Electric Vehicles
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Excellent explanation, but the article title is also bullshit because both Penn and ohio have started building chargers already in the last month or so, they just aren't finished. These two are in the lead because they had largely done the ground work you describe for EV charger rollouts. The money is doing exactly what it needs to do: give states the capitol to start work immediately. Most states are still planning, but the moneys there to actually make the plans a reality.
Based on the white House statements, no one expected this to immediately happen. They all planned for it to take a while to sort, but once its sorted, to move quickly. Turns out infastructure is hard to do competently, but when you put smart people in charge of it and fund them, it actually gets done.
People can say what they want to about Biden, but the motherfucker had been hiring good people to do good things.
Fun fact: Ohio already has its first NEVI station up and running.
Were people actually expecting the construction to start immediately or something? There's absolutely wrenches being thrown at the process, and all of the planning and construction time on top of it all.
The plan all along was to complete everything by 2027, with construction starting in '24 and '25. Every state I've cared to look at has a published plan and timeline. 🤷♂️
It's going to be 90% planning and permitting. 10% construction. There's very little construction needed. (It may even be 99:1).
Crucially, the cable swap is a non-issue, because the chargers will all use the CCS communication protocol. NACS uses the J1772 pins for sensing and initiating charging, and CCS adds an extra communication layer which Tesla has built into their cars since mid-2019 or something when Europe switched to CCS Combo 2 as the EU standard.
I'm not personally a promoter of the NACS connector for lots of reasons nobody cares about, but I'm glad we've at least landed on the common communication protocol. If all these chargers started popping up in 2024 with CCS Combo 1 connectors, I wonder how many of these other brands would actually migrate to the NACS wand versus just continuing on with Combo 1 forever. I'm not convinced any of them really care either, and it's just a matter of convenience for customers. Without the necessity to rely on Tesla's charging network, that convenience sort of evaporates. Add in an adapter for NACS to CCS, and I think the whole issue goes away.
They haven't switched yet, though. And that's one of the points I'm making. They have said they're switching in 2025. To me, that sounded a lot like they were waiting to see what happened with chargers in US and Canada. Announcing charger support for it is also not a meaningful announcement since you really only need to change the cable end. It's like saying I now support winter boots. I didn't change my feet, so it's not a meaningful statement.
The number of EVs sold isn't an argument that's going to sway me. As I've said, I have technical reasons I don't like the NACS connector. If everyone sticks to the current announced plan, then we get DCFC with both connectors and nobody really cares. But if the charger manufacturers and EV manufacturers decide to drop NACS as a whole, I don't think anybody will know or care in 3-4 years time outside of Tesla owners that need an adapter to access other brands chargers.
I clearly said they all announced it was happening in 2025, so obviously linking to their announcements isn't really going to change anything.
The thing they are doing is trying to equip their cars with the port for the chargers that their customer will use. What I'm saying is if the NACS adoption doesn't take off my charger manufacturers, then auto manufacturers have no incentive to adopt it either. That's the remaining question mark. Regardless, Combo 1 connectors are going to be on those chargers because that's what every other brand has on their cars.
I guess if it was just Ford and Ford alone, I could see one company backing out, but not several entities.
Consider why these companies have decided to transition to an NACS port. Because they want their customers to gain access to chargers that exist, and those chargers are operated by Tesla. Now, imagine that in 2024 we start seeing NEVI funded chargers installed around the country, and those chargers have fewer NACS connectors than CCS Combo, or they have no NACS connectors. What do you think the auto manufacturers would do? They haven't signed any kind of contract requiring they use NACS, they've simply announced that they plan to in 2025.
In other words, if there's no convenience improvement to deploying NACS ports because new charger sites don't have a majority of NACS connectors, then they wouldn't do it. They'd simply keep equipping vehicles with Combo 1 ports.
Each announcement has explicitly said they’re doing this to gain access to the Supercharger network.
Yes. Because today that network is by far the largest in the US, and almost certainly in Canada. But the US is funding deployment of new chargers every 50 miles, so you can see where brands other than Tesla might outnumber Tesla over the next few years.
The ink has dried on contracts.
Buying new plastic bits from an injection molding company doesn't require an insane lead time, and the existence of contracts really isn't meaningful in any way. There is almost guaranteed to be language in supplier contracts that allows both parties to back out as long as they keep a dollar spend level or pay a small penalty. This kind of thing happens all the time during qualification and testing.
Going back to CCS would be incredibly unlikely.
Why? If there was a compelling reason to not use NACS, why would anybody continue charging ahead?
They’ll be out-pacing the collective NEVI deployment for a while.
I disagree. They've added 21 in the past year in the US, so let's call it 2 per month on average for 2023. The plan for several states I'm interested in will outpace that immediately. I don't know where you got 1.5 sites per day, but that's absolutely not the case in any way. It's not even 1.5 stalls per day, instead it's 0.624 stalls per day. Can you tell me where you got that number from, because 1.5 sites per day would be 548 sites per year and with an average of 10 stalls per site they've installed this past year that's 5479 stalls. Back of the envelope math should have sounded wrong to you.
I seriously doubt this will happen in the next 2-4 years at the clip Tesla has been dropping chargers.
Again, your Tesla number is extremely wrong. You should go back to the supercharge.info site, go to the changes list, and switch to "add". Lots of Tesla sites have been in planning and permitting for years, and to be frank until something Tesla says actually exists in the world it's not worth much.
Sure but we’re 8-9 months from cars rolling off the assembly line
Maybe.
There is no compelling reason.
There's a couple I can think of off the top of my head. Can you not?
greater reliability
You're comparing to existing EA chargers, which we know isn't the real comparison at hand here.
Realistically, most people just don’t care about the CCS/NACS debate.
Right, which is why I specifically didn't have it. So let's not start it, because there's no debate to be had. One is superior to the other, and it isn't NACS. That's entirely separate from the conversation being had right now.
claim CCS was the reason everything was bad
Nope. Charger reliability has nothing to do with the connector, stop here. Do not pass go. It was the chargers, not the connectors. The connector decision was one of convenience because Tesla has a reliable network when used with a Tesla.
What I'm suggesting here is that companies are prepared to use the NACS connector, as published by SAE. They announced this because Tesla's network exists now and we didn't know what was going to happen with NEVI funds. Now most of those funds have been allocated (if not all?), and since all of those sites are going to get Combo 1 connectors as well as NACS, it's conceivable to me that they announced NACS to hype things up for a while, and the option to pull out is always there. They have zero requirement to use NACS on either chargers or vehicles, they simply may choose to. There's been quite a swing in perception of supporting a certain CEO in the past 6 months that might not be as appealing to a lot of people, so it may not be the selling point it would have.
Where do you see they only added 21 in the past year?
I told you exactly how to find it on the supercharge.info site in my previous post.
Slide 6 tips your hand, so thank you for commenting about this. You just posted the GLOBAL number, not the US number. NACS is US only, NEVI funds are US only. Pretty important detail, that one.
Tyson's corner has been in planning stages since those shitty 208v destination chargers were installed, so I'm glad they finally did something. Is it actually open now? Took them long enough on that one.
“Add” is used when they insert a new site into their DB for the first time.
Yes, it turns out you don't need to mansplain CRUD to me, nor owning and using a Tesla, because I'm personally familiar with both.
Since "update" can mean changed status in any direction it's the least reasonable metric to use, because you'll also capture closed, permanently closed, permitted, and under construction status updates.
You also don't have to mansplain the site since I've been using it longer than you've been a Tesla fan. After all, you are the one citing Tesla's Quarterly report's global number.
And no, I’m not talking about the destination chargers
You keep clearly demonstrating that you aren't reading what I'm writing. And you seem to think you're telling me something even though you've very obviously got things supremely wrong. Again, global figure as one example and now you think I'm talking about Tesla adding destination chargers when what I very clearly said was that the SUPERCHARGER SITE has been planned every since they installed that shitty destination charger.
Do read the entirety of what I've written if you're going to try to argue against it. This is like for fourth or fifth time you've done this.
I was accused of screwing up my numbers
To which you responded with global figures. And this is all in service of you claiming new chargers from other brands isn't going to make an appreciable difference. Really? Then why keep installing new sites if Tesla's got this done and dusted. Unless, or course, one company won't be keeping up with dozens or hundreds of companies installing new sites in new locations.
if we want exact counts
They have an API. Why would we rely on the map page?
Here’s the real count: https://supercharge.info/map, Set Country to USA, status to “Open”: 2082 sites
Again, you're showing that you don't even remember your argument at this point, and it's crazy. You said they opened 1.5 NACS sites per day (in the US). Then you showed GLOBAL figures, and corrected it to 1.4 per day. Now, incredibly, you're counting all sites found on supercharge.info in the US as though they were all installed in the past year. What are you doing, dude. You very clearly already proved yourself wrong by using global supercharger install figures from the quarterly report and dividing it by (hopefully) 75% of a year. Their global number was less than your swag by about 10%, which would be totally fine I agree. If we were talking about global sites. But since we aren't, the debate is over.
Like, this is going to surprise you, I think, but some of us have scripts that pull data from these APIs. You can do the same thing, and collect the stats for yourself over time.
Practically 90% of their North American deployment is in the US.
Uh huh. And they've been installing them since 2012. So you might be able to see why dividing all north america (or even US) sites by days in THIS YEAR is a problem, I'm sure.
I’m stating that your usage of the site is incorrect and your understanding of how to query the site is fundamentally flawed. Sorry?
lmao
Says the dude using the maps page instead of the open API endpoint they've got sitting right there. Kay.
I’m having a difficult time taking you seriously.
You're having a difficult time staying on task. We're currently talking about how you got charger numbers for 2023 wrong, when the conversation started off with my saying it's entirely possible that if auto manufacturers saw charger manufacturers deploying Combo 1 connectors, that they'd drop NACS since they only "requirement" to use it is their own press releases saying they'd adopt it in 2025. If chargers start showing up in 2024 with more Combo 1 connectors, it wouldn't make much sense to switch to NACS instead of offering an adapter for the times you're stuck using one of Tesla's sites and you don't mind financially supporting an antisemite that cavorts with an admitted rapist and alleged sex trafficker online.
On the other hand, and this is what you could have said many posts ago if you fully read what I wrote, since NACS is an SAE standard at this point and Tesla has no licensing rights to it anymore (not royalty free, but none at all), charger manufacturers could just as easily use it and retrofit their older sites. Then start a nice boutique business offering adapters themselves for anybody with a Combo 1 port on their car currently. Looking at the state of ChaDeMo, though, that seems somewhat unlikely in the near or even medium term.
If you want to get back to the original point rather than going off on these tangents, we could have had a more interesting conversation.
You’ve only responded with baseless accusations that I’m grossly incorrect or denial that Tesla can deploy chargers.
Then why did you correct yourself several times in the comments above? Your global number was 1.4 per day, therefore the US number is necessarily lower than that.
Still skipping the Cruz of the topic. Nice. Anyway, bye.
I've restated it several times, and you keep bringing up straw man arguments. Possibly because you skim rather than reading, perhaps because you're unable to fully grasp what I said. But either way, you've demonstrated that you're hung up on nonsense, so I think it's best we both move on.
They should definitely rush to spend 7bn so that the job is done poorly and everybody complains more about the ineffectiveness of our government. Especially with the changes in charging connection standards in the US.
Hasn’t it been over two years?
Not to mention it's not like EV chargers were just invented 2 years ago. States should have already been exploring options. My state has already come up with numerous ways to charge EV drivers more for driving on the roads, all the while paying lip service by making pledges to reduce climate change, but now that there's funding for a legitimate initiative, we get zero action.
I'm not clear how the money was allocated. Is it for local governments or federal agencies to build them? It says along highways, and so I suppose it's for agencies, but I just wonder if the funds aren't going to end up as part of some bigger projects. And I also wonder if they're not using it as grants to developers. I dunno. But these things take time.
That all being said, it's definitely easy to see how certain interested parties might try to stifle this development.
This is correct. The approach some states took (like Ohio) was getting stations placed on pre-existing AFCs (alternative fuel corridors) in order to accelerate the NEVI approval process since placing chargers on a highway not already designated as an AFC would require that road to be recognized as an AFC before any funds would be approved for that particular round of funding. This allowed states like Ohio to side-step some delays and red tape in the beginning so they could get to building stations more quickly and focus on filling out the gaps later.
Source: Participated in some of the NEVI meetings for my state.