Will other brand vehicles be able to use the Supercharger?

[jerry33]

As far as I know there are really only two ways to improve charging speed:

1. Different battery chemistry.

2. Larger battery. A charge means enough to get to the next charger with some extra so that you have a good cushion to combat the unforeseen (or perhaps the foreseen in winter). If batteries are going to have a long life, they have to taper as the SOC gets closer to the maximum allowed. So if there was a 150 kWh battery (as an example) charging to 200 miles would be very fast, perhaps approaching an ICE fill. The only time it would take longer is when going "off network". During our previous two weeks' trip (5300+ miles) to the Seattle area, most of the stops had the "enough energy to continue" displayed when we got back to the car. (Of course, we waited a bit longer until there was a bit more cushion than the Nav system gives.)

 

[Johan]

you are technically mistaken. a 62.5kw ChaDeMo can theoretically charge a 24kwh battery from zero to full, not factoring in "taper", in 23 minutes. adding taper, and the non zero SOC that you're likely to have on arrival, and not adding the 90% charge limit that most of us use, should comfortably fit inside of 30 minutes, just as ChaDeMo marketing claims. to do the same thing to an 85kw battery with a supercharger takes an hour. that's not what we tesla owners do, but the reality of tesla supercharging is pretty close to that same half hour.

my priority is to have more places to fast charge. if the "low class" vehicles are charging three times as often and there are twice as many of them, that means there would be 6 times as many charger spots demanded. But it also means that tesla, or whoever is building the fast charge stations, is getting funded to build them by that extra demand. How would you like having them 50 km apart instead of the present 200, and on all the back roads you can't get to now without using 10kw or slower charger?

My observation is that at most superchargers, there are a lot more berths than there are teslas wanting to use them. since teslas are still pretty uncommon, this imbalance is necessary. but it leads to ICE drivers thinking that it's appropriate to use them as parking spaces. as the number of vehicles and chargers get larger, the bursty nature of tesla arrival times will smooth out (mathematicians call this "the law of large numbers") and a higher fraction of berths will be used, and the ICEs will learn to stay away. but this only works out if the number of superchargers matches the number of cars needing them.

I do see your point--we've paid for a premium experience, which includes not having to wait for a supercharger berth. but I think my model is a way to make that better.

20-odd kWh in 30 mins is slow. Forget kW and kWhs. Think range charged per unit of time: this is what matters. (For example miles/30 mins).

In theory you're right: partnering with a big manufacurer(s) could multiply the network by x5 or x10 and thereby overcoming both the hogging issue as well as increasing the total utility of the network, to Tesla owners also (yes, I'd like a SC every 50 km). Problem is this too is pure theory: No one manufacturer is nearly as committed as Tesla. Nissan, VAG, GM, Ford, Mitsubishi or any one other of the potential other EV collaborators won't commit, they can't keep up with Tesla's tempo, they'll never lay down the investment needed.

All the others want to be sure EVs sell well and are the future before they commit to investing in a fast charging network. Tesla is already 100% committed to EVs and is doing it the other way around: they deploy a lot of capital in a fast charging network before they've sold a lot of cars, to make the cars that much more attractive and let the SC network be a major driver of demand. I promise that anyone else joining in at this point would only drag Tesla down.

 

[mknox]

Please no cars with poorer max charge rates and poorer taper curves than an S60 at the Superchargers. That would diminish the quality of the network..

I've never seen my poor old A-pack even hit 90 kW. I guess I'm now a Supercharger hog.

 

[Johan]

I've never seen my poor old A-pack even hit 90 kW. I guess I'm now a Supercharger hog.

Not at all! You're still, on average, charging more miles/minute than a 60 or 70 pack

There's a reason they 40 kWh Model S was discontinued and there's a reason the 40s couldn't/can't supercharge.

 

[snort]

20-odd kWh in 30 mins is slow. Forget kW and kWhs. Think range charged per unit of time: this is what matters. (For example miles/30 mins).

Exactly my point. as long as they aren't preventing you from being able to charge, why should you care?

All the others want to be sure EVs sell well and are the future before they commit to investing in a fast charging network. Tesla is already 100% committed to EVs and is doing it the other way around: they deploy a lot of capital in a fast charging network before they've sold a lot of cars, to make the cars that much more attractive and let the SC network be a major driver of demand. I promise that anyone else joining in at this point would only drag Tesla down.

I don't see how this drags Tesla down. Since Tesla is committed, only if there's bankruptcy or some sort of hostile takeover can we lose ground. If others start following Tesla's lead, my first choice would be for them to adopt Tesla's standard, and I want to lower barriers for doing that. Tesla front-loads the cost, which is a non-starter for low priced cars. But it's technically easy to implement pay as you go at superchargers. If (say) Toyota decided to jump into the market with a (say) 300km range EV, they have three options: 1: stick with ChaDeMo or CCS, which would mean staying on the charger for well over an hour...not really a fast charge 2: devise some new protocol with spec extremely similar to the supercharger, or 3: adopt Tesla's protocol. If this happens, Tesla owners win big and owners of the Toyota EV enter the new world with a running start. (Because of Toyota and Tesla's past relationship and the price reductions that should be made possible through the gigafactory, I think this is actually fairly plausible)

You're right that a move like this would be a big thing for one of these companies. But many of them have already started down the path with ChaDeMo and CCS. We can move them partway into the Tesla family with an adapter like I suggest, and it's possible to front load the cost, Tesla style. the easier it is for all EVs to charge, the more places to charge there will be. the more they see it, the more they will want our superior protocol.

 

[Johan]

They put Chademo or CCS on their cars yes, but they expected someone else to build the chargers (OK, Nissan did deploy some Chademo chargers here and there).

Look, the technology part of it is 2%, the other 98% has to do with attitude. And in this respect no one is even close to Tesla, which is why there is no one for them to partner with.

If Elon said "We're going to have a SC with at least 4 stalls every 50 miles of every interstate in the whole continental US in 3 years time" do you think the CEO of _______ (insert any possible partner) will go "Yes, let's do it!"

No, they'll say: "Slow down. Sounds hard. Sounds risky. Sounds expensive."

No, partnering with anyone now will only drag Tesla down. I say keep the massive first mover advantage and run with it for a few more years. Make them come begging when Model 3 hits.

 

[snort]

Look, the technology part of it is 2%, the other 98% has to do with attitude. And in this respect no one is even close to Tesla, which is why there is no one for them to partner with.

the attitude change requires potential customers seeing it and management understanding that they like it. If those customers are seeing those hoity-toity, gated community, standoffish tesla owners, they're not going to get it.

If Elon said "We're going to have a SC with at least 4 stalls every 50 miles of every interstate in the whole continental US in 3 years time" do you think the CEO of _______ (insert any possible partner) will go "Yes, let's do it!"

No, they'll say: "Slow down. Sounds hard. Sounds risky. Sounds expensive."

There certainly are plenty of executives that would act like this. there are plenty of others who would say "cool! let's steal a march on our competitors! by partnering with tesla, we can get a big headstart!"

The central problem with adopting a new technology is that a lot of people are skeptical. Tesla has proved that it works.

On the scale of a big car company, superchargers are not that expensive. It looks like they cost about $150K to build. 1000 of them, double the number that there are now in the world, thus costs $150M. It costs the majors between one and six $billion to develop a new car. not quite trivial in comparison, but definitely not a deal breaker when you're working on that scale.

No, partnering with anyone now will only drag Tesla down. I say keep the massive first mover advantage and run with it for a few more years. Make them come begging when Model 3 hits.

you're going to have to explain how you think this dragging down works. partners building compatible stations makes more of them for everybody.

 

[jerry33]

there are plenty of others who would say "cool! let's steal a march on our competitors! by partnering with tesla, we can get a big headstart!"

While the big headstart is true, I doubt there are many (or any) executives that feel that way.

The central problem with adopting a new technology is that a lot of people are skeptical.

The central problem is that existing car manufacturers don't want to build electric cars. The most proactive of the lot (Nissan) made a car that's really only useful as a second car so that it wouldn't compete with the cars they want to sell. It's hard to be interested in Superchargers when your car goes less than 100 miles.

 

[Johan]

While the big headstart is true, I doubt there are many (or any) executives that feel that way.



The central problem is that existing car manufacturers don't want to build electric cars. The most proactive of the lot (Nissan) made a car that's really only useful as a second car so that it wouldn't compete with the cars they want to sell. It's hard to be interested in Superchargers when your car goes less than 100 miles.

Thanks for putting it bluntly Jerry.

Snort, you're of course correct but again only in theory. As strange as it may sound there aren't "many" leaders of other car makers who think this way. In fact there isn't a single one! How do I know? Well, if there was Tesla would have a partner already! My guess is Tesla haven't been approached at all, or if they have it's been by someone unwilling to commit (looking to just piggy back with some kind of pay-per-use or some other arrangement that would ruin the network). That's what I meant by "dragging down". The only company worth partnering with would be someone as committed to EVs as Tesla, and as of today this company just doesn't exist at all.

 

[Rocky_H]

I have thought for a while that whichever car company will be the first to partner on the Supercharger network would be able to get a big advantage over all of the others in the coming EV revolution. However, they all have this common attitude that prevents them from doing it.

It’s mainly pride. They do not want to humble themselves to admit that Tesla has something that they need, because that would legitimize them, which is something they want to avoid.

 

[snort]

It’s mainly pride. They do not want to humble themselves to admit that Tesla has something that they need, because that would legitimize them, which is something they want to avoid.

A big part of it is the patent system and the belief that through having exclusivity, there are big profits to be had. A business as big as a car company, even a small one like Tesla, is a mass of very powerful political forces, pulling in a lot of different directions at once. An example:

In 1980, IBM came up with what came to be called the Industry Standard Architecture. They wanted it to be proprietary, but Bill Gates convinced IBM exec Don Estridge that it would be even better if they set a standard and encouraged other manufacturers to build parts for it, clones of it and write software for it. Estridge had had a few wins within IBM and was on the way up politically, and was able to convince his bosses that Gates might be on to something. It was not an easy decision for them: IBM had built itself a huge monopoly, and by being a little bit incompatible, they had been doing a good job of keeping it, for decades. They were many times as powerful and wealthy as ALL the rest of the computer business at the time. But Gates proved to be right and as a consequence, IBM made much more money from the IBMPC than they had ever imagined and Estridge became the heir apparent for all of IBM. The way Gates described it is that he'd rather have 25 cents from each of a million machines than all the income from a thousand machines that generate $250 each. even though it's the same amount of money the million machine market has a much bigger growth opportunity.

Estridge was killed in a plane crash in 1985, and amazingly quickly, the old monopolist forces within IBM rose to prominence. They decided that they must have proprietary rights to the next generation of personal computer. The product they came up with was the "media channel architecture", MCA. This was superior to ISA in a lot of ways, but it was designed to be difficult to clone or build components for without expensive cooperation from IBM. It was not really a failure, but it separated IBM from the rapid advances going on in the world of personal computers and it took IBM from being completely dominant in an industry the way few companies have ever been, to being an also-ran.

Being a monopoly is a good way to make a lot of money, because you can control the market to some degree and you are insulated from the consequences of many of your mistakes. Pretty much the only way to beat a monopoly is to have an advantage that is so big that the monopoly can't adapt fast enough. So conservative executives try to get a monopoly, and having a proprietary interface is one of the tools they use. Smart executives like Gates and Estridge understand that this is a trap. They still do it if they can, but they have the mental flexibility to take the big leap to the new paradigm when the need arises. There are plenty of these people out there--you don't get to be a top executive in a big company without being very, very smart--but there are a lot of big company executives who inherited their positions and are smart politically, but don't have the farsight of someone like Bill Gates.

So: it may feel like pride from the outside, but to the people doing it, it's what they think is hard-nosed business. I am sure are people within all of the car companies who are watching what Tesla is doing and trying to convince their management to follow it. But Elon Musk has made it a little more difficult, by insisting that they use his front-loaded pricing model for the superchargers. This, unfortunately, is a little bit of the same proprietaryness that's holding back the big boys.

--Snortybartfast

 

[Johan]

Snorty: I respectfully disagree

Front-loading the cost for the SC network is a strategic move that is very easy to mimic if you want. Nothing proprietary about it. Also likely pretty easy to partner in on if you want. But to suggest Tesla should abandon this model, which obviously works great, in order to accommodate others is akin to harakiri.

Also when discussing the SC network, the technicalities of it and the financing/business model don't forget one big thing: The SC would be worthless if it wasn't symbiotically integrated with great cars (S/soon X) and the cars would be far less great without the network.

 

[snort]

It's not the front loading that's the proprietary problem. Tesla has a mature supercharger design which is patented, can be seen to be working well, and is significantly superior to anything else out there. They have offered to open it, but conditional on following tesla's front-loaded sales model. This is a non-starter for someone selling even a medium cost car. They are in effect, holding their patents hostage for the chimera of free charging. Its not free. The SCs need to be built and powered somehow. Tesla is trying to force other manufacturers to adopt his sales model before they can play, which will cost them, it looks like, about $2000 per car.

My example with the IBMPC illustrates how much faster open architectures expand than proprietary ones. Elon Musk has said over and over that his goal is to get as many people as possible driving electric, even if a lot of them are driving the cars of other manufacturers. That was Bill Gates goal too: to get a computer on every desk. He knew that if he helped make that happen, he'd make a lot of money and make a better world, even if a lot of other people made a lot of money off of his own hard work.

my idea is a technological solution to this. Adapters for other cars, which are paid for through the same front-loaded scheme. But once they are a commodity, they can be rented, which turns front loading into a pay as you go scheme. and chops $2000 off the sales price of any car doing it (but not, obviously, the long term price). as long as the users are paying for the maintenance and expansion of the network, why should I care who they are?

 

[Johan]

@Snort: But again we're back to the same issue, that seems hard for you to grasp: a lower priced car is very unlikely to have a large enough and well-managed enough battery to be able to take full advantage of the technology of the Supercharger network which means these cars will choke it, block it and degrade its value.

Also if you read up on it you'd know that the $2000 figure is bloated. Teslas actual cost per car is lower, and in fact can't really be calculated due to the fact that the network can be seen as,for all practical purposes, an extension of the individual physical vehicles. Lime I said above: without cars capable of utilizing the network it would have exactly zero value, and without the network the Tesla cars would have much lower utility value and appeal.

Also, money invested in the SC network is an important and very effective promotion/marketing expense. So that much of the cost is likely recouped several times over.

But we're not going to agree on this, I can tell. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

 

[ecarfan]

@Snort: But again we're back to the same issue, that seems hard for you to grasp: a lower priced car is very unlikely to have a large enough and well-managed enough battery to be able to take full advantage of the technology of the Supercharger network which means these cars will choke it, block it and degrade its value.

I disagree with the assumption you are predicating your argument on. Lower priced EVs could be capable of using the Supercharger network effectively and efficiently. Costs come down as volume goes up. The future may surprise you...

 

[snort]

@Snort: But again we're back to the same issue, that seems hard for you to grasp: a lower priced car is very unlikely to have a large enough and well-managed enough battery to be able to take full advantage of the technology of the Supercharger network which means these cars will choke it, block it and degrade its value.

Why? you keep insisting upon mysterious market and technological forces for which you provide zero explanation or even evidence of existence. A lower priced car with a supercharger interface would be able to use the network, and if the chargers are close enough to wherever they need charge, they will be used, irrespective of the size of the battery. you seem to think that a small battery car is inherently a junker, whose very existence in a supercharger site will somehow spread the contagion of junkieness to everybody else. I know several Leaf owners and a Kia Soul EV owner. A few of them are very serious car enthusiasts (especially the Soul owner) and a couple of them take immaculate care of their cars. Some of them are professional engineers and know a lot about battery management. One of them is a multimillionaire and also has a Tesla. Your premise @Johan, is not just wrong, but offensively, obscenely wrong.



The US national average price per KWH is about 12.5 cents. for an EV that goes 10,000 miles per year, this works out to about $400 a year for electricity. let's say the average US tesla gets 1/3d of its power from the superchargers and we cost this out over 5 years: 50,000*400*.33*5 = 33M. the superchargers themselves seem to cost about $150-250K to install. let's just grant the low end, which should be favorable to your position. 200 superchargers thus costs $30M. 63M/50,000 = $1260 per car, purely for infrastructure. the superchargers take some maintenance and taxes, and the equipment in the car itself is not free. No, I think $2000 is a pretty fair price. It'll get better over time as sales grow, but Tesla is very much sticking their neck out here, by building out the superchargers faster than there is demand to pay for them. In Europe, the electricity costs about twice as much (.208 euro per kwh) and there are fewer cars, so the cost equation gets even worse per car there.

 

[Johan]

I'm of course talking about today, not in 3-5 years where things will be very different. By then the Model 3 will be out and it will be intriguing to see how Tesla approach the issue of Model 3 and supercharging, both technically as well as financially. But until 2017-2018 the only Teslas using the network will be S and X car, with minimum 60 kWh liquid cooled batteries. If "less capable" cars (I hope I'm not being offensive again) were to start accessing the network in 2015, 2016 or 2017 I argue that these cars will actually put a bigger strain on the network per charging instance since these cars will inarguably always be charging fewer miles per minute than Model S/X. My premise is that the main limiting factor of the network is how many cars each location can serve per hour/day. Electrical costs are negligible. By this logic such a "lesser car" should actually be paying relatively more than a Tesla for access to the network, regardless of if we're talking about a one-time unlimited access fee or some kind of pay-per-use model (which I would also argue will complicate things and end up costing just as much to administer as people might think they'd "save" on such an option as opposed to pre-paid unlimited access).

It has nothing to do with snobbery on my part. Before I bought my Tesla I drove a MiEV and most days I ride my electric bicycle to work.

 

[snort]

Electrical costs over 5 years, according to my calculation shown above, are approximately the same as the construction cost of the station. they are almost double the cost of the station in Europe. I don't have numbers on taxes and maintenance, but I'm sure they are not trivial.

I think (and I suspect Elon does too), that there should be enough spare SC bays that waiting is a very rare event. If there are enough SC bays for the demand on it, then it shouldn't matter if they are big or small battery vehicles. irrespective of the demand balance. you are certainly correct that small battery vehicles need to charge more frequently. but small battery vehicles are used almost exclusively for short trips like commuting to work and going to the grocery store, and will almost never be in the inter-city gaps that are the main province of supercharger. About 2/3rds of the miles I put on my own car each year are commuting and short trips. The nearest supercharger is about 100km, so I don't use them except on long trips. I suspect this is pretty typical.

presently, very few superchargers are close to big population centers and Tesla has tried to discourage locals from using those few for commuter charging. This is exactly the crowding out problem that you are concerned about, with only Teslas being eligible. So if we provide access to small battery vehicles, we haven't changed anything at all, except for opening up the network to a wider range of vehicles, and more of those vehicles will be helping fund the buildout of the Supercharger. Most small battery EVs have little use for inter-city charging. But many of those that do will be happy to pay the front loaded cost and some more will be happy to pay the rent. If Tesla and its drivers can avoid blocking them, we will get a lot more superchargers on smaller routes. trip planning will become just as easy as it is for ICE cars. You know there will be a high speed charger close whenever you need one.

in engineering and business planning, there is no now. There's only a before and an after. what's before is done; you can't change it. I'm concerned with it only for what it can teach me, which is a lot. there's very little opportunity to change what's coming soon. Even if Tesla start designing this adapter today, and give it their full blessing, it's not going to be ready for public consumption any earlier than November or December, more likely longer--unless they've been working on it for a while without telling anybody. That's the reality of engineering, and more importantly, manufacturing. Talking about this thing as though it's coming very soon is an exercise in irrelevant.

-Snortybartfast.

 

[andydoty]

So, what if Tesla were to collect a percentage of money from each car manufacturer that would like to utilize the charging stations? In the case of Nissan, they could charge a modest sum to Nissan to unlock the Leafs ability (via an adapter) to utilize the SC network?


@snort,
Not being critical, however, I believe MCA was Micro Channel Architecture not Media Channel.
I owned a PS/2 with MCA and boards were exorbitantly expensive. It did work very well however.

 

[FlasherZ]

Not being critical, however, I believe MCA was Micro Channel Architecture not Media Channel.
I owned a PS/2 with MCA and boards were exorbitantly expensive. It did work very well however.

This is correct. IBM used MicroChannel adapters on both PS/2 and RS/6000 (both POWER and PPC processor arch), until PCI took over. The cards were incredibly expensive, as noted. However, MCA did bring us many desirable features that were pulled into PCI. If anyone remembers the craziness of device discovery, "base address" and manual IRQ's - that was the pain of ISA and VMbus architectures. EISA helped slightly with its configuration parameters, but it was MCA that brought standard system-driven configurable parameters to expansion cards.

(Full disclosure: a big fan of IBM's architecture, especially RS/6000, even if they didn't execute it well...)