They had to open their chargers to get some of the benefits from that big bill a year or two ago (build back better?).
That may be why. In low use areas it may be a nice ROI.
I’ve heard in high use areas things could already be bad from the increase in Teslas sold and piling Fords, GMs, and Rivians in isn’t going to lighten the load any.
They didn’t have a choice. My understand is the EU dictated all cars have the IEC Type 2(?) connector to sell, so Tesla complied. No mess like the US.
The US had no such law and has refused to make one. We’ve gone with the traditional carrot approach where they wouldn’t get funds to built more superchargers without doing this due to the infrastructure law. But it was their choice and they didn’t have to.
I don’t know.
They could have given away their connector 10 years ago and saved everyone a huge and expensive mess. But that’s in their interest. So instead dozens of companies wasted huge amounts of monies installing a bunch of cables that all have to be replaced.
Or the government could have seen that they had a better option and simply taken it and said it was the standard. But of course that wouldn’t be the American way.
So we suffered through a giant mess instead wasting time and money.
Tesla chose not to fix this until the damage was done and their benefit was small enough to be worth giving up.
It's a difference between EU and US philosophies on regulation, particularly regulation of _competition_ issues. Broadly, the US's attitude is "please, companies, consider doing this, look at this big sack of subsidies", whereas the EU's attitude is "do this".
(This wasn't always the case, and in fact at one time the US was tougher on competition law than Europe was, but since the late 90s the US has been largely asleep at the wheel on competition.)
And the US only established a national charging standard that it can incentive in February 2023 at that. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/02/28/2023-03...
Great stuff too, imo. Not just about charging plugs, but specifying standards for how cars communicate with chargers, mandating open APIs to show real time availability info (how many stations providing what charge outputs are available right now?); a full suite of requirements to make sure people can find working chargers & that cars can work with them.
Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, https://driveelectric.gov/news/new-cfi-funding-released
> This funding opportunity is made possible by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s signature EV charging investments: the $2.5 billion Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) Discretionary Grant Program and funds from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program that are set aside for strategic grants to states and local governments to deploy EV chargers.
It seems like Tesla's behavior has been much better in Europe, and I'm not sure what explains the discrepancy.