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.
> They could have given away their connector 10 years ago
And nobody would have adopted it. They had to make it into a de facto standard first, and did. Now, anyone who adopts it gets an infrastructure boost.
> Tesla chose not to fix this until the damage was done
What damage? Massive EV adoption? Retrofits are not difficult, and adapters are cheap.
Seems like the US free market approach is winning yet again, where the superior product is becoming the standard, and the inventor of the superior product is profiting.