It’s happening again. Much to my delight, and the annoyance of people that think we’re so much better now, plugs for electric cars are once again split by continent.
Personally, I had no expectations that the planet would unify on one or another charging standard. Anymore that I expected this great revolution in motoring to allow us to unify on the superior (power consumption)/100 (unit of distance) that could be so much better at helping someone gauge how much energy they have versus what they need. But what I did suspect for a while was this: Tesla wanted to have as much of the charging market as possible as quickly as possible.
Now, I hate that this puts me on the side of the sort of people that think Elon Musk is some kind of space wizard who already knows what they’ll have for their next meal. In my defense, the business model should be patently obvious to anyone who uses razorblades…
Or anyone who discovered that they can buy a new printer for the price of the replacement ink cartridge.
“In a Gold rush, sell shovels” is an adage as old as, well, the gold rush. And being how BEVs are one of the more consistent new tech hotness next to this year’s iPhone, it makes sense to look at the problem from the other side. How exactly do you propose to charge all of these things.
Apparently Tesla’s gambit worked. GM, Ford, Volvo, and Rivian recently announced their interest to adopt the Tesla plug for charging. And just today SAE decided that no, the recently rebranded North American Charging standard is not just going to be “The Tesla connector”, but it’s going to be standardized by them. Right next to the European-preferred combined charging standard, or CCS.
It’s better than the last time we tried to unify electric plugs for what is worth. They’re CCS compatible, which means one or the other can be used provided you have the correct the plug. Combine that with the occasional horror story coming out of electrify America and all of that money used to build a supercharger network across the US and all of a sudden Tesla has a guaranteed source of income to spend on Cybertruck hype and all of those projects that will make money someday, we hope.
With batteries still as the lead answer to “How are we going to propel cars in the future” and advances not only on their energy density but their charging speed and sustainability, the other side of the equation has to be addressed. A unified connector is a great step. Now we just need to deal with where we’ll get the power for these stations and how can we can prevent scenes like that one time that a wildfire escape revealed the issues with those aforementioned charge times. Faffing about with the connector doesn’t solve any of the above.
That Tesla remains as the name most associated with electric vehicles so far is merely a happy side effect.
