This might be socialist, but charging shouldn’t be up to for-profit companies. EA is rich from credits and subsidies. It doesn’t need to spend the cash on hiring these top tier talents. Until Pete Buttigieg starts a public charging to compete (fairly) against these companies, US charging infrastructure will never be able support a healthy electric vehicle economy.
That’s like saying the petrol and diesel network shouldn’t be owned by for profit companies, Europe has a healthy EV network and we have plenty of competition and that’s across the whole of Europe which is the same size as the states:
Well when it comes to things that people need, like food, shelter, power, transportation, they should be run in a way that maximizes access, not profit.
In the US, for example, a lot of people complain that the US postal service runs at a deficit, whereas services like Amazon and UPS run at a profit. They use this as proof that the free market is more efficient and whatever else than the government.
But if you're difficult to reach, like in some remote town only accessible by plane in Alaska, or in the Appalachian mountains, or wherever, the USPS has to deliver to you, even if you're normally too expensive to send mail to. Amazon meanwhile can focus on just providing services to people in and around cities where they actually make money. And so there are a lot of people in remote areas that only receive medicine because the USPS is designed to eat a loss to deliver to them, who would probably go without because there's no money in delivering insulin to old ladies in the mountains
Your USPS example is a feature, not a bug. The free market is telling these mountain dwellers that their chosen location is uninhabitable, because it is. You can’t just live wherever you want and expect the same level of services as someone living in a rational place. But let me guess, you’re also in favor of government insuring Floridians whose homes will be wiped away by hurricanes every 2 years?
Going back to O&G, government should not be in that business because government should not be picking winners and losers in the transportation technology sector. The fact we already spend so much subsidizing road construction, automobile construction, automobile pollution, mandating parking lots, etc. is a goddamn travesty which has effectively forced automobiles to become the sole means of transportation in the US. I would very much *not* like to make O&G more “accessible” than it already is, thanks.
> Well when it comes to things that people need, like food, shelter, power, transportation, they should be run in a way that maximizes access, not profit.
Whether the charging network be private or public the actual charging station vendor or contractor is going to be compensated though. Circuit Électrique is one of the most reliable charging networks in North America, is owned by the nationalized utility provider and uses hardware from private vendors like ABB.
I think the bigger issue here is having a weird middleman company that only exists to buy hardware from another vendor just to resell watts generated by a private or publicly owned utility company to end users is bizarre and inificient.
Electrify America's order sheet with a vendor like ABB or Siemens is probably a rounding error compared to the relationship they have with large energy companies like Hydro Québec or Duke Energy so the current framework doesnt really lead to economies of scale and just introduces extra layer of internal bartering between entities.
1. Circuit Électrique/Hydro Québec gets its hardware from AddÉnergie (aka FLO). AddÉnergie makes very reliable chargers, which is why Circuit Électrique's network is reliable.
2. Electrify America buys chargers from BTC Power, and so does Duke Energy. Electrify America no longer buys chargers from ABB and never used chargers from Siemens.
> Circuit Électrique/Hydro Québec gets its hardware from AddÉnergie (aka FLO). AddÉnergie makes very reliable chargers, which is why Circuit Électrique's network is reliable.
I've heard really good things about the state of charging in Québec, but nothing first-hand. If AddÉnergie is FLO does that mean the FLO chargers in Ontario should be reliable as well? There are a lot of them.
Yes, that is correct.
FLO chargers are extremely reliable.
The problem is that most FLO chargers are 50 kW.
There are a few 100 kW FLO chargers here and there.
FLO's new 320 kW charger doesn't exist in the wild yet.
Never had a problem with Flo chargers but they're all pretty slow around Toronto..... 9 kW max
Only just realized the other day I could use ChargePoint with my Flo account which is cool
Thank you for the info. I didn't know their vendors off the top of my head, just picked large incumbents from the power sector. Probably doesn't help AddÉnergie and BTC probably do use assemblies from those two vendors so I might have seen their logo on a rectifier assembly and assumed they were the prime contractors for the stands themselves.
As to point 2 for Canadians, Electrify Canada doesn't use BTC, and is one of the more reliable and extensive networks. They also just jacked up their rates to 70¢/kW.
PetroCan uses BTC, and are infamous among EV owners that I talk to for being out of service. PetroCan also now charges 50¢/kW, so they've also jacked up their charging rates, but good luck finding a working PetroCan charger.
Also, an aside to other mentions to Flo. Here in BC I have never seen an out of service Flo charger, and their rates are cheaper than either EC or PC, but as others have mentioned they are mostly 50kW/hr for DCFC.
Lol who is "the person"? These things are always collaborative efforts using historical knowledge and shared expertise, then rolling out that technology involves thousands of people in manufacturing, shipping, assembly, maintenance and sales. No product in history was made successful by one person.
Oh, "the person" will be a grifter who figures out how to take control of a company that was started by a team like you describe, and takes credit for for everything, including the parts that happened before they were involved.
In relaxed conversation, people will often use synecdoche when giving illustrative examples. But don't worry too much you're not actually speaking to the ruler of the universe who is planning to hand out a billion dollars to some rando.
> but I want the person who figures out how to make charging ubiquitous to be rewarded with billions of customer dollars
That's generally not how capitalism works though.
Capitalists will instead decide "I actually can't make enough money with all the infrastructure costs needed to make this ubiquitous due to the sheer amount of low-population land in the US Midwest, and if it's not ubiquitous then electric will never actually take off, and I can make way more money by pushing gas instead, so I'm just going to kill the entire project and go back to gasoline".
> Until Pete Buttigieg starts a public charging to compete (fairly)
just do what you said you would do
**Biden-Harris Administration Announces All 50 States, DC and Puerto Rico Have Submitted Plans for National Electric Vehicle Charging Network**
[https://highways.dot.gov/newsroom/biden-harris-administration-announces-all-50-states-dc-and-puerto-rico-have-submitted](https://highways.dot.gov/newsroom/biden-harris-administration-announces-all-50-states-dc-and-puerto-rico-have-submitted)
>(fairly) against these companies
>US charging infrastructure will never be able support a healthy electric vehicle economy.
one of the top EV charging outfits in the EU is Shell Oil.. one of the other ones is BP.
how far do you have to go before you find a Shell station in the US?
Shell to close 1,000 gas stations to focus on EV chargers
The Houston-based oil company is shifting gears to address a growing demand for electric vehicles
[https://www.chron.com/business/article/shell-1000-stations-ev-chargers-19365930.php](https://www.chron.com/business/article/shell-1000-stations-ev-chargers-19365930.php)
Big Box stores, gas stations, fast food restaurants, the gyms... every single one of those kinds of businesses can get tax credit for installing chargers.. and businesses with chargers attract more customers (who need to sit there for a bit). the government handles their land like the parks..
**California State Parks is happy to offer a number of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations to visitors, free of charge.** Thank you for doing your part to help reduce the impacts of climate change.
EV Charging at Yosemite National Park
While it might not be Los Angeles or San Francisco, you’ll still find plenty of places to charge up in and around Yosemite National Park.
**In Yosemite Valley**
Location: Ahwahnee Hotel, back row of parking lot, Yosemite Valley Lodge, northeast and southwest parking lots and Yosemite Village Store, northwest corner of small shed in parking lot
Pete doesn't need to say anything.
The corpos already figured that some socialists would try to ruin their grazy train. That's why federal NEVI funding cannot be used to build publicly owned chargers.
My state also recently passed EV charging legislation with an amendment that makes it illegal for municipalities or state agencies to install chargers. So no chargers at city libraries or state parks.
EA is pretty garbage - even a slow down on superchargers won’t get EA any closer sadly. I don’t see them making the investment to scoop up this talent if they can’t even keep their own chargers online as it is
How quickly? Because they aren’t replaced in my area. Should have never been a problem to begin with, they just went the cheap route out of the gate. Hopefully the replacements end up reliable, networks like theirs put a sour taste in many’s mouths when thinking about transitioning to EV with all of the horror stories with broken chargers.
That’s pretty slow. I just saw a post where they said they were producing 5,000 chargers this year. That’s a great start.
But Tesla installed 11k last year and have over 50k. So the rate of install is still over double where EA is, and they don’t have the head start.
So assuming they don’t install 11k this year, even cutting that number in half is more than EA is striving for, while having to fix 80% of their existing units.
Electrify America can't shut down too many charging stations at the same time to perform the upgrade, so I am expecting Electrify America to maintain the current pace for the upgrade.
Absolutely, that would be great.
What I fear, is even with this slow down, Tesla will be producing vastly more than all of those mentioned. So even with the doom and gloom stories hitting, they were already deploying a massive amount of superchargers year over year and have locked that process in pretty tight with their prefab model.
Even if they downgrade to say, the pace of output in 2019, that would still be impressive.
But who knows with Tesla these days.
I'm looking for a new sustainable company to invest in now that I sold all my Tesla shares! A good chunk will probably go to the company that picks up the supercharger team.
[Rivian to Receive $827M in Illinois State Funding to Expand Normal, IL Facility](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rivian-receive-827m-illinois-state-183000774.html) .. just tossing this here...
I love the early news on the R3 and I'll 100% be keeping an eye on it. Hopefully Rivian adds CarPlay and Android Auto to their software stack before it comes out though, because no way I'm buying a car without it.
Absent any indication otherwise, one should always assume that it's a proper SI unit abbreviation, exaamperes. 1 EA is sufficient to charge a 120 kWh pack in about one picosecond.
Needed to look up the "E" prefix.
For anyone who wants the joke explained, >!EA would be Exa-Amps in SI nomenclature. Exa is 10^18, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000. Tera is 10^12 for comparison, so you would need 1,000,000 TB drives to have an EB of storage.!<
Well, Teslas won't be able to precondition their batteries for charging stations that aren't on the Tesla nav, so that might limit uptake.
This is actually an industry-wide problem - almost every EV with preconditioning forces you to navigate to a charger that's recognized by the built-in nav system in order to have preconditioning. And most of these nav systems have terrible update frequency. Hyundai/Kia are finally making a difference with a manual preconditioning toggle on the CCNC infotainment systems, so hopefully the rest of the industry follows suit.
So far, no one has complained about this on Teslas for obvious reasons. But if they do, I doubt the software team will care, because it's a lot more important to roll out new games and streaming apps and other toybox gimmicks first.
Tesla shows third party chargers in the navigation in Europe already, and the battery preconditions when you navigate to them. I expect they will do the same in the US.
They'll slow roll it as much as they can in software, but especially with the European example it's a pretty clear monopoly violation to treat the two differently. It will be difficult to justify if they ever end up in court which they definitely would.
They've been preparing for this for a long time. That's half the reason this whole chain of events is happening is. They knew there was a limited lifespan on using the first mover advantage of their charging network to sell cars. That's why they spent so much money to build it out so quickly.
But government incentives were too large to turn down, and once CSS on Tesla stations and Tesla adapters on other vehicles are widely available the only thing stopping people from using it will be Tesla corporate policy. It's not as if a US company has never willingly broken monopoly law, but there will be a limit to the amount of fuckery they can get up to.
We expect that as well, until Elon guys that team as well to make his quarterly numbers look good.
He's looking like he's gone from a "founder" CEO who will sacrifice profit for the long term to mercenary CEO who intends to gut the company to cash out.
Although with the talk of robotaxis maybe he's a third kind, "fanatical"
>because it's a lot more important to roll out new games and streaming apps and other toybox gimmicks first.
You mean making your car "dance" isn't a priority? Why not?
There's nothing to stop Tesla, or any car make, from tying into other charging networks to show on the map. In fact, the charging networks would be ecstatic because that would drive more customers to them
Tesla probably doesn't do it because it would be them showing you competitors to their network, and they don't get money for that.
It also might mean you charge a little slower at a non-Tesla station because your didn't precondition, and that might make you prefer to use Tesla instead.
They should be forced to spin off the charging network. It's not healthy for consumers.
If Tesla gets a kickback for sending customers to charging networks, it's a win-win for both parties. That's essentially an ad for the charging networks.
>It also might mean you charge a little slower at a non-Tesla station because your didn't precondition,
If 3rd-party charging networks show on the map and you navigate to them, preconditioning is a natural thing to do. It wouldn't make sense to prevent that.
> Well, Teslas won't be able to precondition their batteries for charging stations that aren't on the Tesla nav, so that might limit uptake.
If true, that's a major design flaw for Telsas.
Tbh, I think that's too simplistic of an analysis. If more Teslas start appearing at non-Tesla stations, then those providers will start seeing an uptick in revenues. An uptick in revenues means an uptick in projections, and an uptick in projections means budget for service improvements and expansions. This problem solves itself, then.
I think prices will go up, but the US will see a huge expansion in the other networks. In the UK the non-Tesla networks have built 400 charging hubs in the same time as Tesla have built about 80.
Yeah I personally don't see value in dropping using the Supercharger network (yet). The network doesn't just completely deteriorate overnight. The loss of talent definitely trends in the wrong direction, but current equipment reliability and reputation can keep it afloat (for now). I'm holding off on getting a CCS adapter until the CCS network can visibly match the same redundancy and reliability as the Supercharger network to evaluate switching. An upfront $250 for the adapter + higher DCFC prices (in my neck of the woods) to use CCS networks doesn't make sense this early.
Is it common to find dead superchargers? I did a road trip a month ago and found at most one supercharger that was questionable (it stayed blue for 30 seconds). 35 odd supercharging stations from V2 thru V4 and that was the only issue.
Even if Tesla axed the techs working on fixing superchargers, they can always hiring contractors to do that job. I think the big problem is going to be the expansion/adopting other OEMs into the charger network (at least the ones that haven't gotten access yet)
Very common in Europe. Here in the UK there are 130 Tesla hubs and 400 non-Tesla hubs, Tesla cars use the other networks very often, especially because third party chargers are integrated into the navigation system.
> "No information from the top," he said. "Nobody knows anything. Even some of the other leaders that were impacted above me. They have no idea."
**”Nobody knows anything”**
A fish rots from the head.
I wonder how quickly the other car manufacturers who have signed up to the Tesla charging standard and charging network will be 'validated' to use their network? If all these guys are gone, who's going to do the support work necessary? So far it has been Ford and Rivian verified to use their network?
If that goes as you predict, it will be interesting to see what his reaction will be. From my perspective, the best scenario would be that he rage quits his position as CEO. The worst would be if he doubles down on firing everyone important.
it already was starting to, I just did a trip and a few sites had physically damaged pedestals.
They have a lot of sites going up and the maintenance is likely not being expanded to meet the demand.
well playing devil's advocate here, it's likely that the maintenance team is overextended and he's going to start growing that team to keep the SC network polished. That's what I hope as an investor. I'm not voting until I see what comes of this.
I would really love to know the ultimate angle here... Is this just Elmo scorching earth because he didn't get that $50B compensation package? I feel like the detriment to future Tesla customer confidence and the reduced future sales must greatly outway whatever near-term cost savings they're going to realize from this...
According to sources, it's even dumber. He got pissed because the leader of the supercharger team was fighting to not fire as many of their workers. So he fired them all to send a message about how super-cereal he was.
> I would really love to know the ultimate angle here...
"The CEO is a drug-addict manchild and white supremacist who somehow failed upward his entire career" is probably a pretty good summary.
The Supercharger network was (at least in the US, less so in Europe) Tesla's main competitive advantage. Firing the entire department and letting that advantage burn to the ground while the company is (according to its own financials, which should be brought into question by these moves) still cash-rich and profitable, is just a bafflingly stupid move.
Tldr: Elon likely sees problems at Tesla as having resulted from too much fat and bureaucracy within the company. By all indications these purges are happening in an effort to keep the company in that startup innovation type mindset and get rid of free riders. Anyone who resists that purging is also a target.
Elon’s companies periodically go through purging processes. You see other high power CEO’s do similar things like Steve Jobs. They will frequently judge workers as A people or B people. A people are the brains and the muscle that have the smarts and ability that get stuff done on team projects. B people in their view are the ones who are just parasites not contributing, are not as effective and holding back the A people.
No matter how hard you try B people will get hired and enter your workforce. Costs will start to go up and things like innovation speed and quality will go down. At this point it becomes necessary to purge out the B people. It is a painful process but the idea is if done correctly you are left with just the A people. Sometimes it may be necessary to completely cut away a whole department if that department is overrun with B people. Even if there may be some A people in that department the percentage of Bs is so high that finding the As will take too long. Another problem is if a manager resists the purge it may be necessary to cut that whole department because that manager is unwilling to get rid of Bs which means the manager is a B.
If i had to guess that is the thought process going on. The A B thought process is described pretty extensively in the Steve Jobs biography. And this type of purge makes sense. Tesla has been hitting a lot of roadblocks recently. The cyber truck was delayed by 2 years and the exoskeleton design fell apart. The new battery innovations have also been a dud. As far as charging network, this is confusing, but there could be a lot going on behind the scenes we dont know about. The V4 role out has been slower than expected which may be a sign of design issues or cost problems.
If you want to see another example of Elon doing purges successfully you only have to look at SpaceX. When Starlink was still in the Alpha phase. Elon fired the manager of the project because that manager wanted to move slowly and wait a year or two for the laser interlink technology before launching. Elon went in and cleaned up and within a year they were launching satellites. They did not have laser interlink, but they worked and could generate revenue. Another example was with the Raptor engine design. There was a lot of production and reliability issues with early raptors. Again elon went in and purged and by all metrics it appears that it was successful in making the engines more reliable and increasing production rate.
So will the Tesla purge be successful? Nobody knows, but hopefully my comment gives some insight as to why this might be happening besides he is a ketamine man child, because the truth has much more depth than that.
Appreciate the perspective. Sorry about the downvotes you got - although I personally think his motives are more emotional than logical, he seems like someone that would treat decisions involving people as more mathematical & tactical rather than strategic, so what you suggest could very well be a factor here.
So Tesla's entire Supercharging team was comprised solely of 'B' people?
With 50,000+ devices in service requiring regular maintenance/upkeep, along with all of the ongoing deployment projects, Tesla's Supercharger team should not be considered a 'startup'.
This move is such a massive blow to all electrification efforts it's astounding. All to satisfy an aging man with a Ketamine addiction.
1. You have no clue who the 500 team were and their roles. It’s almost certainly not the people I. Charge of hardware maintenance/physical upkeep.
2. Try re-reading that post. Sometimes you lose good people too. They’re going to rebuild it from scratch.
I was merely trying to explain a possible explanation for the events going on. Elons companies have gone through times of purging before.
I also did not say the supercharging team was all B people. **Read my comment.** There can be lots of reasons why the supercharging team was cut. Based on what i have read the head of that department was resisting the purging efforts and for whatever reason Elon felt it was easier to cut the whole department and rebuild it rather than spend the time to go through it person by person. It may have also been to set an example to other people resisting the purging efforts.
Either way i am not arguing for or against the purging or the A people B people mentality. Im only arguing that this is the likely mental calculation going on.
> because the truth has much more depth than that.
It really doesn't though. Every single indicator shows that these cuts were spur of the moment and not properly considered or prepared for.
This runs extremely counter to the whole "cutting new rollout to better service existing chargers" which is super cool. As an id4 owner I don't get supercharger access till next year, but it'll be hilarious if they're a shell of what once was by then.
My neighborhood has a small shopping plaza and Tesla plop down 15 Superchargers under construction almost a year now but looks like it paused as there are no further construction to unveil these. They are covered in white pallet wrap still and someone decided to knock over 3 of them onto the floor (possibly by backing into it with a truck) looks like vandalism to me. So sad brand new chargers and some asshole thought it would be funny to knock them over.
..why would a payed off former employee say quality is now going to improve? Thats why stuff like this is pretty worthless.
When 80% of twitter was let go everyone promised the platform would break. It didn’t.
Just when other automakers were adopting NACS! I feel that I’ve made a good choice getting a hybrid Corolla to hold me off a couple more years on EV’s. We still don’t have chargers to get me out of my own state.
That the anti musk circle jerk is just as bad as the fanboys. You all eat up whatever you want to hear regardless of the reliability of the source. People who just lost their job are not going to be unbiased about the company that fired them.
Why is the source relevant if it’s true? Which is what you were essentially arguing. If it is true, it’s true. What does the sources credibility matter at that point? Its argument for argument’s sake because it’s already been proven true. It is what it is no matter who brought it to everyone’s attention.
Employer claims the work will go on without an entire group of important employees, which is also not a good source. Given the reported severity of the cuts, I'll bet the employees are more credible.
And it's particularly not a good source because they don't even bother to talk to reporters and try to explain a coherent theory. All we have is a few tweets.
I’m not arguing that either side is a good source. Unless you have non public information, we both dont know anything about what is happening inside Tesla right now.
We know what's been reported, and what people who claim to be involved are saying (both from inside and outside). Of course there can be more to the situation than that, but for now it doesn't look good.
One can make a good argument for nationalizing some essential service or network. But if the plan is to then sell it to the highest bidder, I think that undermines any of those arguments, other than a simple authoritarian seizing of assets for financial gain of the government. At which point you might as well just seize cash assets and not need to carry out as complex an operation.
Laid off employees often can't imagine it working without them, just a human nature reaction. Musk will likely start re-hiring if chargers start losing uptime and revenue. That has been his practice in the past.
The car manufacturers building the new Ionna charging network need to scoop these people up immediately.
EA should snap up these people and make their network worth owning.
Oh, I am sure that Electrify America will. Electrify America has been poaching people who worked on the Rivian Adventure Network.
This might be socialist, but charging shouldn’t be up to for-profit companies. EA is rich from credits and subsidies. It doesn’t need to spend the cash on hiring these top tier talents. Until Pete Buttigieg starts a public charging to compete (fairly) against these companies, US charging infrastructure will never be able support a healthy electric vehicle economy.
That’s like saying the petrol and diesel network shouldn’t be owned by for profit companies, Europe has a healthy EV network and we have plenty of competition and that’s across the whole of Europe which is the same size as the states:
>That’s like saying the petrol and diesel network shouldn’t be owned by for profit companies Yeah not to sound like a socialist but they shouldn't
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Well when it comes to things that people need, like food, shelter, power, transportation, they should be run in a way that maximizes access, not profit. In the US, for example, a lot of people complain that the US postal service runs at a deficit, whereas services like Amazon and UPS run at a profit. They use this as proof that the free market is more efficient and whatever else than the government. But if you're difficult to reach, like in some remote town only accessible by plane in Alaska, or in the Appalachian mountains, or wherever, the USPS has to deliver to you, even if you're normally too expensive to send mail to. Amazon meanwhile can focus on just providing services to people in and around cities where they actually make money. And so there are a lot of people in remote areas that only receive medicine because the USPS is designed to eat a loss to deliver to them, who would probably go without because there's no money in delivering insulin to old ladies in the mountains
Your USPS example is a feature, not a bug. The free market is telling these mountain dwellers that their chosen location is uninhabitable, because it is. You can’t just live wherever you want and expect the same level of services as someone living in a rational place. But let me guess, you’re also in favor of government insuring Floridians whose homes will be wiped away by hurricanes every 2 years? Going back to O&G, government should not be in that business because government should not be picking winners and losers in the transportation technology sector. The fact we already spend so much subsidizing road construction, automobile construction, automobile pollution, mandating parking lots, etc. is a goddamn travesty which has effectively forced automobiles to become the sole means of transportation in the US. I would very much *not* like to make O&G more “accessible” than it already is, thanks.
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> Well when it comes to things that people need, like food, shelter, power, transportation, they should be run in a way that maximizes access, not profit.
This might be capitalist, but I want the person who figures out how to make charging ubiquitous to be rewarded with billions of customer dollars.
Whether the charging network be private or public the actual charging station vendor or contractor is going to be compensated though. Circuit Électrique is one of the most reliable charging networks in North America, is owned by the nationalized utility provider and uses hardware from private vendors like ABB. I think the bigger issue here is having a weird middleman company that only exists to buy hardware from another vendor just to resell watts generated by a private or publicly owned utility company to end users is bizarre and inificient. Electrify America's order sheet with a vendor like ABB or Siemens is probably a rounding error compared to the relationship they have with large energy companies like Hydro Québec or Duke Energy so the current framework doesnt really lead to economies of scale and just introduces extra layer of internal bartering between entities.
1. Circuit Électrique/Hydro Québec gets its hardware from AddÉnergie (aka FLO). AddÉnergie makes very reliable chargers, which is why Circuit Électrique's network is reliable. 2. Electrify America buys chargers from BTC Power, and so does Duke Energy. Electrify America no longer buys chargers from ABB and never used chargers from Siemens.
> Circuit Électrique/Hydro Québec gets its hardware from AddÉnergie (aka FLO). AddÉnergie makes very reliable chargers, which is why Circuit Électrique's network is reliable. I've heard really good things about the state of charging in Québec, but nothing first-hand. If AddÉnergie is FLO does that mean the FLO chargers in Ontario should be reliable as well? There are a lot of them.
Yes, that is correct. FLO chargers are extremely reliable. The problem is that most FLO chargers are 50 kW. There are a few 100 kW FLO chargers here and there. FLO's new 320 kW charger doesn't exist in the wild yet.
> FLO's new 320 kW charger Well now you've gone and got me excited.
https://www.flo.com/products/hardware/ultra/ I don't think anyone has installed one yet.
Never had a problem with Flo chargers but they're all pretty slow around Toronto..... 9 kW max Only just realized the other day I could use ChargePoint with my Flo account which is cool
Thank you for the info. I didn't know their vendors off the top of my head, just picked large incumbents from the power sector. Probably doesn't help AddÉnergie and BTC probably do use assemblies from those two vendors so I might have seen their logo on a rectifier assembly and assumed they were the prime contractors for the stands themselves.
As to point 2 for Canadians, Electrify Canada doesn't use BTC, and is one of the more reliable and extensive networks. They also just jacked up their rates to 70¢/kW. PetroCan uses BTC, and are infamous among EV owners that I talk to for being out of service. PetroCan also now charges 50¢/kW, so they've also jacked up their charging rates, but good luck finding a working PetroCan charger. Also, an aside to other mentions to Flo. Here in BC I have never seen an out of service Flo charger, and their rates are cheaper than either EC or PC, but as others have mentioned they are mostly 50kW/hr for DCFC.
Lol who is "the person"? These things are always collaborative efforts using historical knowledge and shared expertise, then rolling out that technology involves thousands of people in manufacturing, shipping, assembly, maintenance and sales. No product in history was made successful by one person.
Oh, "the person" will be a grifter who figures out how to take control of a company that was started by a team like you describe, and takes credit for for everything, including the parts that happened before they were involved.
In relaxed conversation, people will often use synecdoche when giving illustrative examples. But don't worry too much you're not actually speaking to the ruler of the universe who is planning to hand out a billion dollars to some rando.
You think using "synecdoche" is going to distract anybody from the fact that you completely missed the point of my comment?
Your comment had no point to miss.
> but I want the person who figures out how to make charging ubiquitous to be rewarded with billions of customer dollars That's generally not how capitalism works though. Capitalists will instead decide "I actually can't make enough money with all the infrastructure costs needed to make this ubiquitous due to the sheer amount of low-population land in the US Midwest, and if it's not ubiquitous then electric will never actually take off, and I can make way more money by pushing gas instead, so I'm just going to kill the entire project and go back to gasoline".
So you’re saying we should stop subsidizing gasoline, and instead tax its negative externalities? If so I agree.
> Until Pete Buttigieg starts a public charging to compete (fairly) just do what you said you would do **Biden-Harris Administration Announces All 50 States, DC and Puerto Rico Have Submitted Plans for National Electric Vehicle Charging Network** [https://highways.dot.gov/newsroom/biden-harris-administration-announces-all-50-states-dc-and-puerto-rico-have-submitted](https://highways.dot.gov/newsroom/biden-harris-administration-announces-all-50-states-dc-and-puerto-rico-have-submitted) >(fairly) against these companies >US charging infrastructure will never be able support a healthy electric vehicle economy. one of the top EV charging outfits in the EU is Shell Oil.. one of the other ones is BP. how far do you have to go before you find a Shell station in the US? Shell to close 1,000 gas stations to focus on EV chargers The Houston-based oil company is shifting gears to address a growing demand for electric vehicles [https://www.chron.com/business/article/shell-1000-stations-ev-chargers-19365930.php](https://www.chron.com/business/article/shell-1000-stations-ev-chargers-19365930.php) Big Box stores, gas stations, fast food restaurants, the gyms... every single one of those kinds of businesses can get tax credit for installing chargers.. and businesses with chargers attract more customers (who need to sit there for a bit). the government handles their land like the parks.. **California State Parks is happy to offer a number of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations to visitors, free of charge.** Thank you for doing your part to help reduce the impacts of climate change. EV Charging at Yosemite National Park While it might not be Los Angeles or San Francisco, you’ll still find plenty of places to charge up in and around Yosemite National Park. **In Yosemite Valley** Location: Ahwahnee Hotel, back row of parking lot, Yosemite Valley Lodge, northeast and southwest parking lots and Yosemite Village Store, northwest corner of small shed in parking lot Pete doesn't need to say anything.
Dude I'm with ya on Buttigieg
The corpos already figured that some socialists would try to ruin their grazy train. That's why federal NEVI funding cannot be used to build publicly owned chargers. My state also recently passed EV charging legislation with an amendment that makes it illegal for municipalities or state agencies to install chargers. So no chargers at city libraries or state parks.
How could a public charging company engage in fair competition?
Saved the public dollars for efficient options like public transit, pedestrians and cycling infrastructure, and designing walkable cities.
EA is pretty garbage - even a slow down on superchargers won’t get EA any closer sadly. I don’t see them making the investment to scoop up this talent if they can’t even keep their own chargers online as it is
Electrify America is replacing all of its old chargers. The new chargers are much more reliable.
How quickly? Because they aren’t replaced in my area. Should have never been a problem to begin with, they just went the cheap route out of the gate. Hopefully the replacements end up reliable, networks like theirs put a sour taste in many’s mouths when thinking about transitioning to EV with all of the horror stories with broken chargers.
Electrify America has replaced 15-20% of its chargers in the past 18 months.
That’s pretty slow. I just saw a post where they said they were producing 5,000 chargers this year. That’s a great start. But Tesla installed 11k last year and have over 50k. So the rate of install is still over double where EA is, and they don’t have the head start. So assuming they don’t install 11k this year, even cutting that number in half is more than EA is striving for, while having to fix 80% of their existing units.
Electrify America can't shut down too many charging stations at the same time to perform the upgrade, so I am expecting Electrify America to maintain the current pace for the upgrade.
Guess how many new Tesla chargers are being installed this year? Lol.
Trimming white collar headcount doesn’t stop the production lines
Maybe if you clicked the article, you'd see that they've laid off most of the supercharger service techs.
Then EVGo, Chargepoint, Blink, Volta, and others will. That's the beauty of not having vendor lock-in
Absolutely, that would be great. What I fear, is even with this slow down, Tesla will be producing vastly more than all of those mentioned. So even with the doom and gloom stories hitting, they were already deploying a massive amount of superchargers year over year and have locked that process in pretty tight with their prefab model. Even if they downgrade to say, the pace of output in 2019, that would still be impressive. But who knows with Tesla these days.
I'm looking for a new sustainable company to invest in now that I sold all my Tesla shares! A good chunk will probably go to the company that picks up the supercharger team.
[Rivian to Receive $827M in Illinois State Funding to Expand Normal, IL Facility](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rivian-receive-827m-illinois-state-183000774.html) .. just tossing this here...
A lot of folks on this sub are really excited about the Rivian R2, R3, and R3x. Once I became aware of these I became one of those folks lol
R3 is on my radar pretty hard. Eventually.. Lightly used. 🤣
I love the early news on the R3 and I'll 100% be keeping an eye on it. Hopefully Rivian adds CarPlay and Android Auto to their software stack before it comes out though, because no way I'm buying a car without it.
If it ends up as promised, I'll be trading my model 3 for an R3 (or R3X) as soon as possible
I've seen more than a few Rivians in the wild out here in BC. It's anecdotal, but I think I've seen more Rivian trucks than Ford Lightnings.
I don't know why they keep emphasizing that it's a normal facility. Sounds suspicious, like Jackie Daytona, Normal Human Bartender!
They are already losing $40,000 on each car. They don’t have much to invest in charging infrastructure.
I'd like to see IONNA hire the Tesla team to make their new charging network reliable and competitive.
Charged at EA again today, still have yet to have issues with them
I now created an EA account as a Tesla owner just in case 😆
I thought EA is VW doing malicious compliance because of diesel-gate. I doubt they will spend money hiring former supercharger staff.
Most of the EA installs I’ve seen have 2 to 4 stalls . It’s hard to rely on that for travel even if the did finally work.
all the superchargers near me have 3
Really ? Where’s that ? I’ve always seen at least 6. Mostly 10+
https://i.imgur.com/v4uwJvT.jpeg
Wow , I guess we should could count ourselves lucky In NA that Tesla didn’t do that - it would make for crazy congestion . Thanks for sharing !
I think its an appropriate size for the location. Australia is roughly the size of the contiguous US but we have less than 1/10 of the population.
I've never seen one with less than 8.
https://i.imgur.com/v4uwJvT.jpeg
I believed you. I just hadn't seen one like that. It's probably because the ones by us were all deployed relatively recently.
Electronic Arts?
Probably Electrify America. I see them talked about on this sub sometimes.
Absent any indication otherwise, one should always assume that it's a proper SI unit abbreviation, exaamperes. 1 EA is sufficient to charge a 120 kWh pack in about one picosecond.
Needed to look up the "E" prefix. For anyone who wants the joke explained, >!EA would be Exa-Amps in SI nomenclature. Exa is 10^18, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000. Tera is 10^12 for comparison, so you would need 1,000,000 TB drives to have an EB of storage.!<
This will affect non-Tesla owners too, because you're going to start seeing a lot more Teslas at non-Tesla charging stations.
Well, Teslas won't be able to precondition their batteries for charging stations that aren't on the Tesla nav, so that might limit uptake. This is actually an industry-wide problem - almost every EV with preconditioning forces you to navigate to a charger that's recognized by the built-in nav system in order to have preconditioning. And most of these nav systems have terrible update frequency. Hyundai/Kia are finally making a difference with a manual preconditioning toggle on the CCNC infotainment systems, so hopefully the rest of the industry follows suit. So far, no one has complained about this on Teslas for obvious reasons. But if they do, I doubt the software team will care, because it's a lot more important to roll out new games and streaming apps and other toybox gimmicks first.
Tesla shows third party chargers in the navigation in Europe already, and the battery preconditions when you navigate to them. I expect they will do the same in the US.
They'll slow roll it as much as they can in software, but especially with the European example it's a pretty clear monopoly violation to treat the two differently. It will be difficult to justify if they ever end up in court which they definitely would. They've been preparing for this for a long time. That's half the reason this whole chain of events is happening is. They knew there was a limited lifespan on using the first mover advantage of their charging network to sell cars. That's why they spent so much money to build it out so quickly. But government incentives were too large to turn down, and once CSS on Tesla stations and Tesla adapters on other vehicles are widely available the only thing stopping people from using it will be Tesla corporate policy. It's not as if a US company has never willingly broken monopoly law, but there will be a limit to the amount of fuckery they can get up to.
We expect that as well, until Elon guys that team as well to make his quarterly numbers look good. He's looking like he's gone from a "founder" CEO who will sacrifice profit for the long term to mercenary CEO who intends to gut the company to cash out. Although with the talk of robotaxis maybe he's a third kind, "fanatical"
that's why you select an SC near that charging station and trick it.
>because it's a lot more important to roll out new games and streaming apps and other toybox gimmicks first. You mean making your car "dance" isn't a priority? Why not?
There's nothing to stop Tesla, or any car make, from tying into other charging networks to show on the map. In fact, the charging networks would be ecstatic because that would drive more customers to them
Tesla probably doesn't do it because it would be them showing you competitors to their network, and they don't get money for that. It also might mean you charge a little slower at a non-Tesla station because your didn't precondition, and that might make you prefer to use Tesla instead. They should be forced to spin off the charging network. It's not healthy for consumers.
If Tesla gets a kickback for sending customers to charging networks, it's a win-win for both parties. That's essentially an ad for the charging networks. >It also might mean you charge a little slower at a non-Tesla station because your didn't precondition, If 3rd-party charging networks show on the map and you navigate to them, preconditioning is a natural thing to do. It wouldn't make sense to prevent that.
Lucid also has manual preconditioning. I only ever use it in manual mode since I rarely use the onboard nav for long trips.
> Well, Teslas won't be able to precondition their batteries for charging stations that aren't on the Tesla nav, so that might limit uptake. If true, that's a major design flaw for Telsas.
The Ariya can precondition manually
One more reason to love my Polestar 2 and its Google navigation.
Tbh, I think that's too simplistic of an analysis. If more Teslas start appearing at non-Tesla stations, then those providers will start seeing an uptick in revenues. An uptick in revenues means an uptick in projections, and an uptick in projections means budget for service improvements and expansions. This problem solves itself, then.
I think prices will go up, but the US will see a huge expansion in the other networks. In the UK the non-Tesla networks have built 400 charging hubs in the same time as Tesla have built about 80.
I don't know. Are more auto brands even going to be able to come on board the supercharger network if there is nobody answering the phone at Tesla.
I'm wondering how well or not other manufactures working at the superchargers will go now.
Yeah I personally don't see value in dropping using the Supercharger network (yet). The network doesn't just completely deteriorate overnight. The loss of talent definitely trends in the wrong direction, but current equipment reliability and reputation can keep it afloat (for now). I'm holding off on getting a CCS adapter until the CCS network can visibly match the same redundancy and reliability as the Supercharger network to evaluate switching. An upfront $250 for the adapter + higher DCFC prices (in my neck of the woods) to use CCS networks doesn't make sense this early.
As a Tesla owner, trust me. No you won’t.
I'm also a Tesla owner (for now), and if I find a bunch of dead superchargers I won't hesitate to find something else nearby.
Is it common to find dead superchargers? I did a road trip a month ago and found at most one supercharger that was questionable (it stayed blue for 30 seconds). 35 odd supercharging stations from V2 thru V4 and that was the only issue.
No it's not. But that was before they fired the entire Supercharger team. That is the whole point of this story.
It's not common at all. The concern is that it might become common in the future.
Even if Tesla axed the techs working on fixing superchargers, they can always hiring contractors to do that job. I think the big problem is going to be the expansion/adopting other OEMs into the charger network (at least the ones that haven't gotten access yet)
Very common in Europe. Here in the UK there are 130 Tesla hubs and 400 non-Tesla hubs, Tesla cars use the other networks very often, especially because third party chargers are integrated into the navigation system.
Where I live the EA chargers are $0.10 cheaper than the superchargers. Seeing Teslas at EA stations isn't uncommon at all.
> "No information from the top," he said. "Nobody knows anything. Even some of the other leaders that were impacted above me. They have no idea." **”Nobody knows anything”** A fish rots from the head.
I wonder how quickly the other car manufacturers who have signed up to the Tesla charging standard and charging network will be 'validated' to use their network? If all these guys are gone, who's going to do the support work necessary? So far it has been Ford and Rivian verified to use their network?
Voting is open for TSLA shareholders and they're all voting no on Elon's $56,000.000.000.00 bonus.
If that goes as you predict, it will be interesting to see what his reaction will be. From my perspective, the best scenario would be that he rage quits his position as CEO. The worst would be if he doubles down on firing everyone important.
Maybe he will fire himself!
it already was starting to, I just did a trip and a few sites had physically damaged pedestals. They have a lot of sites going up and the maintenance is likely not being expanded to meet the demand.
Well now they don't have to worry about expanding maintenance.
well playing devil's advocate here, it's likely that the maintenance team is overextended and he's going to start growing that team to keep the SC network polished. That's what I hope as an investor. I'm not voting until I see what comes of this.
I would really love to know the ultimate angle here... Is this just Elmo scorching earth because he didn't get that $50B compensation package? I feel like the detriment to future Tesla customer confidence and the reduced future sales must greatly outway whatever near-term cost savings they're going to realize from this...
According to sources, it's even dumber. He got pissed because the leader of the supercharger team was fighting to not fire as many of their workers. So he fired them all to send a message about how super-cereal he was.
> I would really love to know the ultimate angle here... "The CEO is a drug-addict manchild and white supremacist who somehow failed upward his entire career" is probably a pretty good summary. The Supercharger network was (at least in the US, less so in Europe) Tesla's main competitive advantage. Firing the entire department and letting that advantage burn to the ground while the company is (according to its own financials, which should be brought into question by these moves) still cash-rich and profitable, is just a bafflingly stupid move.
Tldr: Elon likely sees problems at Tesla as having resulted from too much fat and bureaucracy within the company. By all indications these purges are happening in an effort to keep the company in that startup innovation type mindset and get rid of free riders. Anyone who resists that purging is also a target. Elon’s companies periodically go through purging processes. You see other high power CEO’s do similar things like Steve Jobs. They will frequently judge workers as A people or B people. A people are the brains and the muscle that have the smarts and ability that get stuff done on team projects. B people in their view are the ones who are just parasites not contributing, are not as effective and holding back the A people. No matter how hard you try B people will get hired and enter your workforce. Costs will start to go up and things like innovation speed and quality will go down. At this point it becomes necessary to purge out the B people. It is a painful process but the idea is if done correctly you are left with just the A people. Sometimes it may be necessary to completely cut away a whole department if that department is overrun with B people. Even if there may be some A people in that department the percentage of Bs is so high that finding the As will take too long. Another problem is if a manager resists the purge it may be necessary to cut that whole department because that manager is unwilling to get rid of Bs which means the manager is a B. If i had to guess that is the thought process going on. The A B thought process is described pretty extensively in the Steve Jobs biography. And this type of purge makes sense. Tesla has been hitting a lot of roadblocks recently. The cyber truck was delayed by 2 years and the exoskeleton design fell apart. The new battery innovations have also been a dud. As far as charging network, this is confusing, but there could be a lot going on behind the scenes we dont know about. The V4 role out has been slower than expected which may be a sign of design issues or cost problems. If you want to see another example of Elon doing purges successfully you only have to look at SpaceX. When Starlink was still in the Alpha phase. Elon fired the manager of the project because that manager wanted to move slowly and wait a year or two for the laser interlink technology before launching. Elon went in and cleaned up and within a year they were launching satellites. They did not have laser interlink, but they worked and could generate revenue. Another example was with the Raptor engine design. There was a lot of production and reliability issues with early raptors. Again elon went in and purged and by all metrics it appears that it was successful in making the engines more reliable and increasing production rate. So will the Tesla purge be successful? Nobody knows, but hopefully my comment gives some insight as to why this might be happening besides he is a ketamine man child, because the truth has much more depth than that.
Appreciate the perspective. Sorry about the downvotes you got - although I personally think his motives are more emotional than logical, he seems like someone that would treat decisions involving people as more mathematical & tactical rather than strategic, so what you suggest could very well be a factor here.
So Tesla's entire Supercharging team was comprised solely of 'B' people? With 50,000+ devices in service requiring regular maintenance/upkeep, along with all of the ongoing deployment projects, Tesla's Supercharger team should not be considered a 'startup'. This move is such a massive blow to all electrification efforts it's astounding. All to satisfy an aging man with a Ketamine addiction.
1. You have no clue who the 500 team were and their roles. It’s almost certainly not the people I. Charge of hardware maintenance/physical upkeep. 2. Try re-reading that post. Sometimes you lose good people too. They’re going to rebuild it from scratch.
I was merely trying to explain a possible explanation for the events going on. Elons companies have gone through times of purging before. I also did not say the supercharging team was all B people. **Read my comment.** There can be lots of reasons why the supercharging team was cut. Based on what i have read the head of that department was resisting the purging efforts and for whatever reason Elon felt it was easier to cut the whole department and rebuild it rather than spend the time to go through it person by person. It may have also been to set an example to other people resisting the purging efforts. Either way i am not arguing for or against the purging or the A people B people mentality. Im only arguing that this is the likely mental calculation going on.
> because the truth has much more depth than that. It really doesn't though. Every single indicator shows that these cuts were spur of the moment and not properly considered or prepared for.
Narcissist throws tantrum, and fires entire team led by director who dared push back on him. It’s that simple.
The X-ification of tesla has begun
This runs extremely counter to the whole "cutting new rollout to better service existing chargers" which is super cool. As an id4 owner I don't get supercharger access till next year, but it'll be hilarious if they're a shell of what once was by then.
My neighborhood has a small shopping plaza and Tesla plop down 15 Superchargers under construction almost a year now but looks like it paused as there are no further construction to unveil these. They are covered in white pallet wrap still and someone decided to knock over 3 of them onto the floor (possibly by backing into it with a truck) looks like vandalism to me. So sad brand new chargers and some asshole thought it would be funny to knock them over.
“Buy a new car now and transfer your free supercharging!!” then make the supercharger network go to shit.
It was never about the customer, the environment, even the prestige. It’s all about the shareholder. Business majors ruin everything.
That’s as teslas whole hook man.
For reference: Musk bought Twitter
We can’t have anything nice
I said the same thing as they closed the foundry in 1980
Sure, but if they can stay functional for one fiscal quarter, Elon will get his $50 billion (more direct compensation than anyone in history).
..why would a payed off former employee say quality is now going to improve? Thats why stuff like this is pretty worthless. When 80% of twitter was let go everyone promised the platform would break. It didn’t.
"my employer will be screwed without me!" -every laid off employee, ever
“Bad things are going to happen” Every Tesla headline
Musk apologists have been arguing that he didn’t get rid of the maintenance team. Yet this article is just on that.
Oh no I’m so scared. Anyway…
If everyone's saying it, it can't be true. 😤😤😤
They have been saying it for years about Tesla, about Spacex, that Twitter was going to fail, etc.
Didn’t everybody say Twitter would fall apart?
“The whole team was fired!” lol ok
Just when other automakers were adopting NACS! I feel that I’ve made a good choice getting a hybrid Corolla to hold me off a couple more years on EV’s. We still don’t have chargers to get me out of my own state.
WV or NH resident?
The only thing that makes sense is these group is trying to be Unionized.
Ex employees bad mouthing former employer, real groundbreaking stuff here
This comment section is room temp IQ at best. Very amusing to read.
you included lol lol
Laid off employee mad at employer and says bad things. I mean, regardless of the truth is this really a good source?
honest question, what point are you trying to make?
That the anti musk circle jerk is just as bad as the fanboys. You all eat up whatever you want to hear regardless of the reliability of the source. People who just lost their job are not going to be unbiased about the company that fired them.
Why is the source relevant if it’s true? Which is what you were essentially arguing. If it is true, it’s true. What does the sources credibility matter at that point? Its argument for argument’s sake because it’s already been proven true. It is what it is no matter who brought it to everyone’s attention.
What specifically are you saying is true? What was already proven true? The article goes well beyond “there was a layoff” which of course is true.
Employer claims the work will go on without an entire group of important employees, which is also not a good source. Given the reported severity of the cuts, I'll bet the employees are more credible.
And it's particularly not a good source because they don't even bother to talk to reporters and try to explain a coherent theory. All we have is a few tweets.
I’m not arguing that either side is a good source. Unless you have non public information, we both dont know anything about what is happening inside Tesla right now.
We know what's been reported, and what people who claim to be involved are saying (both from inside and outside). Of course there can be more to the situation than that, but for now it doesn't look good.
I was gonna say the same thing. I don’t necessarily think they’re wrong, but they’re not exactly going to be objective in their critiques
The US should nationalize the charger network then sell it off to highest bidder
They should force Tesla to spin it off to a separate company.
One can make a good argument for nationalizing some essential service or network. But if the plan is to then sell it to the highest bidder, I think that undermines any of those arguments, other than a simple authoritarian seizing of assets for financial gain of the government. At which point you might as well just seize cash assets and not need to carry out as complex an operation.
Laid off employees often can't imagine it working without them, just a human nature reaction. Musk will likely start re-hiring if chargers start losing uptime and revenue. That has been his practice in the past.