Comment by wlesieutre 2 days ago
Most places it's not like gas stations where there's 3 on the same block and they all have exactly the same price all the time, people are going to stop at whatever charger is located where they need it and pay whatever the price is as long as it's within reason.
> 17,800 supercharger stations.
Did they mean 17,800 supercharger units or 17,800 locations with super charger units. Because I've seen those numbers interchanged before.
The problem with chargers (and I say this as an EV owner) is that many people mostly charge at home, so they aren't using them even weekly. However, everyone goes for a road trip say around memorial day, and the EV chargers are PACKED. It is just a huge disparity between normal and peak usage. Or you go on a road trip and you need one in the middle of nowhere Idaho on the way from Seattle to Yellowstone.
Thankfully L3 charger units at least are cheaper to buy/install/maintain (in theory, if people didn't think the coords had copper worth scrapping) and can be installed in more locations than gas station pumps (like super market parking lots).
Given the disparity in peak usage, it makes sense, at least, to compete on availability rather than price, since even if you are paying $60 to charge up, it is only a few times a year. It is much more important that the chargers be where you need them, and to have free units when you need them, oh, and they should be working! ... than to be the cheapest price.
> Did they mean 17,800 supercharger units or 17,800 locations with super charger units.
They mean 17,800 DC fast charging plugs open to GM cars (and say so in the article). Tesla has 2,397 DC fast charging sites (or stations) in the US and a total of 27,711 plugs.
You need a lot of things for a gas station, a giant tank under ground, a run off collection system for the spilled gas/oil, they have to be covered these days, I’m sure most of this is just environmental regulations. You only see them in the grocery store parking lot if they have all of that, it’s not just a few pumps put up at existing parking spaces (well, maybe in Thailand).
It’s not a great metric for comparison in any case. More than half of all drivers will only ever use C public chargers when on a road trip. And over time that fraction will approach ever closer to 100%.
The is true today. However EVs are becoming more common and chargers are being built. In a few years chargers will be more common and have to compete on price. Today Tesla can get away with charging more to some customers - those people will figure it out though and eventually they will have enough options that they can go elsewhere. It is hard enough to brand gasoline (you can have a brand specific additive package most don't but they do exist) electrons are even more identical.
Tesla has enough time to get brand recognition for cheap charging, even if it gets less relevant over time.
Even when chargers become more common in cities, there will always be some places like smaller villages or long roads where you only have one option; that option possibly being a Tesla charger.
So even if it loses significance, the difference will still be there. And maybe it will be sufficient to retain Tesla being known for being cheaper long-term (because of charging).
Whether that's realistic: I don't know.
> Even when chargers become more common in cities, there will always be some places like smaller villages or long roads where you only have one option; that option possibly being a Tesla charger.
Sure, and that's exactly the case for gas stations today, and I'm sure the lone gas station on the long stretch of road has more pricing power than the one in the middle of a city with competition.
And yet gas stations don't charge based on what kind of car you drive. Tesla shouldn't be permitted to do so either, as this market develops more.
A quick search suggests there's around 145,000 gas stations. This article mentions Tesla has 17,800 supercharger stations. I didn't care enough to look up the station counts for the other EV charging companies. But that Tesla figure is around 12% of the gas station total, so let's say the total number of EV charging stations is somewhere between 15% and 20% of the gas station total.
I could easily see EV charging stations approach the level of saturation of gas stations in the next 10 years.
Yes, today people are going to stop wherever there's a nearby charging station. But that's going to change, and fairly quickly.