You can install our site as a web app on your iOS device by utilizing the Add to Home Screen feature in Safari. Please see this thread for more details on this.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
Something I've been wondering about for a while. With Tesla adding CCS charging for non-Tesla vehicles, hopefully with the same degree of uptime as the have had in the past with existing Supercharger network, will the become the de facto charging network industry-wide? Essentially the "Exon" of EV charging, eventually displacing companies such as EVGO, EA and Chargepoint, due to much better service? And if that happens, how much of a profit center does Supercharging become? Now I see it as somewhat of a necessary expense to support the auto lineup (not sure if they currently turn a profit on charging). But in time it seems as if that should be quite profitable.
I think once the supercharger network opens up to non-Teslas here in the United States, that’s the beginning of the end for the third-party players. Especially if they can continue to be as reliable with the CCS protocol is they are with their native plug. Their business plan never had a chance when you look at the much, much lower utilization rate, demand fees, cheaper rates, 5x more expensive install costs, and terrible reliability. I’m curious if the European transition to non-Teslas is more reliable than their existing CCS networks. Any Europeans care to chime in?
It just seems so bizarre that the Tesla plug gives up nothing to the supposed standard CCS and yet has numerous advantages as well as being utilized by probably 90% of the BEV’s that road trip and the decision makers ignore all that because why?
As this is playing out, I wonder if the free market wants and is willing to support a monopoly on 2 $3T markets from a single company in order to avert climate change.
Giving Tesla a 15-year head start was a bad idea
Being the first mover in a market has advantages and disadvantages. Advantages include economies of scale, brand positioning, patents, and supply chain relationships. Another underappreciated advantage is gaining knowledge and information in the early stage before others have gotten started, which can be leveraged in later stages of the game to accumulate yet more knowledge and information in a virtuous cycle. Wright’s Law is not just an industry-wide model; it also applies to individual firms. The game is actually a race down the Wright’s law learning curve, as well as a competition over whose curve has the steepest slope—that is, who extracts the most innovation potential out of each doubling of cumulative production. This is why pace of innovation is all that matters in the long run for any market in which there is still a significant cost delta between the best producers and their less successful competitors.
I think for the car market, this first mover advantage is strong for engineering, including supply chain, design, manufacturing, and servicing. Tesla’s head start is a gigantic and probably insurmountable barrier to competition in many ways. Today I want to focus on how it’s given them data and experience.
Apple and Foxconn, for instance, are formidable companies but they haven’t even started an attempt at EV mass production. New companies like Rivian and Lucid have been working longer but are much less capitalized and less known than Apple & Foxconn, and they still haven’t actually been shipping cars to customers for years. Apple coming to the car market would be like when Michael Jordan left basketball to play baseball in 1993. Despite being a world-class elite athlete at the peak of his athletic prime, he did not even make it to the Major Leagues as a baseball player. The obvious reason was that he had not practiced baseball since high school.
When engineers design a machine like a car, they have simulation models and physical test data showing that stuff should work in theory, but there's still significant uncertainty. Engineers also have models and test data for the manufacturing system and associated uncertainty. Automotive engineering has even more uncertainty than most machine designs because the duty cycle is intense, customer expectations are high, and the vehicle spends most of its time outside with all the accompanying stress from vibration, temperature, salt, moisture, even UV radiation. Plus, the expected service lifetime is more than a decade. Accelerated life testing is crucial for planning this but you just never really know until actually putting the cars in service and waiting for them to get old.
Any new car company has to learn all this from scratch. Sure, they can hire people who have worked in the car industry and they can do their best to copy industry best practices, and they can even buy all the latest commercial off-the-shelf software tools, but there's still a limit. Companies have institutional knowledge, policies and procedures, relationships between people, and habits that are hard to transfer over bit by bit to a new company. Tribal knowledge tends to be indigenous to the environment of the tribe. Companies also have critical data that they’re generally unwilling to share.
With greater design uncertainty, engineers need to apply bigger safety margins and sometimes need to add extra layers of redundancy in case of failure. All of this comes at a price: reduced vehicle performance on key design criteria like cost, range, acceleration, handling, safety, etc. Uncertainty also brings the risk of setting margins too thin and having a higher-than-anticipated failure rate in service, like Nissan's battery degradation in the first-generation Leaf, GM's spectacular f-up with the LG pouch cell partnership and Ford's melting high-current electrical contacts. In the fog of misunderstanding, mistakes happen, especially in organizations where decisions are made based on politics, deceit and confrontation instead of logic, honesty and cooperation.
Drew Baglino discussed this in his Stanford interview earlier this year, saying that a decade ago Tesla had been too pessimistic about Model S battery cell electrochemical degradation, but too optimistic about the other stuff like pack moisture sealing, battery management electronics, mechanical shock and vibration, and thermal cycling. Notably, Drew said that these things "don't show up until you've been in the field for ten years". Yikes. So even the big brains at Tesla were too conservative in some areas and too aggressive in others. It was only after years of vehicles being in the fleet and millions of cars produced that they’ve advanced this far in fixing these problems, making the cars with more reliability, more quality, and less design fat.
Tesla also gets the most data per car per unit time. because they actually had the foresight to design the car for remote data collection and cloud computing. Tesla has been putting electronic sensors on their BEVs since *2003*. One of the very first things they did as a startup was setting up vehicle data collection for trying to reverse engineer the AC Propulsion t-zero prototype. I heard Elon and a few other early Tesla employees talking about this in a panel interview from around the early Model S years (I can’t find it anymore, so no link). I think I recall Elon referring to it as trying to tease out “the ghost in the machine”, because the t-zero used custom analog power electronics and nobody really knew how the hand-crafted mule actually functioned.
All of this means Tesla alone has the luxury of running the tightest tolerances in the industry for their BEV designs, because no one has has produced 3 million BEVs over the last decade. This is like going camping in the wilderness. A novice might be a smart and conscientious planner, but their unawareness of the actual needs of the trip will inevitably result in worse selection of supplies to bring compared to a person going on the same trip who’s done it many times. The novice will bring along some stuff that’s unnecessary and not bring (or not bring enough of) other stuff that they actually do need. The expert also will have a better understanding of which equipment suppliers have the best options. The expert knows what to spend money on and what to go cheap on. The novice needs to spend more time researching and shopping and even then they will probably end up wasting money in some areas and get junky equipment for other items. The expert’s advantage is information and experience.
Novices can surpass experts in the long run. Tesla sucked at making cars 10 years ago, but that was with some prior learning on the original roadster and Tesla-level pace of innovation. This is not normal progress over the first decade of attempting to grow to being a mass manufacturer of cars. I don’t anticipate an iCar or any other competition having a meaningful negative impact on Tesla’s business for at least ten years.
Tesla’s data and expertise lets them get by with less stuff such as:
Structural material
Welds
Fasteners
Battery cell depth-of-discharge reserve
Warranty reserve
Tesla also gets performance gains, such as:
Range per kWh
Charging speed
Weight
More storage space and cabin interior space
Handling
More repeat sprints before power needs to be throttled
NVH (Noise, vibration & harshness)
Tesla's inventions compound each other's gains due to these feedback loops, augmenting Tesla's resultant lead.
Weight reduction and chassis stiffening, for example, reduces the power required to move the vehicle around, reduces NVH, and improves handling which makes the vehicle more efficient, which then enables reduction of the battery size needed for a given set of requirements for range and performance. Weight reduction also in many cases increases cabin storage space by opening up more room, as Tesla has shown with their masterful gigacasting design making for more spacious trunks and frunks. Better understanding of battery degradation and better thermal control means that a more aggressive charging curve can be allowed. And so on.
Example of tech with compound benefit:
Octovalve and integrated thermal management across all vehicle subsystems
Gigacastings with optimized new alloy
Structural battery with seats directly mounted on top
Cell-to-pack architecture
Motors best in the game according to Munro testing and cost accounting (kW/$, kW/kg, kW/cm^3)
I don't think it's physically possible for a competitor to try all of this stuff in their first BEV. They have a long road ahead of them to implement these technologies that are necessary to have a product that can compete with Tesla vehicles on specs, features and cost.
Even Tesla is still learning how to optimize their own inventions. Listen to remarks from the Q2 call:
The Rich Get Richer
All signs point towards acceleration of Tesla's pace of technological innovation. I think Tesla is in a runaway snowball effect situation now.
The EV market has an accumulative advantage dynamic with strong preferential attachment effects. Preferential attachment means a tendency within a competitive system for resources to be biased towards flowing to entities that already have more resources than other entities (i.e. "the rich get richer" / "success breeds success"). Preferential attachment was observed by Italian economist/engineer/sociologist Vilfred Pareto in his famous observation that 80% of the peas in his garden came from 20% of the plants and 80% of the wealth and land in Italy was owned by 20% of the families. The early advantage gained by some pea plants due to genetics or lucky position in the environment made them grow bigger more quickly as sprouts, and they leveraged this small advantage to consume more of the local sunshine, water and root space to grow even bigger, until a minority of plants dominated the garden. This relationship shows up in all kinds of phenomena like formation of stars and planets from dust after a supernova, crater size on the moon, frequency of words used in any language, and much more.
Preferential attachment usually results in a power law distribution, also known as a Pareto distribution. There are theoretical justifications for this and if you want to see the math I recommend reading the link. The stronger the preferential attachment effect, the steeper the Pareto curve is. Whenever there is a Pareto distribution in results of a competition, we can be pretty confident that some kind of preferential attachment effect exists.
In some cases, we observe power law rank relationships in which one or two outliers exist at the top, way off the trend line. This is called the king effect. Kings don’t conform to the statistical distribution of the rest, like how China and India have exceptionally large populations while all other nations fit neatly into a Pareto curve.
The EV industry in the US, Tesla's home turf, shows a typical Pareto distribution with one king, Tesla, which alone still holds most of the US BEV market share, and holds all of the profit. Soon enough they'll have more profit than all of the rest of the auto industry combined, including all cars, not just BEVs.
On a linear scale we can see just how far ahead Tesla is. Note that the pink colulmn is the grand total, the red column is Tesla, and the blue columns are the rest. On a logarithmic scale we can see that the power law model is a good fit, because all the data points fall appromixately in a line. All of them except Tesla, whose sales number comes in an order of magnitude higher than the power law rank relationship would predict. View attachment 850045 View attachment 850044
The dynamics that caused this result are not likely to change any time soon. The rank relationship for 2018 looks almost identical, again with Tesla an order of magnitude ahead of where the Pareto distribution of the rest of the market participants would predict Tesla to be. The numbers have gotten bigger and and the also-rans have shuffled around in the rankings, but in four years nobody has gotten any closer. In fact, if you look closely at the trend lines, Tesla’s deviation from the distribution has almost doubled since 2018, suggesting that indeed they are accumulating relative advantage over time.
I think once the supercharger network opens up to non-Teslas here in the United States, that’s the beginning of the end for the third-party players. Especially if they can continue to be as reliable with the CCS protocol is they are with their native plug. Their business plan never had a chance when you look at the much, much lower utilization rate, demand fees, cheaper rates, 5x more expensive install costs, and terrible reliability. I’m curious if the European transition to non-Teslas is more reliable than their existing CCS networks. Any Europeans care to chime in?
It just seems so bizarre that the Tesla plug gives up nothing to the supposed standard CCS and yet has numerous advantages as well as being utilized by probably 90% of the BEV’s that road trip and the decision makers ignore all that because why?
It doesn't seem to have hurt the competition much in Europe/UK/Norway/etc too much. People still seem to go to the third-party sites first. (Now the third-party sites do seem to be more reliable over there, but they still have problems.)
Here's the ANCAP detailed breakdown showing the Model Y scoring green/GOOD for all AEB tests, so maybe something should have been colored yellow for ADEQUATE resulting in the missing 0.25 points -> 2% Safety Assist score?
As this is playing out, I wonder if the free market wants and is willing to support a monopoly on 2 $3T markets from a single company in order to avert climate change.
Well, if Tesla does grow as large as most of us think and it does wind up running afoul of antitrust and needs to be split up, as investors we need to remember AT&T. The parent co stock retained about 30% of the previous SP with the rest split amongst the baby bells. Plenty of people kept the parent and sold the baby bells and we know how that went.
Shareholders of Standard Oil did quite well too. Perhaps this is the opposite of the conglomerate effect.
I don't think it's physically possible for a competitor to try all of this stuff in their first BEV. They have a long road ahead of them to implement these technologies that are necessary to have a product that can compete with Tesla vehicles on specs, features and cost.
This is my favorite part. Competitors have to either gamble and hope that they can nail 10 major new ways of doing business all at once, or knowingly ship an inferior product and hope they can catch up faster than the others.
ANCAP: Maybe because they don't have one safety feature in the HMI: "Restraint activation / dynamic retractors" (I think that is where it will tug on your seat belt to get your attention.)
Just be careful. If anyone actually looked at some of the car companies that went under in the US from my post, you noticed the majority of them was during the dawn of ICE. It was a gold rush for everyone to start their own ICE company, not much different than the hundreds of EV companies in China today.
The gigacastings use a slightly tweaked AA386 alloy with about 8.5% Si content. Nothing particularly magical about it, though it does highlight Tesla's metallurgical prowess.
Anyhow, Tesla has the chromatography and other analysis equipment to determine what adjustments are needed to get the right blend. Not exactly rocket science. Well...
It is magical though in it's own right. They literally HAD to come up with their proprietary mixture that doesn't need to be heat treated. And heat treating large castings tends to deform them, thus no jigs needed in their application. This wasn't possible before and it IS the key to making the castings work. I call that material science magic!
it’s just like the potato chip thing, it’s very hard to keep a large casting to have its shape. So in order to achieve this, there’s no alloy that existed that could do this. So we developed our own alloy, a special alloy of aluminum, that has high strength, without heat treatment, and is very cast-able.
It is magical though in it's own right. They literally HAD to come up with their proprietary mixture that doesn't need to be heat treated. And heat treating large castings tends to deform them, thus no jigs needed in their application. This wasn't possible before and it IS the key to making the castings work. I call that material science magic!
Yeah, the metallurgical science that went into developing the alloy is very impressive. But from a recycling and alloying perspective it's nothing that out of the ordinary. Sure it would be nice if they got most of castings back, but it may not be very practical, and they'll get recycled one way or another.
Here's the ANCAP detailed breakdown showing the Model Y scoring green/GOOD for all AEB tests, so maybe something should have been colored yellow for ADEQUATE resulting in the missing 0.25 points -> 2% Safety Assist score?
Greenpeace has launched their "Auto Environmental Guide 2022". https://www.greenpeace.org/static/p...09/dd6f236f-auto-environmental-guide-2022.pdf It attempts to rank the top 10 car makers globally on their efforts towards decarbonisation and EV's. Bizzarely the list does not include Tesla (only 2 mnor mentions) as they are only ranking the top 10 based on total 2021 vehicle sales. I expect to see some massive changes to their list once Tesla's sales top around 2.5M bringing them into the top 10.
The summary of their rankings is below. GM gets top spot but mainly due its stated goals and 85% of its ZEV sales being the Wuling Hongguang Mini in China , which is a joke. At least they do a decent job of calling out the greenwashing and foot dragging of Toyota.
I don't get why groups like GreenPeace even bother doing this kind of report when they ignore the No1 driver of change in the auto industry - Tesla!
The chargers themselves are also a lot more complicated. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, Electrify America uses three different vendors for their chargers. So that means maintenance crews have to know how to service and stock spare parts for all three.
Also, Electrify America's cables are liquid-cooled. It has pumps that start up when you start charging. So EA chargers have moving parts that wear out more easily. And it means the cables are more bulky and harder to plug in to the car. But that's how EA was able to offer 350kW speeds long before Tesla. However, four years after EA's rollout of these 350kW chargers, we still have no cars that can take advantage of it.
This is just another example of Tesla's vertical integration and simplicity. It results in reliability.
The chargers themselves are also a lot more complicated. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, Electrify America uses three different vendors for their chargers. So that means maintenance crews have to know how to service and stock spare parts for all three.
I don't know if they are more complicated or not - but for sure, they don't tend to be as well integrated and modular as Tesla Superchargers. Tesla is working on V4 of their Superchargers and Tesla V2 and V3 Supercharger cabinets are wonderfully modular with each generation a good step up in modularity, but having seen the design of them, there's still some room on the table to improve reliability and there's still failures that cause cabinets to reduce charge rates or go down altogether. V2/V3 are also different enough that each has unique problems. Add in urban style posts and yeah, Tesla techs need to stock cables for 3 types of posts and parts for two different types of cabinets.
Until the Supercharger team does nothing but replace worn out connectors/cables after 10,000 charges and routine coolant changes every 5 years, there's room to go.
I still think a major issue with EA and Evgo is that they simply don't dedicate enough resources to maintaining uptime. Tesla has a huge number of people dedicated to keeping Superchargers up and running compared to EA / Evgo and they have been continuing to ramp up the size of their teams as they expand their footprint.
Also, Electrify America's cables are liquid-cooled. It has pumps that start up when you start charging. So EA chargers have moving parts that wear out more easily. And it means the cables are more bulky and harder to plug in to the car. But that's how EA was able to offer 350kW speeds long before Tesla. However, four years after EA's rollout of these 350kW chargers, we still have no cars that can take advantage of it.
This is just another example of Tesla's vertical integration and simplicity. It results in reliability.
V3 Superchargers cables are liquid cooled and there is a separate coolant reservoir, pump, radiator and fan in the base of every V3 Supercharger post, in addition to the coolant reservoir, pump, radiator and fan in every Supercharger cabinet.
Not quite 350 kW, but the Lucid Air can charge at least up to 328 kW. So Tesla has some room to improve here. I suspect the refresh Model S/X can peak well above the current 250 kW limit of V3 Superchargers - but can it beat Lucid? I'm not sure and it also really depends on the charge curve, but I'm also certain that Tesla is undoubtedly working on it.
Tesla makes and will continue to make the best overall EVs and DC charging infrastructure - I just don't think we do Tesla any favors by exaggerating their lead.
