In most of the world the vast majority of people wealthy enough to buy a car live in multi-family housing. Whether there are garages, garage spaces or not depends entirely on where one lives. Consider even New York County, i.e. Manhattan. Very, very few garages there. Consider almost every major city including London, Paris and Rome. In all of those garages are not the rule. In the suburbs Muti-vehicle garages are not rare, but most garages, where they exist, are single vehicle. A quick review of typical. wealthy living conditions yields fairly similar conditions almost everywhere.
In general the countries that are exceptions too that rule are US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and not much else.
Cars end out being very popular in all those places so urban congestion becomes worse and worse. From Tesla perspective the most important single amenity is widespread street charging (even Croatia and Slovenia have that happening, and many countries are encouraging that) plus public parking place charging (Tesla already does that with urban Superchargers and normal ones). Destination charging has been a very efficient add-on and in many large countries (Canada, US, Mexico, China, Italy and the list goes on) Destination chargers act to serve until Superchargers arrive and after.
We all need to make sure we are considering how Tesla must approach charging infrastructure on a local basis everywhere. As Tesla expands sales in areas not yet served or minimally served these are becoming more and more significant from an investment perspective. Of course they always ahem been a huge issue, generally overlooked form an economic perspective. Certainly when they began in 2012 they were free, and that continued until 2018 in some cases at least.
Now the primary issue is whether Superchargers will be essentially break-even or whether combining them with storage might make them profitable, albeit indirectly.
All of that is mostly discussed in supporting trips. In urban cases, from Hong Kong, Singapore, all large Italian cities, nearly all large EU cities and many others there are access rules that favor BEV's. The consequence is that charging infrastructure within those central cities becomes very important. Americans tend to be unaware of such issues, which are Right Now giant issues as Tesla becomes very popular in these settings.
There is no substitute for vast increases in Tesla charging solutions because nearly everywhere the other options are undependable, complex to access, require arcane registration processes, have very few charge points or all of that. Now that Tesla is being induced to share the problem of congestion will rise unless an even more dramatic system expansion takes place very quickly.
When the Berlin and Austin production goes online and Shanghai and others continue production expansion there will be more countries that need dramatic Supercharger networks where there are none. China, US, EU, Japan, Korea etc all need more Superchargers already as does Australia. Now think about Brazil, Russia, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, India, Southeast Asia and so on. Right now Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey and other European are have very little coverage and need it desperately.
Tesla will be producing roughly two million vehicles next year and, say, 40% more the next year.
Just imagine the scale of building deploying and operating all these Superchargers in all these widely disparate countries. Disparate electrical standards, political and economic conditions and degree of multi-country auto tourism.
There are approximately 5000 Supercharger locations now with >25,000 stalls. As geography and density rise those will probably rise at roughly double the rate of new vehicle sales (the last 'rule of thumb' was given me orally by a Tesla Supercharger executive, so nothing written supports the logic).
If all holds we can expect 2022 to need essentially double the Supercharger stations. here should be economies of scale, offset by more regulatory hurdles. Therefore assume $450,000 us per station. That suggests on the order of $2,225,000,000 for 2022 alone.
I doubt it will ber any less, but very well could be much more. How about operating expense and income? AFAIK, we are largely clueless right now.
Auto-park hasn’t worked that well for me. So I’m definitely more of a road trip FSD convert. For now.
