[zamfi]

> By buying a Tesla you're supporting the notion that proprietary connections are good.

You continue to say this, but your evidence is nonexistent for this claim. Standards exist, Tesla doesn't use them for <reasons>, therefore if you buy a Tesla you disagree that standards are good.

I bought a Tesla, I agree standards are good, I wish Tesla would use a standard connector. They don't, because of vendor lock-in. We agree.

We agree that a standardized port is both good and possible. You keep arguing with me like I'm arguing against you on this point, I am not. That is the straw man.

Also:

> yet you also think they're not purposefully pushing their proprietary connector for vendor lock-in reasons

No, I know that they are doing this for lock-in reasons. That was literally in my prior post, perhaps you missed it.

What I AM saying is that the claim that eliminating vendor lock-in will make DC fast charging better for everyone is false. You're right that I care more about fast charging and increased adoption more than standards, because I think we will eventually have standards and it will all be fine.

I don't think that mandating standards now will make fast charging better, which is the thing I care about. I argued strongly for this and you did not refute any of it, instead continuing to argue that those who buy Teslas must not care about standards and are supporting vendor lock-in. Even if true (and I disagree), it's irrelevant.

If you care about standards more than about EV adoption, fast charging proliferation (which I think is a prereq for adoption), then sure, I disagree with you. I think the latter are net better for humanity than avoiding a fragmented charging ecosystem.

You seem to think that a fragmented ecosystem is what will suppress adoption, but I think you are wrong -- I think taking away the incentives of those who are deploying fast charging at scale (i.e., Tesla, for vendor lock-in) will do much more harm than good: in that world, no one will be financially incentivized to build fast charging without market intervention, which perhaps you support but are not arguing for.

And I think present-day vendor lock-in is a small price to pay for 10-years-from-now higher EV adoption.

[vel0city]

> It's a straw man because no one is saying "it's preferable for consumers for Tesla to have a proprietary connector". And it's not Tesla's desire for a proprietary network to support its EV sales that causes fast charging to be a disaster in the US for non-Teslas.

>> By buying a Tesla you're supporting the notion that proprietary connections are good.

> You continue to say this, but your evidence is nonexistent for this claim. Standards exist, Tesla doesn't use them for <reasons>, therefore if you buy a Tesla you disagree that standards are good.

> And I think present-day vendor lock-in is a small price to pay for 10-years-from-now higher EV adoption.

You're literally making the argument that you're suggesting nobody is making. That ultimately its better for consumers if Tesla has a proprietary connector. Your reason for that line of thinking is because you assume if Tesla didn't have a proprietary connector there would be no market for fast charging at all, or that it would have been massively delayed. You even acknolwedge at some point in time in the future maybe we'll have a standard connector, but clearly there's some reason why it can't be done now and we shouldn't really be demanding for a standard. It took a few comments to draw that out, but as you can see clearly some people are making such an argument as that's ultimately the root of your postiion.

I disagree with that basic premise. Look at the massive amount of J1772 chargers out there in the wild. They're mostly J1772 chargers because when they were built several years ago CCS2 didn't exist except on paper and J1772 was seen as the industry standard connector in the US market. Now that CCS2 is a real standard and is on real cars driving on real roads, CCS2 chargers are starting to exist. Imagine a world where Tesla did open the connector back when CCS2 was just a spec on paper. Anybody in this market could have built a DC fast charger. Any other car company could have built a Supercharger compatible car, so there would have been more on the market. With such a wider possible market at both ends, do you think there would be more or less widely compatible fast charging stations? Note that Tesla could still have made up for other companies piggybacking on their initial investment of the chargers, as the earlier Teslas had free charging. I imagine the free charging wouldn't have applied to a Ford or VW or Nissan at a Tesla station. Or do the massively anti-consumer move of not allowing other brands to charge at their stations. So boom, there's the whole argument of "but why would Telsa want to invest if not for the vendor lock-in?"

If third parties could have manufactured Tesla/Superchargers or cars, I imagine there would be a lot more Tesla/Supercharger compatible chargers in the wild today.

[zamfi]

> You're literally making the argument that you're suggesting nobody is making. That ultimately its better for consumers if Tesla has a proprietary connector. Your reason for that line of thinking is because you assume if Tesla didn't have a proprietary connector there would be no market for fast charging at all, or that it would have been massively delayed. You even acknolwedge at some point in time in the future maybe we'll have a standard connector, but clearly there's some reason why it can't be done now and we shouldn't really be demanding for a standard. It took a few comments to draw that out, but as you can see clearly some people are making such an argument as that's ultimately the root of your postiion.

I think you may be confusing an argument about a connector standards with an argument about proprietary networks. I'm saying the connector is basically irrelevant, and not the reason that Tesla's network is proprietary; I'm agreeing that that standards are better than nonstandards for all consumers today, and in the future. A standard connector would make the transition to shared, nonproprietary networks less expensive in the future, but this is basically noise as Tesla's transition from its proprietary connector to CCS2 in Europe shows.

Forcing Tesla to use the CCS standard in the US is a basically irrelevant move unless you also force Tesla to share its fast charging network. So, let's ignore the connector for a moment and focus on the network.

> Imagine a world where Tesla did open the connector back when CCS2 was just a spec on paper. Anybody in this market could have built a DC fast charger. Any other car company could have built a Supercharger compatible car, so there would have been more on the market. With such a wider possible market at both ends, do you think there would be more or less widely compatible fast charging stations? Note that Tesla could still have made up for other companies piggybacking on their initial investment of the chargers, as the earlier Teslas had free charging. I imagine the free charging wouldn't have applied to a Ford or VW or Nissan at a Tesla station. Or do the massively anti-consumer move of not allowing other brands to charge at their stations.

Except Tesla tried exactly this, to make its network shared in the past [0], in part to encourage cost-sharing and all those other good things, and other automakers were not interested. Why wouldn't the other automakers take up Tesla on their offer to share capital costs and join the largest-at-the-time fast charging network?

Because, again, in 2014 (and probably still today), the problem was not an incompatible connector, for which there could be adapters aplenty—it's that legacy manufacturers don't care about EVs, and don't want to spend money on fast charging as a result. Tesla still has a patent reciprocity offer for anyone who wants to support the supercharger connector—but the connector difference is a red herring.

Why would Tesla opening up its network to other vehicles have led to a larger fast charging station network? You are stating this as though it's obvious, but it implies that the only thing stopping anyone else from building fast chargers is that they couldn't use the Tesla connector—which makes no sense.

What has stopped every other manufacturer from building, or partnering, or funding, a fast charger network? Why did VW have to be forced to fund Electrify America because of Dieselgate?

Do you think that if VW honestly thought its future were EVs, and that the reason VW EVs weren't more popular is the lack of a fast charging network, that they would be behaving as they are now? Of course not—they would be building/funding fast chargers as quickly as possible. Instead, they are being dragged kicking and screaming into the EV future by regulation and by the market. They are not building a fast charging network because they do not care about selling EVs.

So, does Tesla benefit from vendor lock-in from the supercharger network and its proprietary connector? Sure. Would there be a larger more compatible network of fast chargers available today if Tesla had made their connector open from the start (i.e., 2011 instead of 2014)? If so, barely—Tesla was, for years, by FAR the largest fast charger network. Nothing prevented other networks from charging Teslas for a fee (and indeed they do now), but they still didn't build.

The reason is not the connector. It's the incentives—we don't have a wide, compatible fast charger network in the US not because Tesla selfishly had a proprietary network, but because no one else wanted to build a large network, and no one else wanted to pay Tesla to share theirs, because prior to 2019, no legacy automaker thought EVs were the future.

Forcing Tesla to open its network today without requiring a cost-sharing on capital expenditures would reduce Tesla's incentive to make its supercharger network larger, because there wouldn't be a competitive advantage anymore. You would have to also incentivize the industry to build fast charging as a whole, and provide capital to do it, and the EA example shows that this is easier said than done.

Hopefully this helps explain how I can support standards and wish everyone used the same plug, but also be ok with temporary vendor lock-in (via the network, not the connector) so that there's incentive for both Tesla and others to build more fast chargers. These are not mutually incompatible.

[0] https://insideevs.com/news/322223/tesla-to-make-supercharger...