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Seven of the world's largest automakers said Wednesday that they're working together to build a new nationwide network of 30,000 electric vehicle charging stations, an effort to stoke already growing consumer demand for EVs.
BMW, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes and Stellantis said the first batch of their "high-powered charging" stations will be available next summer.
In the U.S., consumers bought 557,000 electric cars in the first half of the year, accounting for 7.2% of all new vehicle sales.
The right way to do this would be to go to Musk and say, "here is 500 million dollars. Build us a network."
Egotistical morons. Musk has forgotten more about building an EV network than they have time to learn. Just hire him to build you a network with your funding.
Well, they say that they will support CCS and NACS connectors. But from what I understand, there is a more to a charging network than that. There are phone apps, charger apps, databases, cloud based servers and enterprise apps, accounts, payment systems, reporting and monitoring, etc - will all these things be compatible and equivalent or better?
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Still a drop in the bucket, if they really intend that all new vehicles are going to be 50% EVs by 2030. Having 30,000 EV chargers that take time to charge doesn't come close to handling the road trips that the current 145,000 gas stations serve in the U.S.
It's funny that an automotive startup was able to build 45,000 fast chargers without the help of the legacy auto, and now 7 (!!) legacy automakers are teaming up and will only build 30,000.
What Musk accomplished is nothing short of amazing.
Still a drop in the bucket, if they really intend that all new vehicles are going to be 50% EVs by 2030. Having 30,000 EV chargers that take time to charge doesn't come close to handling the road trips that the current 145,000 gas stations serve in the U.S.
That's a lot of chargers for several reasons. Right now, the vast majority of the plug-in new vehicle buyers (and in general) are going to be those with a pathway towards charging at home and the vast majority of people who purchase EVs get the vast majority of their charging miles from home. Plug-ins are about 9% of total new vehicle market share last month and BEVs (the ones with fast charging capabilities) are about 7% of total market share with a median *total* fleet age of over 12 years which means that the vast majority of vehicles on the road will still be ICE vehicles even if BEV market share gets to majority by 2030, and even by then it's still going to be heavily lopsided towards home charging, so there's no necessity to get anywhere near 100K EV fast charging station in the US by 2030 in order for EV new vehicle market share to majority.
The announced 30,000 fast charging stations from *one* network--even gas in the US is pretty split among multiple providers and it's not like this means all other providers will stop installing. This would be another large network adding to the six large ones in the US and a couple dozen or so smaller ones with DC fast charging stations. Right now there are ~10K DC fast charging stations in the US, and in recent years, chargers output far more than most EVs can consistently input so they're future-proofed in some sense since it's likely the next decade will be like the previous where the max, and more importantly, average charging rates vehicles can handle rapidly go up. Since the expectation is exponential increase in EV market share through to 2030, then that means the vehicle fleet is going to be lopsided towards even faster charging rates and better charging curves and likely increasing efficiency within each segment and so the kind of difference in miles per minute at the gas pump vs miles per minute at the charger will likely continue to shorten considerably and that would constitute the majority of the fleet in 2030 as opposed to vehicles made this year and earlier.
On top of all of this, there are also public chargers that are *not* DC fast chargers, but rather much cheaper and more numerous level 2 chargers which get deployed in a variety of settings since they're relatively inexpensive and easy to set up and are often co-located with parking spots. This would be parking lots or parking garages used either for customers, or more useful, for employees, as well as part of an increasing amount of hotel parking and it's unclear what the charging split on level 2 vs DC fast chargers will ultimately be, but it's reasonable to assume that to some degree, the greater ubiquity of level 2 public chargers means taking some of the charging miles "away" in a sense from DC public chargers and therefore more reason to expect DC pubic chargers not needing anywhere near the ubiquity of gas stations. Keep in mind that increasing average range also means that a larger proportion of trips for people with home chargers are going to be at home since if you have enough range for a daytrip of a couple to a few hundred of miles that are comfortably within the range of a longer range vehicle, then you're more likely to opt out of public charging for that trip in its entirety since it wouldn't beat the convenience and cost of charging at home.
To me, what this seems more like is a preparation for when the part of the market that has pathways to charging at home becomes saturated and more people without a pathway towards charging at home start buying EVs. It's still going to be only about half the addressable market and likely less for new vehicle owners, so this seems more for *after* EVs reach majority new vehicle market share than on the pathways towards that. To me, this is when having more public DC fast charging stations actually makes some difference since it's at that point where you'll start seeing more people buying EVs without charging at home and it's where we'll start seeing a more complete picture of how the public charging split of high output DC public fast charging, lower output under 150 kW DC public charging stations, and level 2 public charging stations will shake out. It's also where we start getting into the wild card of potentially non-negligible amounts of vehicle-mounted solar generation becoming a widely available option as panels get cheaper and more efficient and EVs themselves becoming more efficient.
The ramp up until that point of majority plug-in new vehicle market share though is a pretty clear pathway though due to the proportion of new vehicle purchasers who have a pathway towards charging at home and would be doing the vast majority of their charging at home. Thinking that you'd need anything close to the number of DC fast chargers as you have gasoline stations by that point probably has a lot more to do with inexperience with EVs and how people actually use them.
I've been saying this for the last few years on this forum, but I still think plug-ins reaching majority new vehicle market share in the US is probably going to hit some time in 2028. That prediction was also with double-digit / 10% or up plug-in new vehicle market share by some time in 2023 and that still looks pretty likely since June 2023 was at about 9% and there are still several production ramp-ups of existing vehicle models and the introduction of new vehicles models or substantial next-gen refreshes of existing models slated for the latter half of this year.
Now, all of this has been stated on this forum before and you love popping into EV topics despite having little knowledge or experience with them, so perhaps it makes sense to try to understand the above this time around and try for making some cogent arguments for how you came to and stick with the conclusion that an equivalent or more number of DC fast charging stations compared to gas stations is necessary, and why the above is mistaken. At least give it a shot.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 07-27-2023 at 10:37 AM..
It's funny that an automotive startup was able to build 45,000 fast chargers without the help of the legacy auto, and now 7 (!!) legacy automakers are teaming up and will only build 30,000.
What Musk accomplished is nothing short of amazing.
This might be a conflation of stations vs stalls. The 30K mentioned in the article is for stations which generally have numerous stalls/chargers in them. Usually a minimum of four, but sometimes a lot more. There's a bit under 2K Tesla Supercharger stations and Tesla tends to put in a lot of chargers at their stations.
It should be mentioned that Ionity, which is a similar consortium based in Europe, has created a very expanse and reliable network in Europe, and it's arguable that this should have been what happened here though automakers probably mistakenly thought the US was going to adopt EVs at a much slower rate so didn't get their act together here in the same way they did there.
I reckon if Volkswagen had maybe taken Electrify America more seriously and brought in other partners rapidly, we'd probably still be set to have a bifurcated fast charging protocol in the US rather than what looks to be a pretty settled affair of moving to NACS, so I guess there's a bit of a silver lining?
The right way to do this would be to go to Musk and say, "here is 500 million dollars. Build us a network."
Egotistical morons. Musk has forgotten more about building an EV network than they have time to learn. Just hire him to build you a network with your funding.
Corporate ego is a money loser.
They probably have a pretty good rationale for *not* giving Tesla more revenue streams since Tesla is also a major competitor in their main industry, so it's not entirely stupid of them to try to set up an alternative. The interesting thing is for charging to be consolidated into the automotive industry which is different for gas stations and automakers. The question is if they'll be able to have chargers that are anywhere near as easy to use and reliable as Tesla has done with its superchargers or what similar consortium like Ionity in Europe have done.
What's going to be interesting is how and at what cost and what speed the existing charger networks are going to move over to NACS. The expensive part is ostensibly the permitting and getting enough electrical capacity into the stations so that hard part is done, but it's still going to cost them something. There's also a question of how quickly Tesla deploys v4 superchargers and change existing supercharger stations over to v4 since v4 is going to host the ability to go up to 350 kW (and ostensibly can go up to 600 kW) and will have long enough charging cables for the various different placements of charge ports that other automakers use.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 07-27-2023 at 09:34 AM..
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