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But also, the notion that they can’t do long trips is already pretty outdated.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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Best? I dunno, using these has never been a very pleasant experience. Nothing sticks out as a particularly pleasant experience. I don’t particularly care for being tracked as I travel either. It would be both faster, easier, and more secure if I could just put a five dollar bill in one and buy a few hours of charge or a $10 bill and buy the charge and parking spot for the night.
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.
Down in flames it is then.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=hNZy603as5w
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
