lots of charging stations went in and nobody gives a shit about maintaining them.
The only problem CCS1 has is the shitty mechanical design that can't handle heavy cables. It's a problem that could be worked around simply by installing a hanging arm that supports the cable or handle. But again, there's no incentive to fix it.
NACS supports up to 1000V charging, which can easily match CCS on total charging power for 800V+ cars. There has not yet been a large rollout of 800V+ NACS chargers but Tesla is about to begin installing them, and any other charge provider (ie Electrify America) that has said they are adopting NACS can also provide 800V+ charging at equivalent speeds to their existing CCS chargers.
NACS is basically CCS Type 3 at this point. It's a compact connector that is backwards-compatible with (most of) Tesla's existing Supercharger network while being compatible with CCS on a voltage, power, and communications protocol level.
Really the winning feature is less the connector, and more the install base of reliable chargers from Tesla (and the trajectory of their future buildout).
EEL ShorePower basically did the same thing for boats. Before they were screwed in connectors but now they have clamps which can fall out under any kind of storm (even at the dock), so you need some arm to hold it perpendicular to the hall (I tie rope sling).
You can't believe all those rumors. There's also a rumor that says the Cybertruck will be capable of megawatt charging[0] using the same system as Semi. So probably Megawatt Charging System[1]. Would you believe this kind of rumor?
My understanding is that Tesla opened it up, because the US government would fund EV charging stations, as long as they support more than one auto maker?
So it's not exactly a government free success story.
But nobody else would have made a loan to them, and without that loan, they would have not survived.
The government program exists exactly for that sort of situation, where traditional banks are unwilling to take the risk on an unproven business model.
I have heard second hand that early EV credits helped them get off the ground, but I haven't checked that personally...
> But nobody else would have made a loan to them, and without that loan, they would have not survived.
Feature, not bug.
That was literally the entire point of the (Bush era) Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing policy: to inexpensively achieve pollution reduction by nudging almost-there clean vehicle technologies "over the line" from non-viable to viable. Why are we suddenly complaining when it did exactly what we intended in the first place?
Inexpensive? Big check (see Clinton's try for a typical case). Accelerated pollution reduction with huge health benefits? Also check.
Where's the problem? I'm not seeing a problem. :-\
When you say "feature, not bug" I'm not sure if you're saying the feature is that traditional banks are bad at evaluating new tech, or if the feature is that Tesla would have not survived without a government loan. Either meaning is hard to connect to the rest of your comment.
I don't know what "Clinton's try" is, or really what fuel efficiency has to do with any of this, to be honest!
>the feature is that traditional banks are bad at evaluating new tech
Apples and oranges.
Traditional banks have a profit motivation. That's their only job.
Governments have a public health and well-being motivation. They try to achieve that at minimum cost.
It's wrongheaded to view government merely a "broken bank" in this scenario. It's actually that government is judged by totally different metrics, ones which they achieved very successfully.
>I don't know what "Clinton's try" is, or really what fuel efficiency has to do with any of this, to be honest!
Clinton's try for cleaner vehicles, of course. That was the previous attempt before Bush tried his ATVM loan program.
It's relevant because it shows the typical-case cost for government achieving (or more accurately, not achieving) their public health goals in this sector. It shows how the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Loan program was actually a fantastically cheap and successful policy program when compared to its peers.
I'm still not understanding the thrust of your comments. But if I had to guess, you think that 1) the loan programs were a good idea, and 2) that I think the loan programs were a bad idea.
I agree with 1, but disagree with 2. The loan programs for scaling new massive tech are wonderful and hugely accelerate tech development, IMHO. My only possible complaint is that there are not more failed loans, as I have a bigger risk tolerance.
Chinese banks will happily loan Tesla money. Private credit would probably do the deal today. That loan is probably the highest ROI thing Uncle Sam’s done for the climate.
Maybe it would benefit them now but they wouldn't exist without those credits. I think the overall system is good and working as intended but let's not pretend subsidies are not subsidies.
A lot of automakers in the USA get subsidies, GM even got bailed out in 2008.
Tesla on the other hand creates a lot of jobs, invests in US factories, invests into R&D, pays a lot of taxes, and most importantly - delivers on the vision of transition to clean energy.
Without Tesla, America would still be driving even more gas guzzling SUVs and pickups.
So the relationship is mutually beneficial for the company, country, economy, and ecology
No one is saying that the US didn't benefit from Tesla's existence. But saying that Tesla was not subsidized or profited from government intervention is wholly untrue.
In the grand scheme of things American taxpayer doesnt care all that much, because there are so many leeches who profit off of government spending like military, healthcare, automotive, etc.
in teslas case at least there is clear ecological and experience benefit to consumers to show for all the “subsidies”
You call it subsidy, I call it accelerating EV transition
I don't think anyone is arguing that the government support of Tesla and EVs is necessarily bad here, just taking issue with OP's claim of "without any government intervention."
Tesla doesn't need govt funding, they built a coast-to-coast supercharger network years before and have been continuing to build.
The charging station funding is to help GM and Ford, they can't figure out how the charging thing works, and they don't want to compete fairly, so my tax dollars and yours, they go to help these legacy carmakers.
Well, mostly from other automakers paying Tesla for credits, as mandated by various governments' legislation. But the transactions didn't directly involve government/tax dollars.
Vegas casinos could also buy credits instead of paying taxes, so there's at least that. And of course, some of those credits were undeserved (remember the battery replacement swindle they pulled?)
But even if it was all pure "get other companies work around regulations", those regulations were created to reduce future costs to people, and the public coffers. By subverting them, in spirit, if not in letter, Telsa made profit not just by selling cars, but also by selling our future, something rarely accounted for.
The connectors are much bulkier and the cables are stiffer (not sure if the second thing is a design flaw or an implementation flaw).
Since all the manufactures want to use superchargers they will be forced to handle payments properly (certificates on the car not a flaky payment terminal on the charger). Should help for third party chargers also.
Slimmer cables on superchargers are Tesla being clever and pushing more amps over the cable than the cable is rated for, and monitors when the cable overheats. Everyone else seems to do it by the book and has cables thick enough for their max amperage.
BTW, CSS2 supports 3-phase AC charging, which is common in Europe, but not in the US. In this regard NACS would be a downgrade for Europeans.
Maybe, but over billions of charging hours I have not heard of any stories about chargers catching on fire yet. I have to assume that if one of them did catch on fire it would be all over the news, the media is starving for anti-EV stories.
Assuming it's true, then probably the sensors are fail-safe.
But I'm not totally convinced Tesla is going over the cable rating. A lot goes into the rating of a particular cable -- everything from conductor material and size to the insulation around the conductors, proximity of conductors, etc. Not to mention the liquid cooling. It's plausible that supercharger cables are rated for more than 600A.
Tesla will support both protocols at their chargers.
But if you have an older (pre-2020) Tesla you may not be able to charge at a non-Tesla NACS charger, since those older Teslas do not natively support the CCS communication protocol.
Tesla has promised to offer retrofits for older cars. I went the DIY route for mine (replacing an ECU in the trunk area) for a cost of around $200 in eBay parts.
No, Tesla's chargers will still support their proprietary charging protocol for now.
Longer term Tesla may drop support for it. Might as well use the one protocol everywhere, even when the plugs are different in passenger vehicles and in heavy vehicles:
You seem to not understand the vast amount of government funding that Tesla has benefited from. It is indeed "government intervention" -- just a different kind.
No, but they do have requirements to receive federal funding to build chargers under the recent NEVI program, and that includes using connectors that are non-proprietary.
That's the american way - a highly integrated form of state capitalism that's been given a label "free market" for political expediency. It's all just a 3-card monte game of categories and euphemisms.
I don't like your post. If I lobby you with a few hundred dollars, would you change it to say how the American Way of free market capitalism is wonderful and fair and not at all a plutocracy?
Yes, $7500 tax rebate for the 3 and half people that are eligible. The latest version of this rebate has income limits and people within that income are most likely not the people who buy new cars at full price, ICE or EV.
Tesla built coast-to-coast supercharger network years before any talk of charging station funding.
Charging station funding is a subsidy to legacy carmakers, because they don't to spend a penny building charging infrastructure. Let the govt (Us: taxpayers) pay for it.
Mary, you electrified the entire auto industry, you led, and it matters (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UduPjk9gonw). At the time of this announcement, GM has zero EVs being sold.
And make his fans believe he’s a champion of free market and a self made man that is fighting big government. We can see it clearly in action in this thread, it’s working on many.
The loan was subsidized; commercial entities wouldn't give such a loan, hence even when repaid was a cost to the public. The idea, of course, is that this cost is paying by public good, but Tesla mis-stated the truth, and didn't grant back the public good it was supposed to.
> Now it's 2023 - the Tesla connector is superior to the European standard, European EV companies still lag behind and the Tesla standard is being adapted by the industry without any government intervention.
This is a misunderstanding of the situation. The reality is Europe is a long way ahead of North America on EV infrastructure.
The European charging networks are compatible with all EVs because of standardization. More investment has gone into charger manufacturing and charging network deployment because of standardization.
In contrast, North America continues to thrash about trying to arrive at a charging standard. It's still going to be years of fiddling around to get anywhere near where Europe already is.
The result North America has ended up with is CCS chargers with Tesla's plug on the end. North America could have and should have got to standardization sooner.
The United States is far larger yet completely covered by the Tesla network. Our government handed out so much money to Electrify America and friends, yet their equipment performs poorly and is usually broken. Our government is no longer capable of running projects.
Their coverage along interstates is good but outside that it's sparse at best. The government doesn't get to try running projects any more it's all incentives and public private partnerships. Also Tesla is far from a no subsidy company, it's half built on EV tax credits.
You can go to 99% of the country just using superchargers. It's "sparse" in some places because their cars are long range and hardly anybody lives there, but it's still covered.
There's a big difference between an EV tax credit and getting paid to install charge stations (West Coast Electric Highway) which are often broken, expensive, and slow.
> Tesla charges almost as fast, so they don't need as many slow EU chargers.
No. The fastest chargers are CCS chargers. 400 kW CCS chargers are being deployed these days. Tesla doesn't do 400 kW yet on the Tesla plug (or even on CCS type 2).
I was mostly taking the piss with the comment about "slow EU chargers", but one public L3 charge station can replace 10+ L2 stations, and all 20k+ Tesla superchargers are L3. I can't find a reference for the share of L2 vs L3 in Europe.
But I'll still argue once you have "enough" chargers, it doesn't matter if you have more, and I think there are enough Tesla superchargers as evidenced by them being the number one EV in America.
No network of chargers is going to make my slow-charging, 70-mile-range 2013 Leaf convenient, compared to a 270-mile Tesla which can charge 5-10x as quick.
Beyond the issues other commenters have pointed out with your analysis, I would add to that to not conflate the charger network quality with the connector itself.
There’s nothing significantly technically superior about Tesla’s connector. Most of what’s superior about owning a Tesla is that the chargers are better maintained and placed in more/better locations. Heck, Electrify America wouldn’t even exist if the VW dieselgate scandal didn’t happen. The problem with CCS isn’t the connector, it’s that most companies who run US charging stations are doing it halfheartedly.
I think it’s also in bad taste to have a main point that European-style regulations are inferior to the American laissez-faire system without very much commitment to the facts surrounding why those regulations are supposedly “bad.” I can’t think of many metrics where the US leads Europe in terms of transportation. It seems to me that EU regulations help do things like keep pedestrian deaths and average MPG/emissions lower than the US.
Heck, the EU has double the EV adoption rate of the US. I have to think that a universal connector helped EU customers shop with confidence.
What we have right now in the United States are two major incompatible systems which is exactly what the EU avoided in the first place. Even the NACS solution isn’t a full solution because non-Tesla vehicles can’t use older generation superchargers.
My experience using a non Tesla EV in rural places in Europe is far far better than in the US.
Charging station availability is a solved issues, now they are at the payment consolidation and subscription. ( that part is still the Wild West, but it exists )
I live in LA, ( not L.A ) I’ve seen charging station cropping up only this years in non-metro area.
Look at a deployment map in rural Spain or France.
Where in Europe did you see so many charging stations? I just drove from Florence to Montalcino and the surrounding areas in Tuscany, and didn’t see a single EV charger. Even gas stations were somewhat rare but at least there.
No the EU was not wrong to mandate a standard. It was a broad comparison between the European approach (bureaucratic, lots of talk and regulation) versus the American one (just getting things done). For the record, I'm European myself.
The US didn’t just get things done, though. We also did a huge government initiative to standardize a connector, including allocating billions to charging networks that adopted it. This connector wasn’t Tesla’s because Tesla’s connector wasn’t open/libre. Tesla opened their (physical) connector after it became obvious that it was either that, or be forced to abandon theirs entirely.
Also: as I understand it: NACS is only the physical Tesla connector; the digital elements (protocols etc.) are still CCS. That’s important.
No they were not. Government allocated billions for building charging networks with connectors that are used by more than one car manufacturer which drove Tesla to open their connector.
I don’t think this says anything about “government v. private industry” as much as “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” Further, Tesla having ignored the European standard completely sort of smacks of manifest destiny. Of course government standards don’t work when people ignore them — doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be standards.
Besides is any of this _really_ a problem? Can’t customers buy relatively cheap adapters for NACS chargers if their car isn’t compatible?
The thing is, Tesla didn't even ignore it: in Type 2 / CCS2 markets, Tesla vehicles from the Model S onwards came with at least native Type 2 AC charging (and from the Model 3 onwards, with CCS2 - there wasn't the physical space in the original S and X).
As of the last few years, CCS2 had basically already won in the those markets in the same way that NACS has basically won in North America today.
(There is an adjacent issue - in many of these markets three-phase supply in domestic and small business settings is more common than in North America, and the Type 2 AC plug can supply 3 phase).
Tell me you aren't familiar with US regulation without telling me etc (Tesla's trying to make their plug the US standard is so they could get US subsidies for their charging infrastructure. If there's something Musk's company excel at, is getting money from the government)
> This is such a stereotypical tale: Europe mandated a universal plug for electric vehicles 10 years ago
I would disagree and revert it entirely.
Like usual we have a standard CCS2 that is used successfully over multiple country representing over 500 millions people.
And like usual, USA goes its own way because a private actor pushes its way through lobbying and force it on everybody.
The Tesla connector has nothing Superior. It is thinner, that is its only advantage.
- CCS2 supports three phase power AC 22kw which is very useful in Europe. NACS does not.
- CCS2 cable are bulky because they respect international norms in term of cable safety. NACS does not, cable are undersized on purpose for cost reasons.
- CCS2 is already supporting payment in car. Tesla could simply have adopted that.
- We were already having 3 standard. Chademo for Japan, GBT for China and CCS for the rest of the world.
Congratulations: now we have 4.
Should I quote the appropriate XKCD or should I wait that Liberia and Myanmar uses NACS before doing it ?
> And like usual, USA goes its own way because a private actor pushes its way through lobbying and force it on everybody.
The US went its own way from the beginning with CCS Type 1, because the CCS participants decided that going with the existing local Level 2 AC connector as the basis for CCS was the better option in each market, despite J-1772's worse latching mechanism and pin geometry.
Nothing about the NACS transition was done via political lobbying. If anything the political pressure on Tesla to adopt CCS is what made them cave in and open their connector rather than keeping it proprietary, which led to the other automakers moving away from the politically-favored connector to Tesla's to gain access to their better charging network.
NACS is as similar to CCS2 as CCS1 was. Same protocols and signaling, just a different physical connector. Tesla adopted the CCS standard with their connector instead of continuing to use their proprietary protocols.
Cable size has nothing to do with the NACS spec. Implementers are free to use whatever cables they used previously. You are mixing up Tesla's Supercharger implementation with NACS. Tesla uses similarly thin liquid-cooled cables on their CCS2 chargers in Europe.
> CCS2 supports three phase power AC 22kw which is very useful in Europe. NACS does not.
CCS1 does not either.
> CCS2 cable are bulky because they respect international norms in term of cable safety. NACS does not, cable are undersized on purpose for cost reasons.
The cable size is a separate issue from the plug, and the main difference is cooling not safety margins.
> CCS2 is already supporting payment in car. Tesla could simply have adopted that.
NACS is using CCS1 signalling.
> We were already having 3 standard. Chademo for Japan, GBT for China and CCS for the rest of the world. Congratulations: now we have 4.
CCS1 is different enough from CCS2 that we already had 4 standards if not 5. Now we have 4.
CCS1 is entirely common with CCS2 for DC charging. The rest could have been unified later.
> main difference is cooling not safety margins.
It is safety margin. The pin are currently undersized for the rated power[1]
> NACS is using CCS1 signalling.
Which is irrelevant. Because both are still fundamental incompatible.
> CCS1 is different enough from CCS2
It is not. The only major difference between both is the presence of the three phase AC. A thing that could have been adapted in future and standardized everywhere world wide.
Now we are in the ridiculous situation that an EV will not even be able to charge itself in a neighboring country just because of lobbying bullshit.
Tesla already ship car with CCS2 by default in Europe. They could have standardize on that even in USA.
They did not for short profits, not for user convenience.
> CCS1 is entirely common with CCS2 for DC charging. The rest could have been unified later.
True unification would mean changing the plugs on all the cars and be just as disruptive as this is.
> It is safety margin. The pin are currently undersized for the rated power[1]
I don't see anything relevant at that timestamp? But the pins are not the cable and you were talking about the cable.
> Which is irrelevant. Because both are still fundamental incompatible.
It is absolutely relevant to payment methods, because those are software.
> The only major difference between both is the presence of the three phase AC. A thing that could have been adapted in future and standardized everywhere world wide.
It would require reusing some but not all of the DC pins for AC, and I strongly doubt that was ever going to happen given that it hasn't happened so far.
> Tesla already ship car with CCS2 by default in Europe. They could have standardize on that even in USA.
Why would they use CCS2 when everyone else in the country is using CCS1?
Especially because the plug kinda sucks. Compatibility is more important, but since everyone using CCS2 was clearly not going to happen, might as well make a better plug.
> They did not for short profits, not for user convenience.
Isn’t this a situation like wall outlet jacks that will cause very little real world difficulty? It seems like if all EVs produduced in Europe can be charged in Europe that should be fine. I agree within continent charging should be all the same. Its not like phone charger standards where I might plausibly move abroad and want to bring the device with me.
It’s actually a really good case study into the way innovation takes shape over time. There’s not much to be told from the ‘sociotechnical’ perspective (users don’t really buy a car because of the way the plug feels or looks), but the regulatory aspect is fascinating.
EU we’re well intentioned to regulate a standard as it drives efficiencies across infrastructure and provides some stability for manufacturers who might be nervous about entering an unproven market. However, it’s clear that they introduced it prematurely as the technology and requirements were yet to be ironed out.
I would hold that there will be an easy fix to this problem - maybe a drop in replacement to support regional differences, or a power adaptor (similar to the travel adaptor market that supports the current list of 15 odd mains connectors)?
At any rate, if the global market does need to be normalised, the transition period will no doubt be slow and somewhat inconvenient, potentially requiring support for multiple standards at both charger and vehicle.
Edit: reading through the comments here, it seems that there is an sociotechnical angle in terms of ergonomics, as some cables can be bulky or difficult to handle. (Are they any worse than a bowser handle though, and do people actually have an opportunity to do AB testing in showrooms, which are often catered towards a single brand?)
Europe seems to be doing just fine with their CCS Type 2 connectors and network. Tesla uses the CCS Type 2 connector in that market on all of their cars and chargers.
If anything their public charging network is significantly denser and more interoperable than in North America.
The US basically failed to achieve a workable public charging network, which has led to Tesla's buildout lead and the current situation where they are opening their connector to become eligible for future federal funding and to bring the other manufacturers on board with their connector and network.
I don't think the story of this being a clear cut policy win of US vs EU checks out so cleanly as the commenter above is trying to make it.
The US government most certainly took action. They told everyone all subsidies for chargers and cars were going to be based on the TBD standard. This caused Tesla to leap into gear to try to get their connector to be the standard, motivating them to make whatever concessions to get everyone to agree to it.
Stereotypical? The only other time I can remember that the EU adopted something and it made any noticeable difference was GSM. It was a good five to six years after Europe that text messaging took off because the networks weren’t compatible; it felt like the stone ages.
I think it’s because they know there isn’t enough lithium supply for 100% of their sales to be electric. They’ve also stated that many consumers can’t afford fully electric vehicles.
If they get something working with iron based batteries and have a path to fully electricity their sales then the world is a better place. Their sales volume is immense.
It still seems odd to me that they'd just...not really do EVs while their competitors gain experience and trust shipping EVs years before them. They don't need to flip a switch and suddenly begin producing only EVs.
If so – and Musk is controversial and all – but wasn't this the original 'hump', vis-a-vis Tesla that we needed to get over in order to attain widespread EV adoption?
I think I still wish that battery-swapping was the main "refueling" method; I hear that battery swapping infrastructure is being built up in parts of Asia for small vehicles (like scooters and mopeds). I mean, theoretically, simply swapping out batteries--and just paying a fee to the batter swapper station--would work very efficiently (and quickly). Coordination problem maybe.
Tesla tried out battery swap stations about 7 years ago [1]. They assessed that demand wasn't high enough. Basically, it cost money to do battery swaps (which paid for battery swap infrastructure), whereas supercharging was just the cost of electricity.
On a first principles basis this kind of makes sense. Supercharging has effectively no moving parts. The plug doesn't even have a tab. That's less maintenance and pieces that can break over time. On the other hand, battery swapping has a ton of moving parts, and would require the car to have additional hardware.
Isn’t there also a concern on battery quality? If batteries are expensive, then you don’t want to swap a good one for an older or reduced capacity battery, but you would have no way of knowing a priori how good the replacement might be.
I don't understand why this is a concern. In this scheme you swap out batteries instead of re-charging them; you don't own them, you're contracting with a service to provide them as needed. Theoretically, you could buy the car battery-less and be asked upon purchase which battery service you'd like to sign up with.
But batteries are heavy, so quite possible that a battery swap would end up taking as long as supercharger charge anyway.
I've noticed that battery-swapping seems to be mainly suggested by peope who haven't owned an EV, or have owned an EV where fast chargers are not common.
Or people like me who don’t have the ability to install an EV charger where they live and don’t have the prospect of it any time soon.
My recent experience in a rental Tesla solidified that even with the 250kW chargers, having to go elsewhere to charge it is a big deterrent to buying one. Even in Los Angeles, the Supercharger network isn’t dense enough to overcome this for me.
Yes, there are a lot of people for whom EVs don't yet make sense because they can't charge it overnight where they live (like apartments). And so this really brings home how offbase the parent comment is: maybe they don't own an EV because it doesn't make sense for them to own an EV given how it works for folks in the suburbs, but not elsewhere.
Won’t charge times be like sub 10 minutes with the upcoming 1000V power capabilities?
Though what would be really clutch about battery swapping is that the overhead of battery maintenance could be offloaded from the owner and amortized into the price of a swap. I imagine there would have to be a battery standard so that cells could be serviced at an individual level on the swap provider’s end during maintenance.
Charging for Li-ion is not power, but rate limited, to 15 minutes at minimum. 4C or "4 times as its Ah rating" is considered fastest possible speed within reasonable degradation. Up-rating only allows larger battery packs to charge closer to that speed.
No. Not until we get to solid state batteries. There already are 800V batteries from multiple brands (Porsche, Hyundai, Kia to list a few) yet charge times have remained near 20 minutes.
Most supercharger stops are less than 10 minutes anyway. Very few people are ever charging their battery at a supercharger from 5% to 80%. They’re putting a little bit more in so that they make it all the way home.
I said most for a reason. Road trips are waaaay less than 1% of driving.
And as more and more hotels add L2 Tesla charging, more Tesla owners can charge overnight away from home. If I do trips to Oregon from Seattle, I never supercharge anymore.
I never supercharge unless I’m on a road trip and neither do the other Tesla owners I know. We all have wall chargers. So Supercharger use is 100% road trip for my cohort. I also doubt road trips are less than 1% of driven miles. Road trips are at least 30% of my odometer.
The canned response against swapping is it forces both chassis(4.5k lbs) and battery pack(1.5k lbs) to be able to maintain structural integrity of its own, and that that is just redundant for already heavy cars.
Structural integrity is an issue. Another one is battery quality and care. When a battery pack has a high residual value, and you're taking it with you, there is a real risk of quality mismatch, fraud, theft, and abuse in and around the battery swap. I may have a brand new car, with a near perfect battery; if I go on a trip and do a couple of battery swaps, I'm going to be pretty unhappy if the battery I get back at the end of the chain of swaps is 5 years old with only 75% original life.
That's even before the risk of malicious owners. I'm sure there would be many attacks, but one that comes right to mind is intentionally swapping in low-quality cells into swapped batteries to extract and sell the new high-quality ones you pull out.
I think I don't understand this criticism. The idea here is that you swap each time you're getting a new charge. You're not investing in any one particular battery, you're investing--as a car owner--in a service that maintains quality of it's "fleet" of batteries. You don't "own" the battery, and if the charging service gives you a shitty battery, you go back and have them swap it out for another one. You're approaching this from the perspective of someone who think's they've invested in a hunk of lithium and doesn't want to come out on the bad end of an exchange. But you buy the car battery-less, and sign up for a charging service that gives you one.
That has generally not been the approach I've seen in the market. Most programs expect you to charge your battery for your daily driving. Battery Swap is for long-distance and fast-charging only. Even if swapping was common, I still think there is risk, it would just be on the charging network, and getting a swap would be like renting a car or other expensive item. The battery would be checked for damage after every use, and damage or excessive wear found would be assumed to be the fault of the most recent renter, regardless of that accuracy.
I expect to see cash for clunkers 2: electric boogaloo around 2030. Once the charging infra and the grid is ready, it makes a lot of sense to disincentivize ICE ownership.
A true domino effect has occurred in the market, and in less than one year. Stellantis, VW, and Lucid are now looking at each other to see who will have the absolute worst bargaining position with Tesla.
This basically seems to be a case of Tesla truly opening up their connector standard, marrying it with the existing standardized CCS communications instead of their previous proprietary communications, and using the carrot of access to their charging network to get other manufacturers onboard for the North American market.
There are some governmental pressures to use interoperable connectors used by multiple brands if you want to be eligible for federal infrastructure EV charger funding. Tesla is making themselves eligible for this funding, making sure they won't be legislated into changing all of their charge connectors to CCS1 in the future, and gaining new customers to improve profitability of their charger network.
Tesla is by far the fastest growing DC charging provider in the US, on track to build over 500 stations this year with each station being 8+ chargers, some with 40 or more chargers.
To the best of my knowledge, it is a royalty-free, truly open standard. And it is probably the reason why other manufacturers started to use it.
Tesla most likely saw the writing on the wall, standardization was inevitable, it is already the case in Europe. They have a lot to gain if that standard is theirs, so they opened it. Everybody wins, especially considering that it is also a pretty good connector. I'd say that the only drawback is that it is not the same as in Europe, but since cars rarely cross the Atlantic, it is not a big deal.
I think so. NACS is a much more user-friendly connector than J1772 and CCS type 1. Adapters are a hassle, and it will be nice once we get past that, but this is objectively the best solution on the market.
There's an embarrassing amount of confusion and misunderstanding in this thread for what is supposedly a technically savvy audience.
The current Tesla charging standard is not NACS.
NACS is a new standard based on CCS protocol with Tesla's plug hardware (SAE J3400 connector).
There are very few Superchargers that support NACS, they're mostly still on the old Tesla standard.
This means the US and Europe essentially have the same charging software, with different plugs on top. All the automakers already had to and intended to only support CCS. Tesla's plug just makes more sense for the US's 1-phase power compared to the bulkier CCS plug which is designed for 3-phase power. NACS is just using better hardware with the software they already have.
> The current Tesla charging standard is not NACS.
> NACS is a new standard based on CCS protocol with Tesla's plug hardware (SAE J3400 connector).
> There are very few Superchargers that support NACS, they're mostly still on the old Tesla standard.
Are you sure about that? If so, can you cite a source explaining the difference between the current Tesla charging standard and NACS? Because that's contrary to everything I've read about it before. E.g., https://www.tesla.com/blog/opening-north-american-charging-s... says this:
> We invite charging network operators and vehicle manufacturers to put the Tesla charging connector and charge port, now called the North American Charging Standard (NACS), on their equipment and vehicles. NACS is the most common charging standard in North America: NACS vehicles outnumber CCS two-to-one, and Tesla's Supercharging network has 60% more NACS posts than all the CCS-equipped networks combined.
As far as I’m aware, any V3 superchargers (and the upcoming V4 ones) support CCS/NACS fully. Only V2 ones do not support this, and Tesla hasn’t been deploying V2 superchargers for a few years now. Anything rated for 250kW is a V3 supercharger.
V3 supports Tesla's implementation of "NACS", which is not what was opened up to everyone. You're more than welcome to grab a NACS-CCS conversion plug to try, it won't work because it's not speaking NACS protocol, it only has the NACS connector.
Right now there's only a handful of "magic dock" truly CCS/NACS compatible superchargers that speaks the CCS/NACS protocol that works with non-Tesla vehicles[1].
> There's an embarrassing amount of confusion and misunderstanding in this thread for what is supposedly a technically savvy audience.
? ? ?
Let’s correct your misunderstanding, then.
1. The US has 3 phase power. 2. The difference between NACS and CCS1 plugs is that NACS just combines the DC and AC lines into the same wire. Since the lines support both single and multi-phase AC power, and DC, the only downside of multi-purposing the line is that the car needs to make sure it’s routing the negotiated power to the correct place. 3. The protocol that any new supercharger speaks is the CCS protocol.
Residential areas in the USA tend not to have 3 phase power.
In several (not all) European countries, it's normal to have 3 phase power in your garage, kitchen and laundry room -- even in apartments. In (almost?) all of them, it's normal for any business to have it.
That means the typical destination and many home chargers are using it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/10/toyota-targets-10percent-pro...
But definitely a win for Tesla, since NACS will now be effectively universal (in the US) and Superchargers more popular than ever.