Leaderboard

Except for EA, I expect there to be several rounds of consolidation as David suggested. Shell is actively buying up charging networks and I would be surprised if other traditional energy companies don't start doing the same. BP already has their BP Pulse network in the UK and announced in Feb is investing $1B in building the Pulse network in the US in partnership with Hertz. They also own a company that builds the DC Fast Chargers and an Israeli battery company. Chevron has a partnership with EVgo to install chargers at its gas stations, I wouldn't be surprised to see Chevron just buy EVgo outright eventually. Only Exxon is taking the Toyota "EV's aren't real" approach even though their CEO predicts that all new cars will be EVs by 2040. Rather than being the supplier of energy for transportation, Exxon seems to be taking the path of being the leader in specialized lubricants for EVs that are different than traditional automotive lubricants. If and when Exxon's CEO changes, that policy could change too.

Japanese brands are getting hammered in China. That is also a trend that won't stop as China might be all EV by 2030 and there are 100 car makers making TVs in China right now. So if Toyota and the others lose volume in China, they have to look to the US or Europe and Tesla and BYD are on the attack in Europe. If I were Toyota management, I wouldn't be worried about a 900 mile EV, I would be worried about how do I get the BZ4X price down to $30,000.

EA is a weird situation because they exists due to a court order. Until that court order expires, I expect them to remain independent.

Different issues in different regions. In @David's region, the EV chargers suffer from the volume of use. There's just more vehicle volume at them. In the mid-west, the charger stations are fewer and further between due to lack of adoption. The stations get vandalized more often and there is less of a support network to bring them back online.

This is also true. The benefit of Tesla is that they will typically put in 8 - 14 chargers while EA or ChargePoint will put in 2 - 4. If one Tesla charger goes down it's a 7% to 12.5% outage rate. If one Chargepoint charger goes down, it's a 25% - 50% outage rate.

That's basically a full-time job around here. Tesla solar at a supercharging station is window dressing and a bit of advertising their solar panels, nothing more. Solar in that square footage cannot generate sufficient electricity to fully charge those megapack batteries. Solar on a house covers the house's usage plus a little left over for the grid. A single Model-3 charging at 250kW at a super charger is pulling the equivalent of 166 standard microwave ovens. My guess is that while Tesla is using solar to top of the batteries in the ground, they will primarily be using the batteries for energy arbitrage, charging when the price is low and selling when the price is high, off of grid power. Shell (and others) already do that, but without the battery part. When they're the generation company, they can beat Tesla on the grid price and the amount of gain Tesla gets by using solar will be offset by the cost to install and maintain the batteries and panels. In short, I bet the cost per kWh is a wash between the two companies. I don't have a lot of knowledge on this, but looking at both the ChargePoint and Tesla apps, it looks like in our area it's 35c - 50c to DC fast charge on both networks. The price varies by day and time of day. There's also the possibility that Tesla will charge a higher rate to non-Tesla cars using SuperChargers. ChargePoint and other networks also have monthly plans that lower the charge rate if you're going to be using public chargers a lot. This will be the key factor. The other charger networks, EA specifically, were the ones that shot themselves in the foot on this.

Because the Tesla ones will work.