Tesla: an EV charging superhero or supervillain?
5th times the charm?
This past week I was in L.A. visiting family for the 4th of July holiday. My wife and I rented an electric Subaru Solterra to get around (L.A. is one of those cities where having a car is unfortunately very necessary).
I woke up early Monday morning and decided I should have enough time to drive to a charger and go for a quick jog while our rental filled back up for the week.
I arrived at the first charger, the closest one on Google Maps, and it was no where to be found. After searching around a small parking lot and the neighboring buildings, I gave up and set out to find another option.
Hoping to avoid this issue on my second try, I pulled out the Presto app, which is supposed to be a “seamless one stop shop for EV charging” according to my melancholy Avis representative. The recommended charger was 10 minutes away, so I threw on a country music playlist and set off.
This second charger was at a Chevron. There were 4 chargers, one was occupied, and the other three were out of service (one’s screen just wouldn’t even light up).
I sighed… maybe I just got unlucky. So I hop in the Subaru and juke around to the next nearest charger. This one’s inside a parking garage for a dilapidated outdoor mall. Guess what? Not a single operable charger was available there either (2 worked, both occupied; another 5 were completely busted).
At this point, I was running out of time, but I remembered we saw a Shell / Volta charger at the Whole Foods near our Air BnB. I hammered the accelerator.
This charger was the most cynical of them all. I plugged in the charger and whipped out my phone to figure out how to pay for the electrons. I soon realized a problem — the system saw someone was occupying charger #1, but it didn’t understand that it was me. I was charging for free, so that was cool, but when went to unplug so I could scurry back home for my first work call of the day, I hit a roadblock.
Because the app didn’t know I was the user of this charger, I had no way of telling it to stop charging. The charger refused to detach from my car, no matter how much button clicking, car unlocking, and wiggling I employed. As it turns out, safety features on the Subaru prevents one from disconnecting the charger during a charge. Starting to panic, I did what any good Millennial / Gen Z cusper would and Googled it. Thankfully I found the solution on a Subaru forum and used a tiny pull tab under the hood to manually unlock the charger from my car.
I was laughing to myself through this entire experience. I had always heard rumors about the poor quality of public EV chargers, but this was my first chance to experience it first-hand.
One week before, I had rented a Tesla and that experience had been impressively seamless. Just pull up to a charger and plug it in. Avis charged me later for the electricity I used. Simple. Because of this, the first question that came to mind was “why is the Tesla experience so much better?”.
First off, Tesla is vertically integrated, so they’re able to design hardware and software that works together better than independent companies. And, Tesla’s made huge investments in its charging technology and network, essentially subsidizing the cost of the charger for their divers.
In contrast, non-Tesla EV chargers were built because of regulators. EVgo and Electrify America were both born from legal settlements. Also, most EV charger companies today have had to rely on government subsidies to survive. In combination you get a network of EV chargers that it optimized to meet settlement requirements and acquire maximum government funding. They are NOT optimized for a seamless customer experience.
These electric vehicles have complicated hardware and software. Both can easily break, and there’s a shortage of technicians out there to fix it.
Somebody has got to fix the EV charger problem. And it seems like that somebody is going to be Tesla.
Earlier this year, Tesla announced they would open their vast network of high-uptime chargers to non-Tesla EVs. New cars are all moving towards Tesla’s NACS charging port design and adapters will allow older cars to connect, as well.
I think this is a really interesting move by Tesla. Their network has long been viewed as a competitive advantage and key selling point of their vehicles, so why let other EVs into their network?
Tesla claims they always planned on opening up their network to “encourage more drivers to rapidly transition to an emission-free future”, but let’s be honest there’s more at play here than simple goodwill. Many believe this is a data-collection play. Similar to Google selling data from your hundreds of searches, Tesla could collect troves of data from the connection between your car and their charger. This would give them insights into things like battery science, engine performance, and consumer behavior. This information could be used to improve how they design their cars, place their chargers, and interact with utility companies.
But even if you ignore the near-term data play, I still think this is a really smart move by Tesla. Charging networks are a clear example of an industry with network power. The more chargers you have in your network, the more a customer can trust you as a single-source for their EV charging needs. Furthermore, controlling the network allows you to provide information to the customer about where chargers are and which ones are available. By opening up their network to third-party vehicles, Tesla closes the door on competitors hoping to section off a corner of the EV charging pie.
Thinking forward 5 or 10 years, I can easily imagine a world where all these minor EV charging players die off, leaving Tesla with a charging monopoly. It’s likely that the regulators will come in and ensure fair pricing (similar to utility providers), but the data that Tesla captures will continue to be their main value driver.
Anytime “monopoly” and “data” are used in the same paragraph, it sounds a bit scary. And while I think we should be careful to regulate Tesla’s market power, I’m not pessimistic about it. Somebody has to fix the customer experience of charging an EV, and that player needs to have scale in order to succeed. Personally, I’m okay with giving Tesla some data in exchange for taking on that difficult job.
