This is a death sentence for Tesla. I have a Model 3 that I enjoy despite its shortcomings. One of the deciding factors was the supercharger network. It’s the easiest system I’ve used for charging. It makes all other networks infuriating in comparison.
A lot of people get Teslas for the ease of charging alone. If the network starts to falter, people will leave the brand even faster than they already are.
Tesla really needs to vote this idiot out of the CEO position before he kills the company.
Not to mention the charging infrastructure is one of the reasons some people haven’t made the switch yet. Anything holding back charging expansion is a disaster in my view.
I don’t think that’s it at all. The cost of a new car, any new car, is still out of reach for the vast majority of Americans, much less a dedicated daily commuter vehicle (because you need a gas car for long trips). PHEV is an imperfect compromise, but there simply aren’t enough used PHEV models available on the market.
I bought a car last year, and I really wanted to get something electric, but the car I need just doesn’t exist at the price I can afford. Chargers didn’t factor into it.
You say “you need a gas car for long trips”, and “Chargers didn’t factor into it”.
Isn’t that directly contradicting? Why else do you feel like you need a gas car for long trips if it isn’t related to either not enough chargers or chargers still not being fast enough for you? Chargers absolutely factor into that part of why you didn’t buy electric yet.
But also, the notion that they can’t do long trips is already pretty outdated. There are very few places left where you would even need to take a detour to take a long trip in an electric car. The only downside is that charging at max speed takes about 3x as long as filling with gas still, and not every charging station is max speed. As that continues to improve, it’ll be less and less of a difference.
So, funding the R and D department of the charging network, as well as the construction of the charging network, are absolutely fundamental to more people adopting electric as their single vehicle choice. And not as their second vehicle only for one small purpose.
Right. If you put in enough chargers, ranges of 300 to 400mi are fine. You need to stop every 2 to 4 hours, anyway, so it’s not a big deal in practice.
Stopping every 2 hours is nuts. 4 hours sure ok. I regularly drive long distances for work and if it’s 6 hours or less I’m going to try to make it without stopping at all.
You’re harming yourself doing this. First, sitting for long periods of time isn’t good, and getting up and stretching every 2 hours is recommended. This applies to office work just as much as driving. Second, urination typically happens every 3-4 hours, and if you’re not, then you’re likely dehydrated or have something else going wrong.
If you really, really want to do this, well OK, but we shouldn’t put the whole EV transition on hold just to let you do this.
Yeah nothing’s going to stop me and I do far worse things for my health. You’re right though.
And yeah I was just commenting on the two hour thing which I thought seemed silly. Nothing to do with the original topic of EVs.
It’s not a big deal if you’re only driving a few hours. Longer trips, especially business trips, yes that’s a big deal.
Not to mention, the real world tests don’t support the stated driving ranges for most models. Ideal conditions hardly ever exist in the real world.
In the real world, people don’t regularly drive 600 miles in a hurry either.
Most people don’t, but some do. I did for a while, when I was working as a construction manager and then again as a generator technician. It’s a big country, with all kinds of people. I think you’d be surprised how many people frequently need to drive ling distances in a hurry.
If it’s a business trip where time matters where you can’t afford to loose 25 minutes every few hours, why are you driving instead of flying?
Because planes won’t drop you off at the client’s house, even when you ask nicely.
No, it isn’t directly contradictory, because those advancements aren’t available now and there is a directionality to the relationship between mass adoption and infrastructure. I wanted to buy one despite the lack of infrastructure, but there were too many barriers to entry.
I know where the chargers are, and I know that I can probably charge at home and at work and at the rest stops where we normally stop for gas. But I also frequently go to places where even gas stations are rare, and it still takes 3 times as long to charge, and I may not always have that kind of time. I may find myself on an unexpected trip where I need to gas up, and without that option, I don’t really have a car I need.
Yes, I think we should be investing in research and development, and maybe one day there will be a charging network capable of replicating the speed and ubiquity of gas stations. But that’s not going to happen until and unless there is mass adoption, and there won’t be mass adoption until the cars are affordable and available. You need people everywhere demanding more charging stations, or the infrastructure won’t happen. Business owners aren’t ever going install more chargers than they need in the hope that it will sell more electric cars. That’s backwards.
Even if that charging network existed today, the existing lineup of cars are still priced at a premium and are difficult to find in stock. I wanted one, and could not find something affordable near me. The additional cost wasn’t something I could justify, regardless of whether the chargers were available.
Trying to decide if I agree or disagree, so I upvoted!
The problem is that more people feel that way than would be actually affected. Making numbers up here, but BEVs should handle the needs of 90% but 50% are convinced they can’t. There’s a huge mismatch of expectations.
Combine that with lack of availability, high prices, and manufacturer/dealer resistance to change, and it’s not going smoothly
But the other half of the argument is that things just don’t magically get “good enough”. It’s a progression where some aspect gets a little better or a few more are sold, prompting the need for more investment in another aspect. Any such huge change in something that affects everyone’s life, will be chaotic and take time. How do we smooth that out? Speed the process up?
If I want to go anywhere out of my state, I now need to budget nearly an hour every 200 ish miles for charging. That turns what used to be a 6 hour trip into closer to 8 or 9.
It would take most of the charge range just for me to get to anything interesting, and now not only do I have hours of driving to do, but also hours of sitting around doing nothing.
A gas car can be fully refilled in 5 minutes and be ready for another 300 miles of driving. Electrics just don’t have the appeal to someone like me who makes somewhat regular trips over distances. I’d love to take trains, but that’s not viable in my area, so I’m sticking with gas cars for now.
Not an hour, I regularly go from STL to Chicago in my electric car and it adds 25 min if im driving right back. If I’m staying overnight and plug-in it only adds 15. That’s also when I go to the bathroom and get a snack.
Just like… you know… filling a normal car up with gas. Take a piss, grab some jerkey, have a smoke if that’s your thing, go on reddit for a minute, then keep driving.
It’s not hard. The paradigm is barely changing. I genuinely don’t get how people fail to understand that.
I get the hesitation though. You see gas stations everywhere, if you don’t know what you’re looking for you don’t see charger stations. My car was the last gas thing I had, mower, trimmer, I already had solar panels from a Illinois solar program. I love taking friends on trips with it and then seeing that it’s not scary. I have run into broken chargers twice. Once from vandalism but thankfully it still worked for me as I registered my car so it automatically uses my account to charge when plugged in. The other was a software issue that they had to send someone out to hard reset. Reminds me I told them it would be a cool idea to have registered/trained people that get free charging credits for fixing ones they come across.
Wow, that sucks. I guess Canada is further ahead in that. Electric car charging is 20 minutes per 3 hours here. I can see why it would make a big difference if it’s an hour for your chargers.
It could also be the software for your car isn’t well optimized, they should ideally be having you stop around 25% battery and charging up to around 75% if you are trying to make the best time. The software should inject the stops as close as possible to that ideal if you tell it to prioritize speed.
But if the only chargers you have on your route are that slow, then I guess there isn’t much you can do but hope companies don’t stop funding the R and D and contsruction of more up to date ones.
I don’t think it’s the chargers, but the vehicles. Someone correct me if I’m wrong since I’m only familiar with Tesla, but enroute chargers do tend to be super/fast chargers already, and destination chargers really don’t need to be.
A fast charger is theoretically fast enough but vehicles only use its full power for a short time. each vehicle has a curve of the power it can use, where it’s usually not using the full capacity of the charger. I really think we mostly just need improved vehicles, and they have been improving over time
I was mostly being facetious, I don’t think it’s any different in Canada. The guy was just wrong about it taking an hour every 2 hours of driving.
US needs to regulate chargers.
Yes, yes, market and all. But look at printers. Or charger cables for small electronic devices (EU stepped in). Lock-in of customers is an incentive working against common chargers.
US needs to regulate chargers.
100%. This should have been addressed years ago, honestly. No one would tolerate VW only being able to gas up at Shell stations due to different nozzles. This is no different.
Did Tesla not make their charger an open standard that every new ev is shipping with?
Eventually, yeah.
In the past Elon offered it as part of a bundle, with the deal being:
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You get to use the Tesla connector and superchargers
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Tesla still retains all rights and ownership of the standard and can revoke access whenever they wish
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You agree agree not to use Tesla in the event they infringe on your parents
Unsurprisingly, nobody accepted that deal. I wonder what it was that prompted Tesla to have a change of heart? Were they expecting the government to step in and enforce a standard, a la EU, and they wanted to get ahead of it?
The part about not suing tesla over patent infringement was the true poison pill and why no one took them up on it. Ford has over 79000 patents alone and that’s just one auto manufacture.
I’m not sure that was a valid concern, even if Ford thought that way. This is pretty common in the tech industry, as a form of Mutually Assured Destruction. Everyone has a big portfolio of patents but mainly use them defensively: I won’t nuke you if you don’t nuke me
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I don’t get this concern: in the early stages when things were privately funded, there were incompatibilities, but with federal money and new standards, we seem to have a good set of regulations in place to ensure everything works together.
The beginnings of a market are chaos, but this one seems to have shaken that out
US needs to regulate chargers.
- The Department of Transportation, in partnership with the Department of Energy, finalized new standards to make charging EVs convenient and reliable for all Americans, including when driving long distances. The new standards will ensure everyone can use the network – no matter what car you drive or which state you charge in. The standards also require strong workforce standards;
- The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) outlined its final plan for compliance with the Build America, Buy America Act for federally funded EV chargers. Effective immediately, all EV chargers funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law must be built in the United States. The plan requires that, effective immediately, final assembly and all manufacturing processes for any iron or steel charger enclosures or housing occur in the United States. By July 2024, at least 55 percent of the cost of all components will need to be manufactured domestically as well;
- The new Joint Office of Energy and Transportation released a notice of intent to issue a funding opportunity for its Ride and Drive Electric research and development program. This program will advance the goal of building a national network of EV chargers for all Americans by supporting EV charging reliability, resiliency, equity, and workforce development;
- The Department of Energy today announced $7.4 million in funding for seven projects to develop innovative medium-and heavy-duty EV charging and hydrogen corridor infrastructure plans serving millions of Americans across 23 states;
- FHWA announced details for its soon-to-launch Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) discretionary grant program. The program will make available more than $2.5 billion over five years – including $700 million in funding through the first round of funding available to states, localities, Tribes, territories, and public authorities – to deploy publicly accessible charging and alternative fueling infrastructure in communities across the country, including at schools, grocery stores, parks, libraries, apartment complexes, and everywhere else Americans live and work; and,
- The Administration highlighted major manufacturing and other new facilities spurred by these investments and the Biden-Harris Administration’s Made in America policies, including new commitments from domestic EV charging manufacturers and network operators.
Assuming it isn’t strangled in the cradle by Red State infrastructure haters (like the HSR projects through the Midwest that Obama failed to implement), this could be a good thing.
But I’ve seen so many of these kinds of plans get a ton of money and produce vanishingly little in the way of material change. So we’ll see where it all goes.
Didnt this fucking jackass just like less than a week ago in the quarterly earnings report say they were going to release an affordable EV in a year, and now they just announced aha just fucking kidding on that one?
And the latest FHD still has insane bugs that try to murder you and those around you?
I wonder how long it will take thunderfoot or common sense skeptic to do a vid on this. Amazing.
Ok so, Tesla, shitting itself.
Twitter, shitting itself.
Boring Company… have they actually started any new projects?
Hyperloop companies have now all, I think, either gone bankrupt, dissolved, or switched to doing something else.
SolarCity? Actual Scam and Fraud.
Neuralink?
They recently claim to have made some progress with an actual human recipient of something like a seizure mediation device, but basically Neuralink is run by a bunch of students of an actual ground breaker in the realm of neural implants, and this actual ground breaker has been extremely critical of the company, and I believe threatened a lawsuit as they are basically using his research.
Theres been a whole bunch of top level staff leaving and drama. Hey they managed to unspeakably torture some pigs and monkeys though!
What they have with thesuccessfull human implant is neat, assuming its being reported on accurately, but its nothing new or groundbreaking.
Only thing left is SpaceX, and the only thing they’ve got going is Falcon 9 and Heavy.
Falcon 9 and Heavy are legitimately good rockets, problem is Musk and Shotwell have said for about a decade now they would get the launch costs down to around 5 million and a turn around time down to 24 hours or less.
So far the fastest turnaround on a Falcon re-use is a bit less than a month. And launch costs are competitive, but theyre 10 to 15 times what’s been promised.
Starliner, BFR, whatever, has so far cost taxpayers about 2 billion dollars, is about half a decade behind the contracted schedule, would require something like 12+ launches including refueling to be capable of getting ONE vessel to Mars, or being able to get to the Moon and back.
Theyve launched three of the things and now have to redesign a 2nd and 3rd version. And the 3 launches have basically been failures.
I was surprised the third launch managed to actually get suborbital at all, but the ascent half impacted the ocean at about mach 1 or 2, and the actual starship developed an uncontrollable spin early on and burned up in the atmosphere.
In terms of the NASA contract, SpaceX is supposed to have made an uncrewed lunar landing as of… Q1 2024. Oops. Yeah thats about 12 launches and a moon landing and presumably return of the lunar lander… and so far they cannot even get one into orbit.
As far as orbit goes, Musk was originally saying Starship would be taking people to orbit in 2020. The thing is not even orbit capable yet, muchless human rated.
I dunno if SpaceX will go completely tits up as is/have most of Musk’s other companies, its possible they’ll remain significant with 9 and Heavy, but it should be obvious that with everything else Musk has lied about and mismanaged and his insane public appearances of late, and lawsuits… Starliner doesn’t have a future.
They’ll run out of their current funding contract from NASA, and NASA will realize that Lockheed or ULA or maybe Blue Origin is a better bet for their plans for the Moon.
SpaceX also has Starlink. I don’t know how it’s doing financially, but I do know it’s quite popular in places where wired internet isn’t available, and for people who are mobile. I’ve even seen pictures of cruise ships using it for internet access.
True, I forgot that, however, that last time any actual SpaceX/Starlink finance news came out it was Elon emailing SpaceX employees saying that if they did not launch some huge number of Starlink sats within like a quarter or something, that SpaceX would literally go bankrupt.
Since then, Starlink receivers have had a massive amount of design flaws reported on, had to issue out new receivers, which customers were made to pay for IIRC, and raised their subscription fees.
The service does at least seem to work, though not as originally advertised.
Oh also the whole, “sure Ukraine Mil can use Starlink, er uh well actually they need to pay for it and oh well now Im gonna shut it all off right before a planned offensive because I’m becoming more and more of a MAGA dingbat by the minute” bullshit from Elon.
Tesla really needs to vote this idiot out of the CEO position before he kills the company.
That was last year. It’s too late now.
They can’t because the Musk personality cult is pretty much the only thing keeping the company viable at this point. They are absolutely fucked.
I see this repeated a lot but can’t see how it’s possibly the case. Dude has burned so many bridges over the last few years and I can’t say that I ever see anyone actually defend him personally. I think it’s more that his “anti-fans” see any positive comment toward SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink, or anything else as someone defending/supporting him when that simply isn’t the case.
My boss, who doesn’t even have a Tesla but is a nutty conservative, loves talking about Musk like he’s the modern day Henry Ford.
This comment is, in a nutshell, why Tesla is fucked. Conservatives will never buy electric until after Tesla is long dead so hitching your wagon to them is suicide.
Sure, but it’s not just Elmo’s NüFascist Clownshow Bonanza that’s the problem - he also makes horrible decisions and is a truly terrible “leader”.
Those horrible decisions are a minor contributor to the mass exodus by Democrats, who are the vast majority of Tesla owners.
I’m their prime demographic, currently car shopping to replace my wrecked Benz, and was leaning towards a Model 3 up until reading this headline lol. I guess I could still charge at home or if the network fails it could be purchased by another company?
Or I just avoid stressing about it altogether and get a normal car
EVs are awesome. I loved the two I had. The only reasons I don’t have one now is I hardly drive anymore and am doing construction on my house that makes a truck become useful. If there were an EV truck that wasn’t the size of the house I’m building or the cost of the house I’m building, I’d have gotten that. Instead I got the Maverick hybrid.
If you enjoy the luxury of the Benz, then the Model 3 would have been a step down. There are a lot of good EV options in the luxury range, but very few in the low end range. The Volvo XC40 was really fun to drive and pretty comfortable. My friend loved her Porsche Taycan (that might be too high end, not sure). My coworker just got an i4 and really likes it.
Get a Porsche Maccan.
I do think someone would immediately buy the charging network if it were an option. I mean gas stations have all kinds of stuff spring up around them when anyone stopping there won’t even be very long and only passengers will be bored with nothing to do for that short amount of time. At a charging station, you are taking a longer break and even the driver is participating in that break.
Owning the charge network is going to be a much bigger deal when it’s common to use your EV for long trips. And whether people want to or not at this point, it’s steadily becoming more and more normalized. It’s certainly more enjoyable overall to take a long trip in an EV. The downtime is nice. And healthier than sitting down for hours straight. Even before electric cars, people were encouraged to stop every 2 hours on a road trip anyway.
The old advice was to plan recreational stops along the trip, to prevent embolisms or cramps. What if charge stations had electric scooters or bikes and maps to fun 15 minute activities in range. Not to mention meals of course.
I know many people don’t take road trips in a healthy way currently, so gas cars seem like the better choice for them. You’ll “make better time” if that is the only important thing. But for people that already followed best practices, a road trip in an electric car is already the same.
Investors should build charging stations with infrastructure (ie restaurants, game rooms, etc) halfway between big cities that are 5 hours away from each other. 2.5 hours (~150 miles) is about the distance you can drive an EV before needing to charge. This would create tremendous bidirectional business for people traveling from big cities.
Charging at home is the way to go. You may be able to refinance your home if you haven’t paid it off, and rope in upgrades for new charging circuits.
Plus, there are programs being developed - note none have been finalized - to allow EVs to give power back to the grid and so you could one day make money back from keeping your car plugged in over night. There are already time of use rates too for many markets in the US and EU. Plus there’s peace of mind knowing that your car will always be fully topped off every morning.
As an electrical engineer that has studied the idea of Plug-in Hybrid EVs (PHEVs) and Battery EVs (BEVs), personally I always try to persuade people to look into PHEVs for personal and societal reasons, but even if you don’t go with Tesla for your BEV purchase I think it’s still worth it to go electric. Maybe consider the Chevy Bolt EUV, Nissan Leaf, or Volkswagen ID.4. On the PHEV side, there’s the Ford Escape Plug-in Hybrid and Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe. Lots of tax credits out there too for new ($7,500) and used ($4,000) so EVs are definitely still an opportunity!
- you could still charge at home
- teslas include a free adapter to the other us standard, so you could still charge at any other charging network
Just get a better EV.
I used to drive a Benz, I hated it. Now I’m on my second Cadillac and I’m never going back. Cadillac makes a damn fine automobile tell ya what.
GM makes Cadillac. GM does not make damn fine automobiles.
Subarus are pretty awesome. Just sayin’
While I agree, steering someone looking at a Tesla to replace a Benz towards one feels off. Subaru currently doesn’t have anything that I’d put in the performance luxury category that most Benz’s fall into (and that Tesla is trying to go for). Closest you can get in that is the current WRX, and it’s not even close to that. I say all of this as someone that loves his WRB STi hatch and plans on trying to keep it going until I die.
I love my Outback Wilderness, but I’d agree. It’s Utilitarian-Plus, but no one will confuse it with a luxury brand. Honestly, as the designated kid- and lumber- and dog-hauler, I wouldn’t want anything fancier anyway. The (largely unneeded for me) Wilderness package is already pushing it, but I do like it. :-)
I bought a plug-in hybrid last week. I’d have gotten a pure EV, but I take road trips sometimes, and I don’t want to rely on the patchy changing network in the US.
Another factor is that I rent a house, and there’s already one EV to charge at 120V. The wiring can’t really handle a second charger, and I didn’t want to always be fighting over it.
Tesla really needs to vote this idiot out of the CEO position before he kills the company.
I was holding shares specifically so I could vote Musk out when a vote would come up. These changes listed in the article are too much. I just sold my entire position in TSLA.
I don’t have a Tesla and have not used supercharger network but I can verify that other charging networks are infuriating and not just by comparison. I have half a dozen different apps with my credit card info on them and various old paid credits on them, not to mention committing to a good 5-10 min of fuck around time each time I park at a random charger and try to figure out what the hell this new system is.
I had a Volt (loved it for what it was) and I gave up charging it anywhere but at home. I had the same experience as you, had to have a dozen apps, use the stupid tap to pay, only to find out the network was down and you couldn’t use it. For a plug in hybrid, it was an inconvenience, for a pure EV that may be arriving with less than 10% battery, it would be a disaster.
Can I ask - what’s the best app you found so far?
For me, ChargePoint chargers are the easiest to use and consistently work best, but usually the most expensive.
Blink chargers are the worst. The app is clunky, slow, and the experience just never feels like they actually vetted the process. Also, it feels like they have a hard time keeping their chargers maintained.
What used to be Volta, now Shell (yeah the oil company) is a hit or miss depending on their charger actually working. Nice thing about Volta is that free is free (for now).
For actually finding working chargers, I use PlugShare.
That’s interesting. Always found EVGo more reliable than Chargepoint. There’s a lot of variation I’m sure regardless. Instead of Plugshare you should consider using Presto. It allows you to also start sessions within the app.
Musk also told staff that he would ask for the resignation of any executive “who retains more than three people who don’t obviously pass the excellent, necessary and trustworthy test.”
Pssst. Elon. You’re not any of those three things.
Shouldn’t he resign based on this criterion?
No, just the executive who’s retaining him, obviously
Which… I guess that means the board?
that would imply self-awareness and some degree of competence
And not being a raging narcissist. But then he wouldn’t be a billionaire, so it would be a win win.
On the one hand, funny, but i mean, who even cares though, everything Elon is going to zero, because he only has terrible ideas
the idea that you should buy a car whose features are disabled unless you pay extra for them is probably the main driver of enshittification in society. It’s the enshittification of ownership. Of course capitalists love this idea, but no actual human being should.
You don’t want to subscribe to the heated seats you already paid for? Looking forward to the near future where they replace the ignition with a card reader so you can do micropayments based on how long you use your own vehicle.
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This reads like an AI hallucination.
I was thinking 'shrooms or LSD. But you might be right. A slight over voltage would probably get you the same effect.
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You might be unwell.
… you really decided doubling down on the nonsense was going to disprove my statement?
It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for 'em.
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You need to see a psychologist internet person. That, and your other comment, sound exactly like schizophrenic talk.
Oof if that’s the case I legit feel bad for my last response to them…
You mad bro?
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Speaking of books, have you ever read the Earthsea series? The way you talk about things reminds me of how in Earthsea things have a true name by which you can call and have them send towards your will. The trick is that some people have more then one true name and that, I think, is metaphor for how we can escape being manipulated when someone (or AI) learns our nature.
That’s the most confusing load of bollocks I’ve read in a long time.
Protip: You’re not supposed to run your copypasta through chat GPT more then twice.
…do you ever smell things which nobody else notices?..
You’d say what with the what now?
When you have a narcissistic sociopath for a boss don’t expect job security. All these layoffs and his insane letter will do is cultivate toadying, fear, distrust, cliques and a culture of backstabbing within Tesla.
I’ve said before that the supercharger network is their most important long term asset. They opened up their plug standard, other manufacturers are jumping on board, and they have the largest network that supports all those new EVs.
Only problem is that it’s boring, and Elon doesn’t like boring. So now here we are.
What really baffles me is why he totally ghosted his battery swap station idea. That completely solves the range and charging time issue all in one fell swoop. Demonstrated it on stage even. Guessing it either wasn’t profitable enough for him, not s3xy enough, or he wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to scale it up.
There’s been some discussion over the years that Tesla never seriously tried to make the battery swap work, that they did it to claim subsidies from California which they subsequently never returned to the taxpayers.
what a classic
Wow - didn’t hear that but sounds like something he would do.
He announced it as part of a tax break scam, then let the project die.
Nio has seemingly been successful with battery swap stations in their cars, so luckily the concept hasn’t been completely abandoned.
Tom Scott trying it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w
I would love for a Nio style battery swap to make it to the U.S. It just makes sense.
And for those saying they don’t want some janky battery that’s been through a bunch of cycles. If you have battery swap and access to a station, there’s not a lot of incentive to charge at home since the swap stations do it. The max battery life for most EVs is around 10 years. After that, a total replacement is $$$. With the swap system, you have a moderately used battery forever. If it doesn’t hold charge well, just go back to the swap station and get another one.
I just got back from a trip to Southern California. Every Electrify America L3 station was busy and had a waiting line. Someone said it was normal and many stations were busy until 3-4am. Turns out anyone living in an apartment or condo highrise had to charge at these stations. It used up 2-3 hours of their day just to charge up. Everyone in line said they hated it and many said they regretted getting EVs.
A swap station would do brisk business and roll them in and out in 5m.
Crazy. I could repeat this with every sentence being the opposite. Let me try ….
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I would
lovehate for a Nio style battery swap to make it to the U.S. It just makes no sense.And for those saying they don’t want to have yet another middleman, another huge industry of unnecessary infrastructure, always have to visit a refueling station. If you charge at home, there’s not a lot of incentive to battery swap even if you have access to a station. The typical battery life for most EVs is over 10 years and getting longer as batteries improve so you’d need at most one replacement for any practical life of the vehicle, vs swapping means you never own your battery yet pay over and over: $$$. With charge at home , you have a moderately used battery that will last longer than most people own their vehicle, you’ll always have a full charge, and never have to visit a local refueling station again. It’s very unlikely that a battery won’t charge well, given the predictability of chemistry and fewer moving parts.
A couple months ago, I got back from a trip to Northern New England. The only Tesla Supercharger station I tried had plenty of available chargers in perfect working order and no waiting. Someone said it was normal and many stations were very convenient . Turns out these stations are available even in many small cities and towns, convenient to refueling on road trips. It used less than 30 minutes of my day just to charge up for the drive back, and I didn’t mind walking around the attached shopping center . There wasn’t anyone in line to ask about any frustrations or regrets they may have about getting EVs.
A swap station is an unnecessary distraction to electrified transportation. We’d have to build out a huge unnecessary industry of middlemen, rather than take advantage of our existing buildout of electricity everywhere, would not own our own batteries, and vehicles would be less efficiently designed, having to have standardized removable batteries in one place, rather than integrated into the frame of the vehicle
Notice that I said Electrify America. A lot of the Tesla charging stations did have room, mainly because the software routes people to available stations.
Non-Tesla car companies are making matters worse by piling onto EA and giving away 2-3 years of free L2/L3 charging. That creates incentive to just go there. Many people don’t have Teslas, nor can they charge at home. Those all go to EA and create 2 hour wait times.
The Tesla charging experience is one of their key advantages. However, that’s going to change once they open it up to all cars, which they are. OTOH, Musk is reportered to have fired the whole charging station team, so maybe it won’t happen.
Replaceable batteries swapped in 5m makes for a good user experience. Nothing we’ve said here changes that fact.
Exactly.
It’s not that good of an idea in the long run. It was attractive when EVs struggled to have 100mi range and L3 chargers didn’t exist. Once batteries got good enough to push 300-400mi and there’s plenty of L3 chargers around, it’s just not necessary. The range will outlast your bladder.
That’s on top of what others have mentioned about how they can get abused. You’ll never know if the new battery you’re getting is good. Or if the charge station tests it and find it’s junk, then they have to do something with it, which increases their costs.
I disagree. I know cross country road trips isn’t the norm for most, but at the moment, it burns an hour (at least on my car) to recharge if you need to during the middle of a trip that out-distances your car’s range. A quick battery swap would solve that and give you the same ease/downtime as filling up at a gas station. I’d think some people have a hard time swallowing having to wait an hour to fill up if they’re trying to get somewhere.
10-80% charge time is in the range of 20 minutes. EVs already exist that will get you 4 hours of driving on that. Yes, even in the cold.
This isn’t as big a problem in practice as it’s made out to be.
I think there are actual longer term mechanical and safety issues with it. I don’t think the idea was quite ready for prime time just yet.
I dont want your shitty old battery.
That is why.
I don’t want to rent the battery in my car.
That is why.
I’m not sure I’d want to be swapping my battery out like a propane tank. Not everyone would follow charging recommendations, etc.
I think the battery swap is more like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNZy603as5w
No need to worry about pervious owners or anything. The system charges and maintains the bank of batteries you swap with.
Point remains you roll off the lot with a car that you paid a lot of money for and a lot of that is for that fresh new battery. Then you promptly go out and maybe get a pack with over a thousand cycles on it. Doesn’t matter how well the charge controlling and battery care is, batteries do wear out, and if you paid for the battery, it’s a raw deal that you likely get stuck with an older battery.
Question is what happens if your battery fails, is the swap station going to happily come out and give you a new battery? This might work if the battery is a lease, but that changes the dynamics of the initial purchase significantly.
Pay for the car and subscribe to the batteries sounds like a CEO’s wet dream.
You’re only stuck with the old battery until the next time you swap it out though? Could also remove the need to have charging stations all over the place - just use the gas station model which has been working well for a long time - no need to charge at home or in some random mall parking lot. Just pull into a swap station, get a newly charged battery (for which there should be some safety and quality standards put in place), and leave 5 minutes later.
I think you’re still misunderstanding how this would work. So this battery swap setup is like the equivalent of going to the gas station. Basically, when your battery is close to being dead, you head to this place and get a fully charged battery. So it doesn’t matter that the battery is used, you just keeping swapping batteries out when you need it. Sure it would be annoying to know that when you bought the car, it came with a fresh battery that would get swapped out with an older battery, but you would have bought the car to get into the swapping system since this is mainly for folks that can’t do charging at home.
Elon doesn’t like boring
That can’t be right. He does have a boring company.
But that’s cool because the company name is a elementary school level word play, exactly the kind Musk likes. Also the company is about digging holes and everyone in kindergarten knows how cool digging is.
You can never forget that we’re dealing with a person whose emotional aptitude is the equivalent of a child.
I thought the Boring Company was more about pretending to want to dig holes to stifle public transit in order to bolster EV sales… Am I mistaken?
Self fulfilling prophecy that the company seems to have stopped doing stuff. He found it boring and it is failing.
Their rare “completed” projects are utter embarrassments.
It was attached to the hyperloop, right? Which itself doesn’t seem to be anything more than a ploy to delay/kill California high speed rail.
It succeeded exactly as much as it dared to hope. California rail does seem to be over the hump at this point, but it took an extra decade to get there.
It’s so unexpected: charging should be steady, reliable, predictable income for the foreseeable future, no matter whose BEVs are most popular. They dominate supercharging in the US at the moment, but rapid buildout means someone else has a chance. Don’t they want to lock in this market?
I guess I assume it’s a profitable market , independent of vehicle sales. I wonder if that’s true
I wonder if they miscalculated the install + maintenance cost vs the charging fee they’re giving customers. Like if it’s not balanced correctly they could be losing money on each charging station. Maybe the stations require more maintenance than they anticipated?
That seems like a super basic thing to do if you’re running the business, but so much of the initial rollout was about availability and low cost and do-it-now that maybe that was a secondary concern or they thought there’d be higher adoption by now. It also seems like a simple fix, raise charging prices and say why. But maybe either the discrepancy is too big or they’re worried about customer/media backlash.
Or maybe it’s another example of “move fast and break things” running into the real world and not being viable.
Maybe the stations require more maintenance than they anticipated?
That seems to be the case with many of the brands of public charging stations.
There are often more plugs out of service or operating at lower than rated capacity than there are fully working ones.
The startup cost on their charger stations is pretty high and they typically have a deal with land owners to have them installed, so I doubt they hit break even for years on one bank.
They were aggressive in putting up charging areas to ease the hurdle of charging for potential customers when they were the only viable BEV and sales have slumped pretty badly now, so spending more on chargers at this point is financially unwise. With charger competition ramping up they are not in a great place for the financial aggression needed to have the chargers pay off in any timespan with limited income from car sales.
If they had been of the mindset to corner the charging market, instead of driving sales of their vehicles, they would have had an entirely different strategy and could have had a great steady income off chargers.
I know. The SC network and plug could make Tesla the new “Standard Oil” of the 21rst, (and a half!) Century. It could be far more valuable over the long term than that stupid truck.
funny considering how fucking boring he and his ideas tend to be
The death spiral begins.
Begins? It’s been slowly getting worse for years
Yeah, I think this is the event horizon.
Great movie.
fucking terrifying movie. I will never watch it again
huh
I wonder what’s the probability that the current EV makers might unite to create an open source standard alternative now that this has happened?
There are already 2 of them.
NACS, which is essentially the Tesla charger, was made available to other car manufacturers at no cost already, in 2022. Due to a few reasons, among them the existence of Tesla superchargers already deployed, a lot of companies have adopted this as their charger for newer cars.
Even if Tesla went down completely, their charger is already open, so nah I don’t expect any changes based on this.
Okay, that makes sense. Was going to ask how proprietary/locked that charger system was as it seems to be the immerging standard.
Yeah I’m kinda surprised they made it open, to be honest. But they did, and its in a way that can’t be retracted, so nothing depends on their continuing good behavior.
Its a pretty standard business decision, make it open so everyone uses it and because you manufacture the parts they have to go through you.
This aint Volvo making their three point seat belt open.
Also, I think Tesla saw the way the wind was blowing on standardization. Eventually, the DOT will enforce a standard plug, and if it’s not YOURS, suddenly you have to either remanufacture the cars you’re making, or otherwise refit them to work with the new standard.
In EU the plug is standard for everyone and Tesla users either have a ccs2 plug on their car or they bring an adapter if their car is older
A requirement for them to receive $7.5 billion in government funding for charger construction was for them to allow other cars to charge on their network, which required opening the standard.
Ah that explains that nicely. Thanks.
Open source? Standards?
What?
Do that and Lose the chance of earning billions in royalties if WE manage to corner the market?
None of that will happen unless, say, the European Union will force manufacturers hands.
CCS is already required in Europe, problem is there aren’t nearly as many CCS chargers in the US especially compared to Tesla’s network
Time to short the stock then, if they are not gonna invest in their own future.
Layoffs tend to precipitate big stock price jumps in my experience. Investors love job losses
They do, to a point.
If it’s a “trim” that is a vague percentage without any standout cuts in recognized people or groups, then good. If there are recognized names or groups, but they are people associated with widely known failures, like a team whose sole responsibility is a proven financial failure, good or even better. If you have people caught up in it who are well recognized for critical successes, then the investors won’t be so bullish.
Here we see two groups seen as responsible for the key success factors of Tesla obliterated, with very little external signs of why this could be a rational move. The other layoffs might have been viewed well, even if some of them were also bad news, but I think these two will be viewed as bad news.
Also, this may be seen as a missed opportunity. Tesla established SC network as the premiere EV charging solution, and made it credibly cover other manufacturers, setting it up as independently valuable with it without Tesala. Tesla ditched the entire team, putting that at risk and taking on expenses to let go of those people for long term salary savings. A different business might have sold off the group intact, not only avoiding severance expense, but also getting a big check in the process from some other company. Keeping the “business” with none of the actual people is a bizarre move.
Nailed it. This round of layoffs is not just “trimming a bloated labor force,” it’s cutting off investment into the future of Tesla as a company, which is a really bad business move when you had an advantage in the past but are now losing it. Turns out not only Musk is a filthy rich a-hole, he’s also terrible at keeping businesses competitive. He absolutely needs to resign if Tesla wants to not fail.
Amazon has been trimming employee numbers for close to three years now. Any large layoffs now see a dip in stock, so most of the layoffs this year have been small-scale to not worry the investors.
True, at some point investors switch from “good, they are improving efficiency” or “good, they are making way for higher quality hires” to “uhh, is there a problem? Are you going to keep going and risk going under some unknown critical threshold that will impact the health of your business?”.
I imagine the rules are different for Amazon. It’s just a regular corporation not a vanity project.
Cutting the supercharger team could be a hedge for Musk personally. The stock tanking seems likely now, so not having this team makes them a less attractive acquisition.
Tesla valuation is beyond comprehension, I don’t want to touch it.
Investors love job losses
Once again confirming how sociopathic the stock market can be.
It’s because of the massive short term gains.
I made several thousand dollars in the stock market by buying stocks that announce layoffs. They almost always jump after the announcement unless it has to do with other circumstances like bankruptcy.
They did more layoffs yesterday and the stock price went down lol
Yeah but the longer term doesn’t looks good.
My dude, never underestimate wall streets ability to ignore tsla failing. They will hold that stock. Shorting tsla is a fools errand. The people who own tsla are immune to reality.
Everything good that tsla owners were banking on has already happened. The gravy days are in the past but… the insane valuation persists.
You cannot short stupidity.
Killed the Golden Goose moment
He either didn’t get his pay package so he is burning the whole place down, or he has really lost his mind.
Why not both?
Maybe he figures that crashing and burning as many giant global companies/brands as possible will make him more memorable for the history books.
yeah thats what you get for allowing a corpo to build a proprietary, closed charging ecosystem.
It hasn’t been proprietary for a little while, its an official standard now. They had to open it in order to receive government funding for charger construction.
The North American Charging Standard (NACS), being standardized as SAE J3400, is an electric vehicle (EV) charging connector system developed by Tesla, Inc. It has been used by all North American market Tesla vehicles since 2021 and was opened for use by other manufacturers in November 2022. It is backwards compatible with the proprietary Tesla connectors made before 2021. (link)
I hope that’s a wakeup call to all the other automakers who announced plans to switch from CCS to NAC"S"
Big fucking mistake basing future plans on that company
NACS is an open standard. Tesla could fold tomorrow and it would still be a good idea for the other manufacturers to switch to it so we don’t have multiple competing plug standards in this country.
Is it really so? The specs are open, and Tesla has been permissive about letting other companies use their patents, but what would happen if they changed their minds?
nothing, it’s an open standard now: SAE J3400
Well, not necessarily.
Short term, they dramatically increased access to credible fast charging.
Longer term, near as I can tell, third party NACS fast charging will commence. So while this may be a disaster for Tesla and the Tesla charging network per se, long term it has room for another company to come along and displace Tesla.
If such a company were looking for a team to drive such an initiative, it seems we all know where to find one now…
NACS is essentially CCS in a Tesla plug, so the only reason there isn’t any yet is that nobody has made the switch yet - any CCS charger could be converted by just swapping the plug.
But it also means passive adapters work and are cheap, so there’s no hurry really.Honestly, EV-Go or Electrify America building NACS chargers isn’t going to fix anything. The plug isn’t what makes the Supercharger network appealing, it’s the fact they ensure the stations are ubiquitous, fully functional, and the payment is seamless. If he’s throwing out the team that is making sure those things continue to be true, the charging problem is only going to get worse.
Why does it matter? The standard is now open and can be used by everyone. It’s just like CCS now from a usability pov but with many more chargers
If anything, it was a major coup by Tesla to make their plug the standard when they have the largest existing charging network for that plug. Now they’re in a position of letting other networks catch up.
This decision is bafflingly stupid. Is firing people the only way Musk can get hard anymore?
I didn’t really follow. Because the way it happened was, Tesla can make money from it’s charging stations and other OEMs get a robust charging network.
How robust it’ll be by the time other cars get access is now rather questionable with this firing spree
It’s a headstart for a robust charging network while other charging station companies build more to catch up
How many non-tesla nacs charges are there?
How many ccs chargers are there compared to nas? That’s the question that matters to GM Ford and other automakers
My point is that even if nacs is open, it is a monopoly. Tomorrow Tesla decides to ask 100$ per month to access the network and you can’t go somewhere else. In EU the mandatory plug is the same for everyone and Tesla chargers must have ccs2 and Tesla cars must have ccs2…
I understand that. But building chargers using their ports is an option and will be something that happens. It just answers the customers of other OEMs of whether to charge their cars now. And even if Tesla controls a significant portion of the charging infrastructure now there’ll be others that build chargers with that standard with time. And I’m sure there was some closed door agreement they came up with on pricing
Dude it’s how many years of “electrify America” project that is supposedly supported by the biggest car manufacturer and the network is terrible. Nobody will go compete with nacs because Tesla has the market penetration and it’s ubiquitous. I guess the mon-tesla will change the plugs on some select locations and that’s it. But we’ll see how it goes with the supercharger network after musk fired the entire team…
Wrong. Educate yourself and try again.
Ahhh, the trustworthy test. Sounds like the same type of test that Trump plans to use in his hiring process. Coincidence? I think not. All part of the fascist playbook.
Musk has been reading about all the layoffs happening at other companies who are now floundering due to the loss of institutional competence and memory, and goes “we need some of that shiat STAT!”
Is this clown trying to tank the company because he didn’t get his payout?
I think he’s trying to tank the company because he sees Sundar doing the same shit at Google and assumes it will lead to a big payout.
No he’s simply an arrogant, incompetent yutz.
- Fired the Supercharger head and the entire department
- Fired the lead of new vehicle development
- Previously fired head of battery development
- Constantly “one year away” from Tesla full self driving, whilst Mercedes just launched geofenced FSD, with Mercedes assuming 100% liability during FSD
- Elon just had a out of the blue trip to China, appears to have ‘kissed the ring’ of Beijing, and hyping TaaS robotaxis
What’s Tesla’s USP to an investor now? The supercharger ‘lock in’ and early head start at the EV game are Tesla’s biggest boons, but the former appears to have been gutted and the latter has been squandered on a slow model release schedule
If the Tesla Board had any responsibilities at all, it was to prevent this by ejecting Elmo. They chose to not.
It is now time to stick a fork in it. Billionaires - Away!
The shareholders need to start calling out the clear bias of the boards constitution. Vanguard and iShares combined hold more shares than Elon does. It’s clearly doable, it’s just time for some adults in the room. If you hold Vanguard and iShares etfs in your accounts, don’t be afraid to let them know this.
Are they going to give him his $60B bonus now?
So is the implication that he’s just going to source all those things from a Chinese company? Basically the next Tesla and chargers will just be rebadged BYDs or whatever?
It could be as simple as securing more/better access to China’s significant rare earth deposits that batteries need. Could also be signs that Tesla is offshoring or pushing harder into China’s domestic market, but they’re way behind there
Mercedes fsd is pretty bad tho, it’s full self driving basically for marketing reasons. Following one geofenced highway without a problems is not close to full self driving. It does basically what tesla autopilot does but a little better. Not even better in some cases because if I recall correctly it can’t change lanes automatically. Sooo just a marketing from their side
Worldwide food shortages are pretty likely this year, but sure, care about “investors”
I actually don’t care about individual investors, beyond the implications for the broader ‘economy’ if the Tesla bubble bursts. But given how absurd the market cap for Tesla is compared to the traditional automakers, when this hype train stops picking up
speedmore rubes, the rest of us need it to coast down gradually, not crash and burn.Got it, investing in food.
