Tesla owns the electric gas station! for now... Now that unity is achieved in the US, I think we're about to see an explosion in charging stations and designs of various charging hubs (drive-in movies's revival?) as Tesla won't be allowed to own the network 100% come soon.
Who else is going to invest in a fast DC network? The closest competitor was Electrify America, and they can't make the economics work. Tesla made it work by subsidizing their $1B+ global fast DC charging network cost out of robust vehicle margins.
Most EV users will charge at home, some at their place of work and businesses, with fast DC charging filling the remaining gap (people who can't charge at home or people on road trips/high utilization driving patterns).
> Tesla made it work by subsidizing their $1B+ global fast DC charging network cost out of robust vehicle margins.
VW is doing the same with EA (although with more vehicles and lower margins). I don't know the specifics and I'm sure they would love for every stall to be full but I wouldn't be surprised if they had no expectation of making a profit at this point or even in the next five years.
Honestly I think they have some limited upside here which is that if they can fix the quality of their service and add NACS cables then they can compete on price or location with superchargers for NACS owners' business. My guess is that the stalls are empty because few who seriously need to travel long distances would buy a non-supercharger compatible EV specifically because the EA experience sucks. If they fix their UX then they can immediately begin tapping into the NACS market instead of waiting for CCS cars to slowly trickle into the roadtripping segment of the market.
VW was required to fund Electrify America ($2B) as part of their Diselgate settlement with the US goverment, and they were prohibited from branding them as VW as part of the deal (hence the EA brand). EA has tried to get additional funding with not so great results.
Might be able to salvage the network if they add or swap out for NACS plugs (opening up to the mass market EVs), but if they can't make the unit economics work and increase utilization, those EA stations are going to end up abandoned with the enterprise shuttering.
And this is why EA is such a shitshow. VW was required to spend the money. They weren't required to make it a good charging system. So: poor maintenance, buggy software, and overall an experience that makes everyone who tries to use one hate it.
There are many brands of DCFC around me. EA obviously, EVGo, blink, 7Eleven, Road Ranger, Francis, and Volta. There's a few other travel centers on the routes I take which have their own branded chargers as well
The earlier non-Tesla charging stations definitely had a rough start as there was practically zero market at all for them. The economics will change as more EVs are on the road. I do agree most early EV owners are going to be those with easy charging at home, but people without home charging may eventually want EVs as well. Public charging station use will probably increase a good bit over the next few years.
Those are brands, not networks. No one is going to road trip if they can't trust they can roll into a station at 10% state of charge and charge in 20 minutes off hours. The network uptime is the selling point of Tesla Superchargers. You will never be left stranded.
Install the PlugShare app or check out their website and see what comments users leave about reliability with regards to your local stations.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1136861_tesla-superchar... (The Tesla Supercharger network was the first comprehensive DC fast-charging network in the United States, and it remains the best in terms of customer satisfaction, according to a new J.D. Power study.)
I don't care about "networks". I don't choose Exxon or Shell or whoever because they have the most gas stations, I go to the one that's most convenient for me. I'm not beholden to any particular "brand" or "network" of charger, I just want one close that works. I'm no particular brand fanboy, I'll use whatever works and is convenient.
> Install the PlugShare app or check out their website and see what comments users attempting to charge look like.
I use the PlugShare app a good bit. All the chargers I referenced are 9.5+, with most of them having 10 ratings. I also have my own personal experiences at those chargers. In all of my public charging sessions I've never once failed to charge at a decent rate at a DCFC. And I'm one who has driving around the city testing out chargers because I've been interested in the tech. I have experienced some of those free L2 chargers at grocery store parking lots being offline, but even then most of the time those have worked flawlessly.
And I don't bother with specific apps for charging "networks", all my DCFC has either been plug and charge or phone NFC/EMV payment terminals.
I don't personally put a lot of weight on Twitter polls to give me an accurate picture of reality, and if JD Power tells me something I'm likely to think the opposite is true. Most of JD Power's statements are meaningless noise to me.
I don't doubt Tesla's chargers have more uptime on average. There's a lot of things they do better historically, like having lower lifetime rated cables they change out more often and they're faster to roll out to places with issues to repair. But its not inherently a Tesla thing, the other chargers can do it and it seems in the past year a number of companies have stepped up their maintenance and reliability considerably. I'm going by the data I can see around me and what I see on PlugShare around me, which shows the non-Tesla chargers near me and on the routes I want to take are generally pretty reliable.
Since EvGO and Chargepoint seem to be public companies, I looked up their financial statements. It's not pretty. They are all bleeding money and that's with machines that people complain are down a lot. Chargepoint is in a slightly better spot because their Level 2 chargers seem to be somewhat better in the profitability department, but still losing tons of money.
And that's not really surprising. If you look around at quotes, installing a single DCFC charging stall of 150Kw or better looks to run about $100k per stall plus significant installation costs almost matching that.
At $100k for the stall itself, and if we assume $.50/kwh (a bit higher than most EVGO stations I see around here) and we assume $0.16/kwh electricity (residential rate here), that means each kwh sent to a car has a profit of $0.34. So the stall would need to dispense 294,117kwh of energy to pay for the stall itself. If the average rate of dispensing to a car is 100kw (which is probably high even without leafs and bolts due to charging curves) in 15 minute intervals, that's 11,765 cars that need to charge for 15 minute intervals to break even on the equipment itself, so an average of 32 cars charging per day (assuming my math is right, which it may not be).
32 cars per day at 15 minute average charge times means the stall has to be utilized 33% of the day. That paypack doesn't count maintenance, install fees, repairs (they are always breaking down), kickbacks to the land/building owners, etc... And many areas of North America doesn't get electricity for $0.16/kwh (though some are cheaper)
The math definitely feels to me like it's really hard to make DCFC stations profitable in much of the US, especially until EVs become more prevalent.
> we assume $0.16/kwh electricity (residential rate here)
EIA average for industrial electricity is ~$0.14/kWh. I know around here its not uncommon for industrial users to pay all the way down to ~$0.07/kWh, there's a good bit of difference depending on how far up the line the industrial user owns which varies the delivery cost a good bit.
I definitely agree these early days in DCFC is mostly a brand mindshare and land grab play for a lot of these companies, I'm guessing they're trying to already be in the ground in all the places for when/if the market for DCFC really swings to higher demand.
I think the way to make it profitable is to install PV canopies over the charging stations. Then at least during the day the electricity is free.
Of course capital cost is higher because you still need a fat feed from the grid and transformers and coolers, and maintenance might be more costly, but free electricity during the day when most people are driving would almost certainly pay that back quickly.
>The closest competitor was Electrify America, and they can't make the economics work. Tesla made it work by subsidizing their $1B+ global fast DC charging network cost out of robust vehicle margins.
The economics are going to have to change.
Right now, dollar-for-dollar, electricity for your vehicle is cheaper than gasoline. I'm confident that will not be the case in the near future; the charging infrastructure has to be built and maintained, and the government will want their tax money (in Canada, a significant proportion of gas prices are taxes).
>Right now, dollar-for-dollar, electricity for your vehicle is cheaper than gasoline
When I did the math on this, that wasn't necessarily the case in my area, it depended on the situation. $0.40/kWh comes out to around 7 miles per dollar, depending on your vehicle and how you drive it (eg on a road trip going 80mph you'd probably get less than 7, chill city driving with no passengers maybe you get as high as 10 miles per dollar).
My current ICE car isn't particularly efficient (around 30mpg on the highway, whereas nowadays even non-hybrids can get 40mpg) but for road trip purposes it would also get around 7 miles per dollar.
Tesla also made it work by making their chargers cheaper with smart engineering. CCS stations are huge monoliths packed full of fancy lights, touchscreens, ridiculously long cables, giant plugs. Superchargers have none of that. A cable no longer than absolutely necessary, a stand just large enough to hold it comfortably, a plug about as small as possible, no blinkenlights or touchscreens.
An ordinary 120V 15A plug can add 100km to a car over night when electricity is 1/2 to 1/4 the price of a DC fast charger. Tesla's mobile charger is $200.
The superchargers are essential is giving people the peace of mind to make the EV switch and for enabling long-distance road trips, but they just can't complete with the economics of home charging, which is where the bulk of EVs will be charged.
there are many home situations where home charging is not immediately feasible. Apartments and condos (both medium density or high density) are not conducive to personal charging installations.
Actually I think you'll find that the electric gas station is owned by anyone with a car garage and electricity. Fast DC charging is the exception, not the rule.
Sure, but I'd think that makes the economics of operating fast chargers all the more tenuous. Like, if we assume they're mostly needed for people away from home, that means both that they're essential to adoption of EVs in general (people want to be able to go on road trips) and that they suddenly go from being a thing people need all the time to a thing whose demand has extreme fluctuations seasonally, or with the economy insofar as it affects people's seasonal income, etc., just like other travel-oriented businesses like hotels.
(I should also note: so far the EV adoption story has been much better for people who own their homes and have dedicated parking, but as someone who lives in an urban neighborhood where most car-owners park on the street, I think expending to markets like mine will necessarily mean more public chargers are needed.)
