Will Tesla’s charging technology end up conquering North America? And if it does, will that disrupt or accelerate the transition to electric vehicles?
The past few weeks have seen much Sturm und Drang around the news that U.S. automakers Ford and General Motors are pledging to make their future EVs sold in North America compatible with the fast-charging technology owned and operated by Tesla, rather than the Combined Charging System (CCS) technology standard that’s been adopted for the vast majority of non-Tesla EVs and charging stations in North America and Europe.
Subscribe to receive Canary's latest news
And a flurry of announcements from EV charging network operators such as EVgo, ChargePoint, Flo and Blink Charging and fast-charger manufacturers such as ABB North America, Tritium and Wallbox that they’ll support both CCS and Tesla’s technology has prompted predictions of the beginning of the end for CCS as the North American standard.
“You’ve got GM, Ford and Tesla. That’s 60 to 70 percent of the EV market in the United States,” said Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy, which tracks data on EVs and charging networks, adding that “it’s just a matter of time” before other EV manufacturers follow Ford and GM’s lead and switch to Tesla’s technology.
But that’s not a universal view, to be sure. “As it stands, every international automaker selling in North America is sticking with CCS,” said Pavel Molchanov, director and equity research analyst at Raymond James & Associates. “If someone major — let’s say Toyota or Volkswagen — were to jump on the Tesla bandwagon, that would be needle-moving, but we will believe it when we see it.”
However, industry analysts do agree that Tesla appears to be the big winner in the EV-charging shakeup. The company could add $3 billion of revenue in 2030 from non-Tesla EV drivers as Ford and GM are followed by other automakers, according to a report from Piper Sandler.
Drivers may also gain by being able to access Tesla’s fast-charger network, which at 17,000 charging plugs is more than twice as large as the roughly 7,500 fast-charging stations available from all other providers in the U.S. combined. According to a yearslong independent study from J.D. Power, Tesla’s chargers also offer a more reliable and user-friendly charging experience than the less-than-stellar performance offered by most of its competitors.
Still, there’s a long way to go from these recent announcements to deploying the EVs, charging stations and underlying communications and software systems needed to realize them. Ford and GM don’t plan to have Tesla-compatible EVs on the market until 2025. Even the seemingly simple task of delivering an adapter that will allow existing Ford and GM EVs to plug into Tesla chargers won’t happen until next year, with manufacturers turning on a dime to produce this new technology.
These complications pose a challenge for an EV-charging infrastructure that’s already struggling to grow quickly enough to meet the state and federal goals for switching from gasoline to electric-powered cars. The U.S. will need between 500,000 and 1.2 million public charging ports by 2030 to support the Biden administration’s goal of having EVs make up half of all U.S. car sales by the end of the decade, according to various analyses.
Today, the country has more than 100,000 slower-charging Level 2 charging ports, but only about 31,000 direct-current fast-charging ports, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center.
There’s also the problem of dealing with the EVs caught in between the two charger types.
“We’re going to be selling millions of EVs between now and when GM and Ford coalesce around this specific connector,” Nigro said. “How do we make sure the market accommodates those EVs and the millions that are already on the road?”
“That’s going to be a big challenge, and it’s going to be more expensive as a result because you have to add more hardware” to support multiple charging technologies, he said. “What will it cost the industry, and will it yield benefits down the road? That’s an unknown right now.”
A long road to the chargers the U.S. needs
The biggest public EV-charging companies in the U.S. have a problem: They face years of spending more money than they can earn from charging. That’s because they have to build chargers well in advance of the volume of EVs on the road rising to a high enough level that they break even. Supporting multiple charging technologies will add to those hard-to-recoup costs.
This isn’t a new problem for EV charging operators, to be clear.
CCS went through a nearly decade-long battle for North American supremacy with yet another fast-charging standard, CHAdeMO, favored by some Japanese automakers, including EV pioneer Nissan. While Nissan announced last year that it will switch to CCS for new EV models sold in North America, many EV charging stations still offer both technologies.
The Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit research organization largely funded by utilities, has outlined the problems that fragmented and nonstandardized EV charging technologies pose for EV adoption. Multiple charging technologies are just one of many complicating factors that EV drivers face, noted John Halliwell, senior technical executive at EPRI.
“If you’re thinking about EV charging standards, it’s really about the consumer experience,” he said. “When I use my bank card to get money out of an [ATM], there are probably dozens of standards and business relationships behind that machine and money coming out.” Consumers don’t have to know how complicated these behind-the-scenes integrations are, he said — “I want the experience to be simple.”
Industry observers have praised Tesla’s charging system for its ease of use and streamlined support of future-forward features like “plug-and-charge” capability, which allow drivers to pay for charging without credit cards, subscriptions or other alternative forms of payment.
Meanwhile, the CCS standard — developed by standards body SAE International and spearheaded by CharIN (Charging Interface Initiative), an umbrella organization for more than 300 companies and organizations working on EV charging standardization — has gone through its fair share of growing pains, with different implementations from automakers and charging operators complicating its smooth operation in the field.
The question for Tesla, and the automakers that are crafting agreements to use its charging network and technology, is how well its chargers will perform with a much wider array of vehicles, all of which have hardware designed and software coded outside of Tesla.
“Tesla had it easy — [its charger] had to talk to three cars,” Nigro said. “It’s a lot different making that work across 100 EVs being upgraded with software every few months.” As this complexity grows, “I think they’ll run into a lot of the challenges that existing charging providers have experienced.”
What’s a standard? Why does it matter?
It’s also important to remember that Tesla’s technology is not, in the strictest terms, a standard. That’s despite Tesla renaming it the North American Charging Standard (NACS) late last year as part of a pledge to open its previously Tesla-only charging stations to EVs from other companies.
Standards can be wickedly complex, but the important thing to note here is that Tesla’s tech isn’t entirely open to all parties who wish to build with it — usually a foundational tenet of standards.
The Link LonkJune 16, 2023 at 02:30PM
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMib2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmNhbmFyeW1lZGlhLmNvbS9hcnRpY2xlcy9ldi1jaGFyZ2luZy90ZXNsYS1oYXMtcHVsbGVkLWFoZWFkLW9uLWV2LWNoYXJnaW5nLW5vdy10aGUtaGFyZC1wYXJ0LWJlZ2luc9IBAA?oc=5
Tesla has pulled ahead on EV charging. Now, the hard part begins - Canary Media
https://news.google.com/search?q=hard&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
No comments:
Post a Comment