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by ggreer 553 days ago
Longer cables have significant disadvantages. They cost more. They're less efficient, meaning they charge slower and/or require more cooling. They contain more metal, making them more appealing to thieves. They get tangled and damaged more easily. That's why Tesla made their cables so short and standardized on a charging port location.

I'm sure future charging stations will have some long cables for vehicles with odd port locations or trailers, but I don't know if every charger at a station will have a long cable. Considering the disadvantages of long cables, it makes a lot of sense for manufacturers to use one location for the charging port. That allows owners to use as many chargers as possible. And it would mean that anyone driving an EV wouldn't have to remember where the port is on their specific vehicle.
2 comments
vel0city 553 days ago
The cables are going from a cabinet many meters away from the dispenser to the dispenser. They could go another 3-4 feet and suddenly support a lot more vehicles.

Or Tesla could have placed the dispensers to the sides of even some of the spaces and alleviated the issue.

But Tesla envisioned only the few Tesla models to ever charge at Tesla chargers, so they designed them with tight tolerances.

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peutetre 553 days ago
> I don't know if every charger at a station will have a long cable.

Every charger will have longer cables. Longer cables have been deployed on chargers from many manufacturers for years. It's not novel.

Tesla is generally behind the curve with charger development. Kempower and Alpitronic make the best chargers.

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ggreer 553 days ago
Both of those companies have much higher costs per charger than Tesla. Kempower doesn't make their prices public, but the cheapest I could find was $50,000 for a 1 port 50kW charger. A dual port 200kW charger was almost $200,000. Alptronic's chargers are $50,000 for a 1 port 75kW charger and $90,000 for a 2 port charger with 300kW total output. Those numbers are just for the hardware. That doesn't include costs for installation, land, or grid connection. My best estimate of Tesla costs is around $41,000 per plug, and that includes all of those extra expenses.[1]

Sadly, the graveyard of failed companies is full of ones that made amazing products. Kempower's revenue has been going down over the past year, and they've burned through half of their cash reserves in the past few quarters. They've decreased headcount to reduce costs. I hope they pull out of this dive, as more competition is great for consumers. But it really is the case that fancier chargers are significantly more expensive. So much so that it's hard to make them profitable.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42344230

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