Will Tesla Buildup Superchargers to Accommodate Anticipated Demand from Ford, GM, Rivian, and whoever else, Adopting NACS circa 2024/2025?

[threeputts]

lots of discussion at this similar thread/poll:

Will Tesla Buildup Superchargers to Accommodate Anticipated Demand from Ford, GM, Rivian, and whoever else, Adopting NACS circa 2024/2025?

With the recent news of Ford, GM, Rivian - and presumably others - moving to adopt Tesla's NACS plug and therefore be able to use the SuperCharger network (that is presumably v3 SuperChargers) starting circa 2024/2025, what's your best guess as to what impacts, if any, this will have on Tesla...

teslamotorsclub.com

 

[ewoodrick]

What do you guys think? I know this is pure speculation but it IS a concern esp with the ramped production of Tesla itself + all the new manufacturers hopping onboard in 2024-2025 timeframe. The network itself is already quite busy ... I can't imagine what it'll be like coming up. It's not like Tesla can just spin up new sites overnight -- many locations are still 1+ year permitting BEFORE even starting construction

As has been seen, Tesla can install chargers faster than anyone else. Just a year or so ago, Tesla built a Supercharger factory Tesla opens its new Supercharger factory

They now have chargers in a very modular form, where basically the site has to be prepared, electric cable ran, and they drop the Supercharges as a single prefab module. Really fast installation process.

Here's a recent article on planned locations Tesla Temporarily Leaked 340+ Upcoming Supercharger Stations - CleanTechnica


Sure, some locations can have long lead times, but not all do.

BUT, Most cars rarely use the Supercharger network. Most cars charge at home. And most of these other vehicles coming aboard will as well. And pretty much all the third-party charging sites will be installing NACS connectors as well.

Now, if you are in middle or lower California, it's a different story. And Tesla is working hard to solve it.

 

[Tman317]

I think they will get behind the curve. It's time consuming and expensive to build SC locations, plus the time needed to negotiate an agreement with the property owners needed to install them. With that said It may be a year or two before Tesla owners notice much difference, which depends how sales go with other manufacturers. It won't affect me much as I don't take may MY or most road trips. The ride is poor, I fine the additional planning needed for charging to be a PITA, I miss satellite radio (much better than streaming from my phone). It's a shame as I love driving the car around town and short trips.

 

[RTPEV]

I think they will get behind the curve. It's time consuming and expensive to build SC locations,

Tesla is operating at a scale that gives them a massive economies of scale benefit, and they manufacture the equipment themselves, so they've optimized the cost quite nicely. And they are flush with cash, and in the future may be able to benefit from NEVI funding. I don't think expense is a major concern.

As for time consuming, Tesla has this down to a science. They can roll out their pre-fab units in 1-2 weeks, and again, at their scale, they have gotten the permitting process and coordinating with utilities down to a science. Most of the time it's not like it used to be. They've probably seen it all in the way of having to deal with permitting entities and already know what it takes to get a clean permit. Not trying to trivialize the process, but I also don't think this is a concern.

plus the time needed to negotiate an agreement with the property owners needed to install them.

This is the best part. Property owners (hosts) are ever increasingly more interested in approaching Tesla to host a site than the other way around. Just like the NACS domino effect, they are seeing their competitors hosting sites and don't want to be left behind without chargers on site. This too is becoming increasingly easy for Tesla. And again, with thousands of sites nation- and world-wide, they pretty much already know how to make a deal with hosts. They've probably seen it all.

 

[ucmndd]

People have been asking this for years and speculating about massive problems.

It’s never been a significant issue. No reason to think it will be any time soon. Tesla makes more EVs than every other manufacturer combined - at this moment in time giving other vehicles supercharger access is a tiny drop in the bucket.

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

I think they will get behind the curve. It's time consuming and expensive to build SC locations, plus the time needed to negotiate an agreement with the property owners needed to install them. With that said It may be a year or two before Tesla owners notice much difference, which depends how sales go with other manufacturers. It won't affect me much as I don't take may MY or most road trips. The ride is poor, I fine the additional planning needed for charging to be a PITA, I miss satellite radio (much better than streaming from my phone). It's a shame as I love driving the car around town and short trips.

If they were always dealing with individual companies it could be more time-consuming to get an agreement and install.

But Tesla has agreements with companies to install in multiple locations so things can happen quickly. There are 134 open Superchargers at Wawas, and growing.

I would also expect that they have a standard agreement, so there wouldn't be that much work for Tesla.

 

[BitJam]

Tesla itself + all the new manufacturers hopping onboard in 2024-2025 time frame.

The other OEMs keep talking about getting access to 12,000 superchargers. Google tells me Tesla currently has 17,000 in the US and, as others have said, Tesla is building more quickly. Just a wild guess but I'd bet the chargers at stations that are currently crowded will be among the 5,000+ that Tesla is not going to open up to other brands.

If the other brands mostly get access to underutilized superchargers then this is like free money for Tesla which will get plowed back into building more superchargers. The other big benefit is the public charging network will not only provide NACS access but they will be forced to up their game and provide decent convenience and reliability or they will go out of business.

Teslarati claims the number of supercharger stations is growing 33% year over year:

Tesla Supercharger stations grow 33% year-over-year

While Tesla's gross margin in Q1 was lower YoY, key aspects of its business like the Supercharger Network are still growing.

www.teslarati.com

Maintaining exponential growth is really hard and eventually becomes impossible so I do expect some hiccups along the way but I don't foresee a major supercharger crisis. My guess is a lack of service centers will be the primary pain point.

Walmart plans to add thousands of fast charging stations at their stores. ISTM these will now have to include NACS. This is going to complement the supercharger network nicely. For example, from my house the nearest supercharger is an hour away. The next nearest one is two hours away. Walmart is six minutes away.

IMHO the NACS dominoes have been the best news for Tesla owners all year. It ensures we will have plenty of DCFC options going forward and the number of Tesla compatible destination chargers should also skyrocket.

 

[beatle]

The other OEMs keep talking about getting access to 12,000 superchargers. Google tells me Tesla currently has 17,000 in the US and, as others have said, Tesla is building more quickly. Just a wild guess but I'd bet the chargers at stations that are currently crowded will be among the 5,000+ that Tesla is not going to open up to other brands.

It's because non-Tesla vehicles will only charge on V3 SCs. V2 aren't compatible: https://www.ford.com/support/how-tos/search/can.i.use.a.tesla.supercharger

"Note: V2 Superchargers are not capable of charging non-Tesla EVs and will continue to be unavailable."

 

[zknobody]

From what I've seen here in Canada, municipal governments make building slow.

Permits take forever delaying expansion so this will slow down expansion in some areas of this country without a doubt!

 

[jerry33]

Given the number of BEVs from rivals and that Tesla is already building SCs at the fastest rate they can sustain--remember each SC requires negotiation with the property owner--I don't see much of an issue.

 

[Ken Thomas]

Just voted Optimistic with normal build out.

Just got back from a 5,121 mile road trip crossing 11 states. Lots of miles on interstate highways, state roads, rural back roads, just about every kind of road imaginable.

Absolutely no issues charging. Never any "hypermiling" or "range anxiety". Rarely under 80 mph. Followed the same driving / "fueling" schedules we have always driven on road trips, in gas cars prior to our Tesla, and it didn't take any longer.

Not once in the whole trip did we every have to wait. We found there were far more SC's than we expected there would be.

In our experience; there is a lot of headroom as it is, much less with the in-progress build out.

 

[johnnycnote]

Highly unlikely that Tesla would agree to let others use the SC network without a plan in place...

 

[EbS-P]

Forgive me for not reading 4 pages, but it trick me that the poll didn’t even mention other companies building out their current (or new companies starting to build) chargers with NACS chargers. Tesla open source the standard. I think it’s silly (and rather monopolistic) to think one company can build out the entire and only NACS charging network.

Can Tesla meet demand on their network? That depends a lot on other companies. My position is Tesla alone will not be able to meet national NACS charging station Demand through 2024/25 alone. But I also don’t think they will have to. Once major utility companies get their act together there will be serious competition for charging dollars.

 

[jerry33]

Forgive me for not reading 4 pages, but it trick me that the poll didn’t even mention other companies building out their current (or new companies starting to build) chargers with NACS chargers. Tesla open source the standard. I think it’s silly (and rather monopolistic) to think one company can build out the entire and only NACS charging network.

Can Tesla meet demand on their network? That depends a lot on other companies. My position is Tesla alone will not be able to meet national NACS charging station Demand through 2024/25 alone. But I also don’t think they will have to. Once major utility companies get their act together there will be serious competition for charging dollars.

I somewhat disagree with this because most charging is done at home, not at charging stations. Also the profit margin is very low for most charging stations. The margin is better for Tesla, but the others have to charge quite a bit to have a viable network. The uptime tells the story. Also "competition is coming" has been legacy auto's mantra for the last twenty years. I don't see it changing in the future despite press releases (Asian competition excepted).

 

[houstonian]

Forgive me for not reading 4 pages, but it trick me that the poll didn’t even mention other companies building out their current (or new companies starting to build) chargers with NACS chargers.

VBB limits the amount of poll choices; hard two go beyond two variables (e.g. will TSLA SCers meet demand + how they do it + null).

Can Tesla meet demand on their network? That depends a lot on other companies. My position is Tesla alone will not be able to meet national NACS charging station Demand through 2024/25 alone. But I also don’t think they will have to. Once major utility companies get their act together there will be serious competition for charging dollars.

Fair point, but can major utilities implement - from scratch - a material amount of L3 charger locations in under two years? Uncertain.

Five years / 2028-ish? Maybe, but doubtfully (imho) another 3rd party can offer a material footprint comparable to the breadth and reliability of what Tesla’s got by 2025.

 

[Spaghett]

Forgive me for not reading 4 pages, but it trick me that the poll didn’t even mention other companies building out their current (or new companies starting to build) chargers with NACS chargers.

I do think there is a valid concern that even if other companies add NACS connectors to their stations, Tesla Superchargers will continue to be the most popular/reliable places to charge and therefore at risk of crowding.

 

[blue y]

inb4 3 hour bolt charges and F150s top charging at 20kW sitting at stations the vehicles barely fit in the parking stalls clogging up stations.

 

[houstonian]

I think you are worried about nothing. Here is a screen shot of the number of Superchargers being built right now from

supercharge.info


View attachment 951885

Will follow up with:

Current V3 + under construction circa June 2023


Current V3 + under construction circa June 2023 with 20+ or more stalls


Current V3 + under construction circa June 2023 with 40+ or more stalls

So a 25% increase in superchargers planned/in-progress. Point still stands, availability is still lacking in parts of country + anecdotally on a recent drive down to LA a lot of chargers are at 100% capacity with in-nav quoting 25min waits.

Interesting to also note the largest concentration of 'large' SCs [read: 20+ stalls] are in CA, and southern CA to be specific. Suspect Tesla sees the same thing.

Will older bolt/leaf give access to supercharger too? Even though they shouldn't there ARE cars that charge slow af and could squat on spots. I'm sure other companies will be ramping production too soon.

I do not know either way but my guess is "no". Would also hazard a guess that DC quick charging will become a standard feature on mostly all (if not all) EVs going forward.

People have been asking this for years and speculating about massive problems.

It’s never been a significant issue. No reason to think it will be any time soon. Tesla makes more EVs than every other manufacturer combined - at this moment in time giving other vehicles supercharger access is a tiny drop in the bucket.

Did not initially click how much SC demand originated from Tesla itself - and to Tesla's credit - their ability to match increasing supply to increasing demand appears to be working.

I do think one thing which caught Tesla offsides is a higher than expected uptake to use SCers as a regular charge option, particularly with the 3s/Ys who domicile in an apartment, condo, or some other urban-ish setting where adding L2/L1 charging is not practical...if you want to see one busy-a$$ supercharger, check out the one on W Alabama in Houston TX...insane utilization till 1/2am!

This location supports a urban area in Houston with moderate residential density (e.g. mid-rise apartments/condos and patio homes) and while the patio/SF residences presumably could install a feasible L2 solution, I'd assume less options exist, if any, for the apartments and condos...hence the demand rebounds to a swamped SC location.

That said, Tesla's brining online two new locations / 24 stalls combined in close proximity and one hopes the boost in supply will help ameliorate the high usage at W Alabama. To the larger point though this does seem Tesla's aggressively moving to build out excess capacity where needed, even if it's a tad late due to unforeseen demand from those who cannot access a ongoing L2 solution when Tesla perhaps thought they could originally.

 

[MP3Mike]

Will older bolt/leaf give access to supercharger too? Even though they shouldn't there ARE cars that charge slow af and could squat on spots. I'm sure other companies will be ramping production too soon.

Leaf's won't. First they are CHAdeMO, not CCS, so they aren't compatible. Second, Nissan hasn't adopted NACS for their future vehicles.

Bolts are a GM product, and the announcement said existing GM EV owners will be able to use the V3 Superchargers. So most likely they will be able to use it with the appropriate adapter. But really, there aren't that many of them, and there won't be any more after this year. (Unless GM changes their mind.) So it really shouldn't be a big problem. (And really they don't charge that much slower than the older Tesla Model Ss.)

GM sold a total of 15,652 EVs in 23Q2:

• Bolt: 13,959
• Hummer EV: 47
• Lyriq: 1,348

Given Tesla sold ~466k in that same time period, likely about half in the US, I don't think you really need to worry about the small number of EVs GM sells clogging the Superchargers for a while. (Maybe if they were all sold in one region, it could cause a problem, but that seems unlikely.)

 

[BitJam]

I do think there is a valid concern that even if other companies add NACS connectors to their stations, Tesla Superchargers will continue to be the most popular/reliable places to charge and therefore at risk of crowding.

The others will have to improve reliability or they will die off. This is another big benefit from opening NACS, it will force the other charging companies to get their acts together.