Egos and inertia: two phenomenonally bad reasons that have been responsible for more bad decisions in our world than almost any other.
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Egos and inertia: two phenomenonally bad reasons that have been responsible for more bad decisions in our world than almost any other.
my prediction: the first company that agrees to partner with Tesla to use and significantly expand the supercharger network, will be among those that come out on top in the end. I wish BMW would just pull themselves together and do this. Imagine if every single appliance you bought had a proprietary connector to plug into the wall.. How messed up would that be? I find it a little disturbing that the OEM's still haven't come together and joined Tesla on this venture... It is so utterly obvious now that Tesla has done it right - time to bypass the own ego for a bit and cooperate...
Exactly. CHAdeMO is a good backup plan and much like destination chargers if you have enough time.
I do think that the model Ξ rollout will spark competition with destination chargers at restaurants and shopping centers.
But they are mostly in inconveniently located dealer lots, not available 7x24, often blocked by dealer cars, subject to individual dealer policies, and generally only have one or two stalls. There are a few out in the public, but they are few and far between--and still only have one or two stalls. They won't play a big part in the EV revolution for a long time, although anything is better than nothing. I don't see anyone doing more than paying lip service to EV charging other than Tesla.[/QUOTE]
Just like Kodak, "film still makes sense". It's obvious from the amount of reservations for a car that they won't get for a couple of years that the public can't wait for EV to happen.
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I think you're going to wind up with a lot of level 3 50kw CCS / Chademo stations out there. There is a publicly funded buildout of these starting here in Ontario. I'm not sure if this will make things worse or better. They're borderline useless for people trying to travel.
And most don't even deliver 50kW, more likely 25-35. Just calling something "fast charging" doesn't make it so.
In Norway, there already are two gas station chains that have done this.
The biggest gasoline retail chain here statoil.no have some chargers and has announced a major expansion over the next year. This is in collaboration with gronnkontakt.no one of two major fast charge providers. Statoil also has a formal collaboration with Tesla and SC on several of its gas stations.
Shell has also recently announced that they in partnership with the other major quick charge provider Fortum will have a massive development over the next years.
Others such as Esso have said publicly they do not want to offer charging.
Although oil producers may not see that this is good for business , gas station chains and owners will.
The difference between the first to offer quick charge (Statoil) and those who are still opponent(Esso) is whether they are directly owned by oil producers or sold/spun off as a separate company like Statoil is.
CuriousG
Active Member
Why not have these people just use Apple Pay and Android Pay and be done with it? Don't these cards use NFC to begin with?
edit: After thinking about it, I forget that some of these services aren't available to other countries outside the US.
Jerry, if you're referring to the CHAdeMO chargers at Nissan dealerships, sure. All of those things are true.
> There are a few out in the public
This part isn't true. There are far more CHAdeMO chargers beyond Nissan. The CHAdeMO association claims 1612 chargers in the US as of March 23rd.
For, example, Washington and Oregon have a state initiative "the electric highway" which has put lots of CHAdeMO (usually with an L2 and CCSCombo) chargers in convenient places. I've used them along the Oregon coast when out of range of the SC's along interstate 5. Last Fall, in Dallas, before the Dallas supercharger came online, I used at CHAdeMO two blocks from my hotel, and it was in a Walgreens (maybe CVS?) parking lot. Before the supercharger just north of Monterey CA opened, I used a CHAdeMO in the hospital parking lot in Monterey. Easy peasy.
True, I've never seen a bank of CHAdeMO chargers in one location like superchargers, but until demand grows, I'm not sure that's yet a problem. And, that's actually an advantage for now - the 1612 CHAdeMO's in the US mean you're more likely to be near a CHAdeMO than a Tesla Supercharger.
Bangor Bob
Member
In North America, many filling station agreements with their suppliers prohibit supplying "alternative" fuels. Add DCFC, lose your access to gasoline...
On the standardization though -- we already have two sizes of diesel nozzles, along with three major octane ratings for gasoline, and E85, and propane, and in some places natural gas. I think we can live with a couple charging standards, although adapters are nice things to have...
What sucks about non-supercharger DCFCs is they're largely regional systems requiring pre-registration for payment. And in some cases of cross-border travel between US and Canada, it's not even possible to sign up for a company's service from the other country!
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jcaspar
Member
I would add Ford and GM to this list as they are way ahead of most in electric vehicles, especially Ford. BMW is very new but seems to be starting to take it seriously. Toyota is likely to the the big player that could die a quick death as they are actively anti EV. Mazda, Kia, Audi and several of the other foreign manufacturers are very far behind and will have great difficulty catching up.
Regarding the awkward CHAdeMO charging, it seems absolutely crazy to me that the federal and some state governments were paying to essentially subsidize a foreign companies vehicle (the Leaf). I suspect you would NEVER see Japan doing something similar that would further worsen their trade deficit. Baffling to me...
You are making quite the bold call there sir - Toyota? I see your logic but the idea of mighty Toyota going out of business is so hard to conceive. I know I know - Nokia, Kodak etc.
I'll grant you the small players - unless they move to exclusively hybrid powertrains and can compete in that way with a select demographic. We must remember that there are still 10's of millions of Americans with no place to charge EV's. For the next 10-20 years there is at least a niche market there until EV infrastructure gets built into the parking spaces of every condo and apartment complex in America.
If I had a gas station in a prime downtown location I would be starting to consider my options down the road pretty seriously by now. I imagine that in 3-7 years it could very well be that Teslas (which don't have their own charger at home and have to park on the street) roam the streets alone at night to go charge at a downtown charging location while their owners are asleep. Where will they go to charge? But, in the meantime, and on another note, as far as I know gas stations don't actually make much off of the gasoline they sell.. If I had a gas station (especially if it was forced to remain gasoline only) I would shutter it and open a nice cafe or a subway there, offer supercharger-level charging (at lets say $20/hr), and hope to appeal to the city folk that are going to need a fast place to charge in the coming years. That business model would probably make them more money, in time, than selling fuel and ***** coffee.
Interesting. I'm thinking your on to something here. It never occurred to me that the powerwall could be used for this purpose. It all makes sense now and if Elon isn't planning something to this effect for the future that would be silly.
I must be missing something. How does this eliminate anything? You still need to convert line AC to DC to charge the powerwall. And this assumes, of course, that it becomes cost effective to sell a 90+kwh powerwall, which is 12x bigger than what's out there now.
Sure you could charge a 90kwh powerwall at a lower rate for, say 10 hours, and then dump to the car in 1 hour. But then you need another 10 hours before the next vehicle can be serviced. That's fine in your garage, but wouldn't help much in a public place.
deonb
Active Member
It doesn't help much in one public place. It helps a heck of a lot in 100'000 public places.
If Tesla can ever make a ~100kw powerwall-charger that costs $15'000 installed, comes with its own built in HPWC, and can be wired into any existing 208V/240V supply, things starts to make a lot of sense.
Then instead of 1 Supercharger station in a parking lot that costs $300'000 to build, needs a new transformer, and are subject to demand charges and what not, you can have 20 Powerwall chargers, distributed all over the place.
Put another way, Tesla wants to double the amount of SuperChargers before the Model 3 release. That's another 3500 chargers in ~600 locations. Instead, for the same price, they can have 70'000 "powerwall chargers" in 70'000 locations.
The individual chargers are not as nice as SuperChargers since you need to know which ones have charge available, and you probably need the logistics of reserving etc. But I wouldn't rule it out as an overall feasible model - once they can achieve a low enough cost for the Powerwall.
I see the logistics as being quite challenging, but never say never I suppose. I, personally, would see it being difficult to leave on a trip, not quite certain that somebody wasn't going to dump all of the pwchargers while I was in transit, leaving me stuck. Who knows?
mikeash
Active Member
I think it's still a problem because it makes it difficult to count on these chargers. A single unit can easily be broken down, in use, or blocked, so you need contingency plans. Also, they're not typically run as critical infrastructure. When they are broken, the response often seems to be, "We'll fix that in 4-6 business weeks."
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