[vel0city]

There are many brands of DCFC around me. EA obviously, EVGo, blink, 7Eleven, Road Ranger, Francis, and Volta. There's a few other travel centers on the routes I take which have their own branded chargers as well

The earlier non-Tesla charging stations definitely had a rough start as there was practically zero market at all for them. The economics will change as more EVs are on the road. I do agree most early EV owners are going to be those with easy charging at home, but people without home charging may eventually want EVs as well. Public charging station use will probably increase a good bit over the next few years.

[toomuchtodo]

Those are brands, not networks. No one is going to road trip if they can't trust they can roll into a station at 10% state of charge and charge in 20 minutes off hours. The network uptime is the selling point of Tesla Superchargers. You will never be left stranded.

Install the PlugShare app or check out their website and see what comments users leave about reliability with regards to your local stations.

https://insideevs.com/news/664737/tesla-superchargers-averag... (Tesla Says That Supercharger Average Uptime Is Near Perfect *100%)

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-supercharger-reliability-dom... (Tesla Supercharger reliability continues to dominate industry)

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1136861_tesla-superchar... (The Tesla Supercharger network was the first comprehensive DC fast-charging network in the United States, and it remains the best in terms of customer satisfaction, according to a new J.D. Power study.)

[vel0city]

> Those are brands, not networks

I don't care about "networks". I don't choose Exxon or Shell or whoever because they have the most gas stations, I go to the one that's most convenient for me. I'm not beholden to any particular "brand" or "network" of charger, I just want one close that works. I'm no particular brand fanboy, I'll use whatever works and is convenient.

> Install the PlugShare app or check out their website and see what comments users attempting to charge look like.

I use the PlugShare app a good bit. All the chargers I referenced are 9.5+, with most of them having 10 ratings. I also have my own personal experiences at those chargers. In all of my public charging sessions I've never once failed to charge at a decent rate at a DCFC. And I'm one who has driving around the city testing out chargers because I've been interested in the tech. I have experienced some of those free L2 chargers at grocery store parking lots being offline, but even then most of the time those have worked flawlessly.

And I don't bother with specific apps for charging "networks", all my DCFC has either been plug and charge or phone NFC/EMV payment terminals.

I don't personally put a lot of weight on Twitter polls to give me an accurate picture of reality, and if JD Power tells me something I'm likely to think the opposite is true. Most of JD Power's statements are meaningless noise to me.

I don't doubt Tesla's chargers have more uptime on average. There's a lot of things they do better historically, like having lower lifetime rated cables they change out more often and they're faster to roll out to places with issues to repair. But its not inherently a Tesla thing, the other chargers can do it and it seems in the past year a number of companies have stepped up their maintenance and reliability considerably. I'm going by the data I can see around me and what I see on PlugShare around me, which shows the non-Tesla chargers near me and on the routes I want to take are generally pretty reliable.

[KallDrexx]

Since EvGO and Chargepoint seem to be public companies, I looked up their financial statements. It's not pretty. They are all bleeding money and that's with machines that people complain are down a lot. Chargepoint is in a slightly better spot because their Level 2 chargers seem to be somewhat better in the profitability department, but still losing tons of money.

And that's not really surprising. If you look around at quotes, installing a single DCFC charging stall of 150Kw or better looks to run about $100k per stall plus significant installation costs almost matching that.

At $100k for the stall itself, and if we assume $.50/kwh (a bit higher than most EVGO stations I see around here) and we assume $0.16/kwh electricity (residential rate here), that means each kwh sent to a car has a profit of $0.34. So the stall would need to dispense 294,117kwh of energy to pay for the stall itself. If the average rate of dispensing to a car is 100kw (which is probably high even without leafs and bolts due to charging curves) in 15 minute intervals, that's 11,765 cars that need to charge for 15 minute intervals to break even on the equipment itself, so an average of 32 cars charging per day (assuming my math is right, which it may not be).

32 cars per day at 15 minute average charge times means the stall has to be utilized 33% of the day. That paypack doesn't count maintenance, install fees, repairs (they are always breaking down), kickbacks to the land/building owners, etc... And many areas of North America doesn't get electricity for $0.16/kwh (though some are cheaper)

The math definitely feels to me like it's really hard to make DCFC stations profitable in much of the US, especially until EVs become more prevalent.

[vel0city]

> we assume $0.16/kwh electricity (residential rate here)

EIA average for industrial electricity is ~$0.14/kWh. I know around here its not uncommon for industrial users to pay all the way down to ~$0.07/kWh, there's a good bit of difference depending on how far up the line the industrial user owns which varies the delivery cost a good bit.

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

I definitely agree these early days in DCFC is mostly a brand mindshare and land grab play for a lot of these companies, I'm guessing they're trying to already be in the ground in all the places for when/if the market for DCFC really swings to higher demand.

[secabeen]

Industrial users also pay a demand charge based on the maximum current draw over the period; that can be significant.

[dreamcompiler]

I think the way to make it profitable is to install PV canopies over the charging stations. Then at least during the day the electricity is free.

Of course capital cost is higher because you still need a fat feed from the grid and transformers and coolers, and maintenance might be more costly, but free electricity during the day when most people are driving would almost certainly pay that back quickly.