It’s The Superchargers, Stupid | In Depth

almost every week it seems like a car company makes a claim that they have or will have a tesla killer they don't but you know what for sake of argument let's say they do let's say starting right now every other auto manufacturer comes out with an ev offering that is as safe as fun to drive is technologically advanced including all the driver assist features as efficient with as much range for the same price or cheaper with service centers over-the-air updates the games the fart modes everything a tesla has and for the sake of argument let's say they can do all of it and they can make as many of them as customers demands no supply issues even if the other auto manufacturers could do all that they would not be able to beat tesla and here's why it's the superchargers stupid i'm zach and i'm jesse and you're watching in depth on now you know [Music] do you ever feel like you're getting dumber you know we're about to start the show right now right i mean sometimes i feel like i'm not using my brain enough like i'm not putting enough real learning in no i know what you mean that's why i love brilliant oh right you're talking about all the awesome courses that brilliant offers on everything from gravitational physics to neural networks yeah brilliance courses are awesome but i'm talking about their daily challenges daily challenges yeah in addition to brilliant's fantastic courses they have these daily challenges that really stimulate your brain what's really cool about these daily challenges is that they keep you engaged even between courses yeah that's why we love brilliant with brilliant interactive problems and hints you're actually learning at your pace in a way that sticks in your brain yeah i love how brilliant brings subjects to life there's just so much to learn i'm going to start a daily challenge right now brilliant teaches over 60 different courses and really easy to understand ways over 10 million people have learned from brilliant maybe now isn't the best time well we have to start the show oh wow this is really to support our channel and learn more about brilliant go to brilliant.org now you know and sign up for free and also the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20 off the annual premium subscription all right now we have to start the show come on so you know i've been shaving with my henson shaver for months now yeah i'm still a little jealous and you know how you get the 100 free blades yep i've been shaving for months i haven't really made a dent in the blades and i've been changing the blade every time i shave so you're trying to get through the 300 blades huh i'm doing the best i can and it's actually hard to get through all these blades i think that if i was like really trying to make them last i could probably shave for maybe three years yeah so head on over to henson shaving and remember to use our code now you know to get 100 free blades now before we kind of start the show let's just get this out of the way first first of all home charging is super important and can make nearly any eevee a useful viable option for commuting or getting around town it's probably the most important aspect to ev ownership and adoption it doesn't get talked about enough and maybe we'll make a whole in depth about it someday but as soon as you need to travel outside of the range of your car or have to make a bunch of trips or something out of the ordinary happens charging networks and preferably fast charging is what you're going to need and that's what we're talking about today we've been waiting for ford bmw gm vw somebody to build their own high-speed charging network but year after year they haven't so at the end of 2012 tesla started building their supercharger network it wasn't anything much to talk about at first by the end of 2013 they only had 61 locations but by the end of 2014 they had 292. now by the summer of 2016 when jesse and i did our first cross-country tour in sparky tesla had over 600 supercharger locations worldwide now let's pause here because i hear what some of you are yelling at your screens right now what about electrify america what about evgo what about chargepoint and blink well let's look at electrify america for a second okay they just got to 730 high-speed locations not bad they started the network in 2018 and four years later they've reached about where tesla was after that amount of time so that's great oh but hang on uh how many actual charging stalls does ea have 3168 and how many charging stalls did tesla have in the summer of 2016 about 4 800. um okay remember that hey but don't forget evgo oh right how many fast charging locations do they have 854 and how many stalls uh 1752 again remember that number because that's about two stalls per location so hang on though evgo counts a high speed location as having 43 kilowatts or higher let's be honest many of their locations are only 50 kilowatt chargers and hang on to that thought because we're going to cover that more in a minute now according to the us department of energy chargepoint has 1822 locations with high speed dc fast charging and 1844 ports funny that's almost a one-to-one ratio but hang on that sounds really high from what we've experienced i mean this is what it says on the doe website okay but let's check out just a few random sites let's go to chargepoint.com okay let's click dc chat ammo and dc combo how about this one it's not far from us bill rick of massachusetts okay well so click on the more info uh click there yeah see it's only 24 kilowatts yeah there are some tesla destination chargers with more power than that but according to the doe that same charger is a dc fast charger how about this one up in northampton new hampshire yeah see only 24 kilowatts now we're not going to bore you we went through dozens of random chargepoint sites from here to ohio and beyond and about 30 percent of them were only 24 kilowatts or they were closed because they were at mercedes dealers or harley dealers but let's get back to charging networks what about charging networks that don't belong to electrify america evgo or chargepoint well there are 16 other charger networks in the u.s with dc fast chargers blink charge lab e charge ev charging solutions evconnect ev gateway flow fpl evolution green lots ivy op connect power flex switch energy volta wabasto and zef network so let's take every non-tesla non-ea non-evgo and non-charge point dc fast charger in the u.s so that means there are currently 876 locations with 1700 ports that shows you that there's about an average of two ports per location keep that number in mind now let's take all of these and add them to the evgo electrify america and chargepoint that would be every non-tesla dc fast charger in the u.s what is that total right now okay so you're talking 19 networks with 4 282 locations and 8 464 stalls so again remember those two numbers or just remember the ratio it's a basically two ports per location it's going to be important so now back to tesla's supercharger network we left off in the summer of 2016 but a lot has changed since then back then jesse and i had three possible routes across the us with 292 supercharger locations in north america today there are over 1 430 supercharger locations in north america with over 10 000 stalls there are 3 263 superchargers in the world and almost 30 000 stalls again remember that ratio that's about a 1 to 10 ratio isn't it but i bet we just lost you didn't we because if you remember a few minutes ago we said that 19 non-tesla charging networks have 4 282 locations and 8 464 stalls in north america and we just said that tesla only has 1430 supercharger locations in north america with about 10 000 stalls i mean look at this map of all the non-tesla dc fast chargers in the country and then look at the map of just tesla superchargers wait tesla has less green dots so then what the are we talking about this is where all non-ev drivers lose the narrative if you're an ev driver who has driven more than let's say 20 miles from your home then you get it but i promise you nobody else does the auto executives don't the politicians don't and potential car buyers don't and that's because all green dots are not the same okay so this brings us to point number one kilowatts how much power does a charger deliver when you get to a gas station well i haven't been to one in years so correct me if i'm wrong but i think they all pretty much pump gas at the same speed but that's not true with chargers a 24 kilowatt charger will take about three hours to charge a tesla model 3 from 0 to 100. a 50 kilowatt charger would take about half that hour and a half 150 kilowatt charger would take about 45 minutes because of a tapering charge cycle we'll get to that in a minute and 250 kilowatt charger would take about 25 minutes again because of the tapering now until you start driving an ev these numbers don't mean much because they're not real to you three hours 45 minutes what's the difference there's a big difference 20 minutes at a charger is a coffee and a bathroom break three hours is what the heck am i gonna do for three hours your day's pretty much blown point number two location now we all know that in real estate it's location location location right well the same is true of charging would you like to drive through traffic or windy back roads to get to a charger or would you like well-placed easy to get to locations let's visit a non-tesla location here on chargepoint how about this one in manchester new hampshire looks like it's not far from a highway so that's great yeah what are you complaining about well this is located at a harley-davidson dealership let's look at some of the comments on chargepoint about it definitely not a dc fast charger it's set up for it but after 20 minutes we only had increased by about one percent i think it's functioning as a level two at the present time or this comment the charging station is next to the service door at the harley-davidson dealership bikes were parked in the ev spots and location means more than just distance from a highway it's also about the amenities while you're charging i mean i guess if the harley dealership is open while you're charging you could go in and look at the motorcycles but i'd prefer bathrooms somewhere to grab a bite to eat or coffee and i don't think you'll be doing that here most tesla supercharger locations are placed near at least a convenience store or a mall now we have the only map that we know of in the world it's on the now you know channel website where people submit video supercharger reviews where they show what's nearby the supercharger and they rate the supercharger from 1 to 10. and you know what most locations average an 8. right from inside your tesla on the nav screen you can see the amenities of every supercharger now point number three is cost how about the cost of charging well here at this charge point charger for instance they charge 34 cents per kilowatt hour and i know i just lost you you see you're used to dollar per gallon or euro per liter for gasoline and diesel right most tv chargers are priced per kilowatt hour it's how you measure units of electricity it's actually pretty simple just like a 10 gallon gas tank can hold 10 gallons of gas a 75 kilowatt hour ev battery can hold 75 kilowatt hours of electricity so if you pull into this charger and charge for two hours you'll get 48 kilowatt hours of electricity in your battery see two hours times the fact that it's 24 kilowatts and you get 48 kilowatt hours now how much money will that cost 34 cents per kilowatt hour and you just got 48 kilowatt hours of electricity so 48 times 34 cents that's 16.32 what are you complaining about that's less than you'd pay for gas to go the same distance what i'm complaining about is uh if you were driving an ice car and you went to a gas station and it was like oh this is pretty good price per gallon and you're happy and then tomorrow you needed gas and the gas stations you passed were all really expensive and you're like i guess i'll have to wait till i can find another station you would be in this uncertain area we kind of like it as consumers when we kind of know what to expect right and for most part because all the gas stations are competing they're pretty much similar in price and here's where i like chargepoint they're very open and honest with their price they're not all the same because chargepoint doesn't actually own the charging stations themselves it's owned by those locations that's a really good point i just want to stress here if there's a restaurant that puts in a charge point charger then that's the charger owned by the restaurant right and they set the rate and it could be free or it could be a dollar per kilowatt hour or they can have it so that way you plug in in the first two hours you get to park for free but then there's a parking charge after a certain amount of time or you could plug in and immediately the moment you plug in there's a five dollar parking fee it's completely random that's just on charge point right if we go to electrify america we go to different ones then you there's different uh levels of subscription and oh you want to join our network well that's uh you know eight dollars a month but if you pay the ten dollars a month you get a better rate when you plug in it gets very complicated and you're probably not going to just be on one charging network because they don't do all the same things so you're going to want to be on charge point then you're going to be on and we'll find america and we'll get to that in a minute but what we like about tesla is if you look here we're showing some screenshots of us checking out different prices at different superchargers they show you before you get there what you're gonna pay and it's regional and it depends i mean two superchargers that are less than 50 miles apart can be a couple few cents different it depends on state lines and stuff like that but pretty easy to understand and you own a tesla you're pretty much signed up for their network and tesla's not going to try and gouge you and another point is even if you haven't set up your credit card on your tesla account you can still charge at a supercharger and accrue quite a bit balance before you actually have to put a uh credit card in you might be going well who cares most of these chargers you pull up and you're not part of their system you don't get anything to do with you so you won't be able to charge at all until you've set up an account and you're usually standing there point number four is the number of stalls remember we told you to keep those numbers in your head so what if you need a charge and you pull into this charge point location and there's somebody already charging there crap you either have to drive to another location or you're going to be waiting possibly for hours while this person charges and what if there's nobody in the car so you can't even ask them how much longer they plan to be there at a tesla supercharger first of all there's an average of eight stalls that means that very rarely are they all taken but even if all the spots are taken those spots are going to be opening up frequently because of three reasons number one there are many stalls number two with high kilowatt charge speeds teslas there charge up fast and leave fast and number three there are idle fees if more than half of the stalls are being used at a tesla supercharger location then you get charged an idle fee if you leave your car plugged in for more than five minutes after your car is done charging not to mention that in a tesla you can see right on your screen how many stalls are being used at any supercharger in the world so you can decide to drive to another supercharger location if you feel like that one looks too crowded many of these other charging networks only have one two or three chargers per location what are the chances that they're going to be available and this is a big point that i have to make that i think it's overlooked by so many people if you went to a gas station in your ice car and there was only two pumps then you might be in line for a while good news with gas stations is it usually only takes about five minutes to fill a tank so you know you can say well they'd be moving in and out pretty quickly but with a slow charger a car can sit there for hours right which means you're going to be waiting there for hours and you have no idea how long it's going to take and this is why most gas stations that you pass today have at least four or six pumps because they know that customers don't want to wait point number five is hours of operation because let's face it sometimes you need to pick someone up at the airport coming in on a red eye or you're out for a late night you need to be able to charge anytime day or night weekends and holidays almost every tesla supercharger location is open 24 7 365. many are located near convenience stores and other businesses like hotels where even late at night you can sometimes find a bathroom or even a cup of coffee or some help that's just not true with most other chargers many are located in dark corners of parking lots or behind industrial buildings many are located in parking garages where you have to pay to park even though you didn't really want a park you just wanted to charge point number six has to do with another aspect of evs that non-ev drivers just don't get every ev has a different max charging speed car manufacturers and dealers like to say stuff like oh yeah this ev has fast charging but fast charging as we've just seen doesn't really mean anything you have to put a number on it you have to know the kilowatts a tesla model 3 or y for instance has a max charging speed of 250 kilowatts a chevy bolt has a max charging speed of 55 kilowatts now which number sounds better to you 250 or 55. teslas can charge almost five times faster and then there's something called a taper curve as you charge closer and closer to full your battery can't take as much juice as it could when it was empty so the charger keeps asking your battery how you doing and your battery goes oh i'm pretty full can you slow down a bit so over the course of your charging session your charging speed slows down you just can't shove 250 kilowatts into the battery for the whole charge and so even if you buy a car that says we have 150 kilowatts of max charging speed it may not be as true as you think because when you pull into charge you won't be getting that speed for the entire time and this is true of every car tesla's ford mockies vw id4s whatever but it's very important to taper charge now you can basically put as much you can shove as much energy into the battery as you want but that might be damaging the battery and this is something that we don't know yet but many many car manufacturers seem to have instead of um an intelligent feedback loop system of charging seem to have kind of a pre-written script for what they're going to do so it gets up to 80 state of charge charging it like 60 kilowatts which is pretty high and then it'll just jump down to 20 and you're like why is it now at 20 kilowatts well that's because what that's what they wrote right it's not based on any thermal data it's not based on any battery data it's just they wrote a program that said that that's what it should do and we don't know what the long-term effects of that are going to be remember leaf gate where basically it's like our new leaf can charge really fast but then after you charge fast one day then it wouldn't let you do it for the rest of the day right now leafgate was a really big problem most of the other cars coming out don't have as big an issue but if their degradation starts to really start to ramp up we're only going to see this in the next few years as these cars age right so that's just kind of a a question but also you have to keep in mind that some of the most popular cars sold in the u.s don't have very fast charging speeds point number seven a charger that isn't working is worthless in fact it's worse than worthless yeah here's an example you're driving home from grandma's house one night with the whole family in the car you need to charge to make it home so you open your plug share app you see that there's a dc fast charger on your way great you pull into the charger stall with 20 miles left in the battery you get out of your car you plug it in and nothing happens hmm what uh you unplug and you plug it in again nothing happens you call the number on the charger and they tell you to unplug and try again i already tried that but you do it and it still doesn't work i have kids i need to get home in the car i'm sorry sir it looks like there's something wrong with this charger god damn it right you're not gonna have a fun night and we speak from experience we both own nissan leafs and you can't charge at tesla superchargers so we've been to tons of other charging networks and guess what they break all the time one that you went to and was fine last week can be broken this week there's really no rhyme or reason to it and it's super frustrating but look at this graph tesla superchargers have near perfect uptime now i don't know exactly what's wrong with these dc fast chargers that have been installed i think it's because they have bright red buttons on the front that you can hit to stop and i think that people just walking around go oh a button and they press it and i think that screws something up i also think because their networks have to have a screen and input from people um in a credit card reader exactly there's way more to connect exactly there's way more to get broken with superchargers you see there's no screens and you're like well then how does this operate where's the button there is no button we're going to talk about that in a second but i did go on to try and find what the uptime percentage was for these other networks and guess what you can't find it they don't publish it if it was great they'd publish it they don't and from our own experience along with hundreds of others of you writing to us every week we know that their networks suck and i'm not saying that these other networks as uptime is like 20 or something like that i'm saying yeah it's probably 80 90 but guess what 80 or 90 is not a sure thing yeah if you went to a gas station and one time out of 10 no gas came out you would stop going to that gas station point number eight what charging network is this we just told you that there are 19 charging networks in the us to make sure that you can charge at all of them guess what you need accounts with pretty much all of them i mean you wouldn't want to get stuck on a trip not being able to charge because you don't have a blank account would you so we didn't belong to blink but it only took a couple minutes to um go into the blink system put in your credit card they charge i think it's 49 cents a kilowatt hour and it charges at about uh so about 14 miles an hour in the tesla uh 24 amps so not a great charge so be prepared to have a stack of cards and a screen full of apps from a dozen companies fun fun yeah no i'm not kidding they all operate differently some are pretty easy some are byzantine and so you get to a charger and a lot of times you're like i don't even know what brand this is like if you go to green lots for instance it's not obvious that they're green lots and so you sit there like uh what is this charge point what is this until you find the app i have plenty of examples of where i've pulled into a charger i've gone through my wallet i've gone through my apps to find the right app only to find out that oh i hadn't updated my app in a while because i hadn't been to this charge network in a while and so i had to re-put in my credit card and do all this stuff not fun i mean i just want to say some of these they need to send you a card in the mail before you can charge exactly so that doesn't help you when you're standing at the charger does it and that leads to point number nine you're busy you want to get back on the road but guess what many chargers you get to will take minutes and minutes just to get the charge started why you say it's 20 22. i know but many of these chargers have hardware and software that seem to be designed by people that are just learning how to build them how many times have we plugged into an electrify america or evgo ghostal for instance plugged in and then just had it not engaged after we blipped our card it's like russian roulette yeah and so again back to your point even if this only happens 10 of the time and i would say it actually happens to us more than that that would be like getting to a gas station and having it just not work one in 10 times which means that just you cannot function you can't have a life where you drive a car and it doesn't work one out of ten times whereas here's how it works at a tesla supercharger you back in you hop out you plug in no cards no fobs just plug in and seconds later seconds later you're charging at incredible speeds that's it takes a bit quicker than what he just said it it's literally that fast and that easy yeah no thinking whatsoever and that leads us to point number 10. how's the charge going you plug in your tesla you go for a walk to a nearby coffee shop you make a phone call you take a bathroom break oh and oh yeah how many more minutes do i have before i'm charged enough to get on my way your test lab tells you you have four minutes left tesla calculates how much charge you need in order to get to your next destination all you have to say is i want to go to a destination it will plot a route for you going through the superchargers it does all the thinking for you many other evs don't tell you anything you have to walk back to the car get into the car look at the progress screen i'm at 56 percent um how many more minutes do i need to stay here until i have enough juice to get going so let's see i'm charging at 16 kilowatts and home is 82 miles away and i think i use like 400 watt hours per mile so that's uh all this doesn't happen with the tesla it takes into account weather traffic even wind speed and elevations to get you an accurate estimate of what you're going to need to get you to your next destination and it tells you what you'll have in the battery when you get there so you can make an educated decision on how much longer to charge tesla's supercharger network beats all other networks on all 10 points we just covered they solved all the problems they surpass on every metric you can get anywhere in the country all 50 states have superchargers you can drive across this great country of ours pretty much any way you want to without having to think about it the car will automatically navigate you from supercharger to supercharger without you having to do anything more than just say where you want to go the car does the rest but you know what i don't even think i got to the best part yet tesla is only getting better at building more stalls per location with higher charging speeds than just a few years ago at better locations with more amenities and they're continuing to build more and more superchargers every week and as they build each new location it makes existing locations even better how because now there's less volume of cars at existing locations so tesla just updated their supercharger map here to show soon to be locations so let's take a look red dots are existing supercharger locations and gray dots are soon to be locations many in the next quarter or two now i know it's a bit overwhelming because it's just a bunch of dots on a map so let us show you a part of the world that we know really well okay we travel around here a lot so let us show you a few new supercharger locations coming soon and how they demonstrate that tesla knows what they're doing to make it easier let's go to supercharge.info their maps are actually even easier to read red dots are existing superchargers blue dots are permitted superchargers so they pulled the permits but they haven't built anything yet orange cones are superchargers under construction and what's really cool is that supercharge.info uses permit information to show much more accurate locations than tesla's map does because on tesla's websites a lot of times they'll be like we're building the supercharger in burlington so the dot appears near the center of burlington when in fact well for instance take a look at this one the supercharger in burlington massachusetts is going to be at the burlington mall it's an excellent location not only is it right off of two major highways but it's also a very popular mall see how the dots are now circling the city of boston along a major corridor tesla continues to fill in the puzzle making the whole network stronger and more useful every time they open a new supercharger let's take a look here south of the city of boston see this spot here near hanover where there's a permitted supercharger or new bedford where they're building one right now these are locations that may not have been necessary in the beginning but are now giving drivers more choices and again they're on major corridors and again it's hard to understand how amazing the supercharger network is until you experience it when you combine the world's most amazing charging network with the most amazing cars you get well an amazing experience while you're charging for the 20 minutes at a supercharger you can watch netflix or youtube or you can play a game supercharging actually becomes something you look forward to can you say that about going to a gas station now jesse and i are really excited to get a rivien pickup truck but the one thing about that truck that gives me pause is that when we head off for an adventure i'm worried that i won't be able to just hop in and drive off to the mountains or to the sea like i can with tesla i'll have to plan routes and destinations dependent upon other charging networks charging networks that i know are going to be problematic for all the reasons we talked about more expensive charging charges that may be full or not working or closed chargers that will definitely be slower and have less amenities it won't be seamless it won't be worry free it won't be fun the truck might be fun but the long distance driving won't be and if you're hoping like me that rivien will build out a charging network like they said they would well according to the department of energy website they haven't built any yet that's not a good sign if you ask me because they didn't just announce this last week they announced it months ago but i hear what you're saying why would a car company need to open their own chargers when there are public options available number one guaranteed experience basically everything we just talked about in this episode yeah having a good network helps sell cars last year tesla sold over 350 000 evs in the us compare that with ford's 27 000 or gm's 25-ish thousand gm and ford don't have the production to support anywhere near what is pumping out but if they did i don't think they would sell because every single machi and bolt off the lot is another ev in a charging spot the public network that exists today will see more use which will cause it to break or be full at a much worse rate these car brands will see their sales dry up as the chargers break and the media gets wind of the story the second reason car companies should make their own chargers is that charging companies aren't really that viable here's chargepoint's earnings for as long as they've been public um you mean losses yeah they've never been profitable and since their spac investors have been losing interest okay but what about electrify america well i'd love to show you their earnings but they're actually a subsidiary of volkswagen aha they have a charging network well not really it was all part of the dieselgate settlement volkswagen had to put two billion dollars into making the electrify america network and six billion euros into making the ionity network in europe you can see why everyone likes the ionity network better so we can't see their earnings but they do have to report to california air resources board every year and tell them how much money they spent because that's all they really had to do and so through 2020 that's all up until 2021 they spent over 800 million dollars wait this is just a spending plan well they call it an investment plan but yeah it's like how do we spend 2 billion as fast as possible which i mean is great we've seen an exploding network of chargers but how long will this business model last yeah i mean it's a dog and pony show for the government that mandated they spend two billion dollars and so it's not just that car companies would benefit from having chargers as a selling point for their evs it's that charging companies don't make enough revenue and have either been relying on shareholders or dieselgate money to stay in business people think that you just pull the pumps out of a gas station and replace them with chargers but it all comes down to the reduced price of fuel and the increased time to charge standalone stations won't work there needs to be a different business model and many can exist but what we have so far in the us will not be adequate car companies wishing to survive will need to make a useful network not chargers at dealerships not some here and there but a strong robust network that can stand on its own and be strengthened by other networks so this is all to say if you need another reason to be bullish about tesla the supercharger network is one of tesla's most insurmountable moats there are so many reasons to love a tesla they are the safest cars on the road they will be the first to fully drive themselves they are incredibly fun to drive but i have to be honest if the supercharger network didn't exist and i had to charge my tesla on the other charging networks we talked about it just wouldn't be the same yeah without superchargers a tesla is like a beautiful suit of armor without a squire to help put it on or help take it off without superchargers a tesla is like a super powerful computer that isn't hooked up to the internet you know what these aren't exactly the right metaphors uh comment down below with your metaphor on what a tesla would be like without the supercharging network uh we're gonna read one or two of these that we like on tesla time news next week and i think one of the biggest takeaways from the supercharger network is the number of stalls at each location we just showed you that if you add up the number of locations from all the other networks it does outnumber superchargers in the us so you might be like well tesla superchargers don't look that powerful anymore do they but they still don't beat the number of stalls exactly and the key number is when you pull into a location whether it's to pump gas or to fill up your car with electricity if there's only one or two chargers there it's not going to be reliable it's either going to be broken or someone else is going to be parked there and you just can't take that i mean i have a story from the other night we were driving back from new hampshire we pulled into a supercharger location that has eight stalls and they were all taken and it was like oh my gosh we need some juice we waited in line we were second in line it took about seven minutes before we were at a charger and then we started charging right that's not ideal it'd be great if they were always open but this was like a super crowded night people coming back from skiing and that's the weight we had if that had been almost any other charging network we probably wouldn't have gotten home that night exactly because yeah you have a eight stall supercharger there's a good chance that someone is about to leave the more stalls you add the the greater the chance that there's more turnover and tesla tracks every single charger i mean we've been to their headquarters where they've got a big screen that shows what's going on that second every supercharger in the world they can look at that data and go you know what that corner of the world is pretty busy we need to open another supercharger location there and they've been doing a great job at not only adding new locations but also keeping up with demand tesla has been selling as we've said in this episode they sold 350 000 evs in the u.s last year so that's a lot of cars that are going to need supercharging and if you don't drive a tesla you may never have seen these these are locations where there's not just eight chargers there's 24 or 50. what other charging network have you ever heard of that's building that many chargers at a location now we're not talking about europe we're not talking about the uk i know that uh things are a little bit rosier in europe a lot of that has to do with diandi and the fact that uh they got three times more money squeezed a little bit you know vw got squeezed a little harder and so yeah everything's a little bit rosier and generally people don't drive as far and stuff like that but in the u.s we're talking mostly specifically in the u.s and and i also hear this other point but zach and jesse the the bipartisan infrastructure bill 7.5 billion dollars that is going to be invested in fast chargers oh this sounds so good i want to slow down here for a second so we have electrify america which is going to go bankrupt at some point because they didn't set out to make a company they want a real business they set out to spend 2 billion they're doing a great job and now we're gonna add 7.5 billion dollars that's amazing if you do the math you compare the roughly a billion dollars that they've already spent election fire america has already spent on making 730 chargers that gets you to 5500 chargers which is about exactly the same network that we have today right it's all about number of stalls and the charging speed at those stalls so again if you build out a charging network with about two stalls at every location that don't pump out much juice it's worthless you cannot rely on that as a driver i'm just gonna put it out there i don't think that that's going to be enough and so when we talk about other car brands needing to add charging to their lineup basically this is what i'm saying they need to have places where i as a ford owner can guarantee that i will have a spot that it will work and that i will feel good going to those chargers and if you're wondering why ford or gm doesn't build out their own charging network well think about it this way to start building out a charging network and to get to any meaningful number let's say a thousand chargers uh you're gonna need to spend about three billion dollars and what is ford and gm doing right now they're spending that money on ev factories which their shareholders are like okay but if you told your shareholders at ford and gm we're gonna spend three billion dollars on a charging network the shareholders would go uh how much money you gonna make off that and they'd be like well tesla doesn't really make anything off the supercharger so nothing and this is where i would say the the big auto manufacturers are getting a 7.5 billion dollar subsidy yeah they can go oh yeah don't worry about charging didn't you hear joe byron joe piper joe byron said that you're gonna have charging pilot i don't think that it's going to work that well and i i'm just i'm looking at something and i'm saying i think this is going to turn into a train wreck yeah and you know what it's a really good point this isn't helping tesla at all tesla drivers do not use other charging networks because they don't need to it's not that we're too aloof or anything like that it's just that they suck and so there's we don't need to and so if you spend 7.5 billion on charging you're not helping tesla one bit and that is what you're going to be helping ford you're going to be helping gm and that's great it's great i'm not i'm actually against public charging i actually don't think you're helping them and i actually am kind of against it this idea of oh don't worry the government's gonna pay for all the charging networks i don't think it's gonna work and i and and you go and you look at charge points numbers they're not making any money they're losing money find me one other company besides tesla that's actually making money making charging infrastructure and that's a really good point tesla's making money from their superchargers because it's part of the car experience it's not separate from the car experience exactly and there really is no other model that works in my opinion and that is the big problem with public charging that's done wrong is that it's actually going to hurt ford and gm because you might think getting into that brand new maki that yay this is going to be great guess what go look around on the internet look at people who are excited about their mockies and then nine months later sold them do you know why one of the biggest reasons is charging they were like i thought this was going to be like tesla and then i learned the hard way as i began to learn what this really means that the infrastructure wasn't there i think that there are other charging models i think that there are other companies that can get into it you know say like a target or a walmart and it's like oh come to our target here's why i stay here for a little bit and try here stop here's why you can't i think it could have worked before tesla came on the scene and it might have even helped some of the other car manufacturers but i don't think it'll work today the reason is tesla's don't need that charger at a target and so and since teslas are the biggest market share why would target want to spend money on a very small market share i see so you're saying that model 3s wouldn't be going to target well i mean they go to target but not because of the money target just spent on charging they they're they're happy as is we've already got a great charging network right and so if your target and you're looking at well we're going to put in this charging let's see who's going to use it and someone says well here's the pie and most of the drivers today in america are in tesla's so we're going to spend all this money to get a few bolts i don't think they're going to want to spend the money for it and i mean that does come down to the problem with with plug connectors and how basically all these ccs chargers aren't going to be useful for tesla which is fine this is why it's a moat i mean this is why we're talking about the supercharger network basically just cut off the other car manufacturers at the knees now they could have gotten in early enough and not had the moat but they waited too long and i think it's impossible to come back and this is why i was so excited about rivian when they announced their adventure charging network because i'm like yes an electric car company that gets it and then i waited month after month to see where they were opening and i haven't seen any open now maybe they're in super stealth mode and they're all going to open it once but i haven't even seen any pictures from you guys and you guys are some of the best spys out there so i think we would have heard about it i think it was a big press release why because they were doing an ipo and they wanted the market to be super excited and then nothing really happened i think that there's still time for rivian to do it i think that it makes sense for arubian to do it especially because they are a electric only charging i agree i'd love them to do it's just they're not doing it right but i mean they're still ramping up production of the trucks you know they have to they have it's going to take some time and i agree each each month is tesla digging a bigger moat it's true and especially once the cyber truck comes out and you can supercharge your cyber truck but you can't supercharge a rivien you're going to start to go maybe i don't want the rivian and this is the thing when you listen to auto analysts about the stock prices of things like tesla do they ever really talk about the supercharger network i hardly ever hear them saying anything more than lip service about well they have a lot of chargers they don't understand it most of them don't drive it and so they don't understand what kind of moat we're talking about here thank you so much for watching this episode of in depth we hope you enjoyed it hit the like button if you liked any of the points we brought up in this video it helps the growth of this channel and if you haven't subscribed yet you should subscribe because we do uh tesla time news every tuesday we do an in-depth every week we'll see you next week now you know thank you so much for watching till the end of the show now uh i know you didn't get anything for valentine's day oh yeah yeah yeah it's monday monday this monday coming up the one coming up not enough time to order anything right what if you could digitally download something that was actually meaningful yeah not an e-card no no no a real special gift special gift for tesla owners what can they get right now uh we have a we have a light show so all you need is a thumb drive just any old little thumb drive you got laying around but they don't want like a hip-hop light show beautiful i spent many hours working on it it's a beautiful jazz light show it's romantic very romantic so i'm just saying you do have time to download this that's true don't think you have time to go get the diamond necklace or whatever the you know that all the jewelry places are gonna be packed and the flowers are all gonna be gone and everything like that good good yeah five minutes and you've got yourself a valentine's day present that's what and then when you say oh yeah your presence in the mail it's because of the because of the chip shortage or whatever you know i don't know how that pertains to you know whatever nice thing you got them don't worry you'll have at least something you you slackers yeah you can pay what you want and every dollar that you spend is going to be going to now we act it is a 501c3 charity yeah so head over to ecoware right now put the link in the show notes below and we won't tell anyone

Channel: Now You Know

Views: 221,386

Keywords: tesla time news, now you know, zac, jesse, news, update, elon musk, model x, model 3, model s, model y, supercharger, nyk, electric cars, ev, technology, science, funny, autopilot, electrek, tesla roadster, model 3 performance, education, future, solar, TSLA Stock, gigafactory, tesla battery day, Tesla App, Tesla Full Self-driving, FSD, tesla recall, Cybertruck, rivian, charging, EV charging, electrify america

Id: YLLDx4r72_8

Length: 43min 11sec (2591 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 11 2022