Electric cars are on the rise in the United States. Nearly half of all
car-buying adults are open to the idea of bringing a battery-powered vehicle
into their home, and automakers like Ford are reporting triple-digit sales
increases of battery-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. But finding a
charger on the road, which can be challenging, may soon become easier thanks
to electric automaker Tesla: The company recently pledged to open its
proprietary charging network to other electric vehicles in late 2021.
While most electric car charging is done in the home, commuters and
travelers often need to charge on the go, and will then have to find public
EV chargers along their route. There’s just one catch: the charging
infrastructure in the United States is still very young, and coming across a
place to plug in isn’t as easy as finding a gas station, at least not yet.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk first announced that Tesla was planning to open its
network to non-Tesla vehicles via a tweet on July 20, and later expanded
upon the idea during the manufacturer’s quarterly earnings call on July 26.
“We’re currently thinking it’s a real simple thing where you just download
the Tesla app and you go to Supercharger,” said Musk, referring to the
company’s line of fast chargers. “And you just indicate which stall you’re
in. So you plug in your car, even if it’s not Tesla.”
Currently, all Tesla Superchargers in the US use a proprietary inlet
connector with a form factor that can only be used to charge Tesla-branded
vehicles. Other EVs on the market use an open standard like the Combined
Charging System (CCS) or less common CHAdeMO connector. This means that the
Supercharger inlet cannot be physically inserted into a non-Tesla vehicle to
charge it.
The solution involves a small new piece of hardware. Musk says that the
company will start selling a Tesla-designed adapter which sits between the
car and the Supercharger, which will allow owners of non-Tesla vehicles to
use the Supercharging network along with the Tesla app to charge their
vehicle.
The expansion of charging networks in the U.S. is reaching a critical
tipping point. As more automakers move towards electrification, the need for
additional chargers is predicted to grow at an astronomical rate. In fact,
President Joseph Biden recently called for providers to reach a milestone of
a half-million chargers installed by 2030 and set out to establish an
infrastructure funding bill to make the target a reality.
But recent bipartisan compromises seek to cut the available funding for EV
charging infrastructure expansion in half, meaning that charging may get a
bit more crowded before it gets better. Since Tesla controls a large portion
of the total chargers deployed today, allowing other vehicles to charge on
the Supercharging network could ease the crunch.
There are currently 43,525 public charging stations across the nation,
according to the US Department of Energy. However, only 5,260 of those
stations actually have DC Fast Charging, which is necessary for EV drivers
to quickly top off their battery mid-trip, readily available. The remaining
88 percent of charging stations have slower charging speeds that are meant
to charge an EV’s batteries over longer periods of time, such as overnight
at a hotel. That’s obviously not ideal if you just need some quick juice.
Confusingly, a charging station refers to a physical location that usually
has multiple individual chargers where multiple vehicles can charge near one
another simultaneously, like how a gas station has multiple pumps. For
example, a total of 18,875 fast chargers exist, but they are distributed
amongst those 5,260 stations.
The total number of chargers described by the Department of Energy includes
1,074 fast charging stations built by Tesla. And the good news is that each
of those has approximately five times the number of average chargers per
station, 10 cars as opposed to a non-Tesla station’s average of 2 cars. This
means that Tesla’s Supercharging network makes up around 20 percent of all
stations and over 56 percent of all total chargers on all networks today,
but only Tesla vehicles can charge at these locations. With Tesla offering
to open its charging stations up to other automakers, the ability to charge
away from home becomes significantly easier for owners of vehicles made by
other brands.
This proclamation was met with mixed feelings from Tesla owners, who fear
that opening the network up to non-Tesla vehicles will cause even more
congestion. Tesla’s charging stalls have appeared online during busy travel
times like Thanksgiving, when lines overflowed out of parking lots while
vehicles waited for chargers.
Musk says that Tesla plans to address this by adjusting the network’s
pricing, increasing the cost to charge when the network is “jam-packed” in
order to deter unnecessary charging. Likewise, vehicles that charge more
slowly due to technological constraints will also face higher costs, because
the longer a vehicle charges, the longer the wait for another vehicle
becomes. This is also expected to improve as Tesla continues to aggressively
roll out additional Superchargers to offset the increasing amount of cars on
the road.
As of now, Tesla hasn’t revealed an exact timeline for when it plans to
expand its charging network to non-Tesla vehicles. However, Musk estimates
that it will begin rolling it out before the end of 2021. Much like hot dogs
and buns, the number of electric vehicles on the road will never quite be
equal to the number of public chargers. That isn’t necessarily a problem,
especially as the primary means of juicing up is accomplished at home. And
as the network continues to grow relative to the number of new EVs on the
road in the next decade, pain points like congestion will hopefully become a
thing of the past.
Credit: popularscience.com
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