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Rivian embraces Tesla's charging standard for EVs

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Re: Rivian embraces Tesla's charging standard for EVs

#311

Post by Delphiki »

jameshart wrote: post #274
93po wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or that they have, by far, the best products at given prices.

JD Power has Rivian, MINI and Kia scoring higher than any Tesla model.[1] Polestar, Ford VW, Audi and Hyundai are in the same ballpark for ratings. Several of those manufacturers have cars in the 30K range, well below the prices Tesla is starting at. That moat seems pretty small these days. [1] https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-us-elec...

For me, it's hard to find anyone else that matches Tesla on price, range, and performance. It seems like with the other EVs you get to pick two of those.

Re: Rivian embraces Tesla's charging standard for EVs

#312

Post by _ea1k »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #179
_ea1k wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only have politicians noticed this, but the conniving little jerks have already started framing the problem in a way that implies EVs should be paying far more than gas cars. Many states are pushing for tag fees based upon the average revenue per gas/disel vehicle per year without regard to those vehicles MPG. Given that a lot of EVs are replacing high MPG vehicles, the formulations are incredibly unfair. But the…

> Many states are pushing for tag fees based upon the average revenue per gas/disel vehicle per year without regard to those vehicles MPG. Given that a lot of EVs are replacing high MPG vehicles, the formulations are incredibly unfair. Is it, though? Does the taxation rate matter more than the total collected per year distributed by the number of users? If you aren’t counting/won’t count miles driven, this seems like…

> Is it, though? Does the taxation rate matter more than the total collected per year distributed by the number of users?

I'd agree with that, if it were applied fairly. Drop the gas tax and switch to $/car across the board. Alternatively, develop a new formula based purely upon vehicle weight[1].

But instead, they just want EVs, including things like Nissan Leaf, to pay the same as the average. In my state, the average is a lot closer to an F-150 doing 15k/year than it is to a Corolla.

This is just punitive to the EV owner.

[1] As it is, mpg correlates strongly with weight, so gar cars effectively already get taxed based upon a combination of weight and miles driven. The challenge is to figure out a reasonable, non-punitive approach to doing the same for EVs. At least in "anti-EV" states, it is very obvious that there is no attempt to do that.

Re: Rivian embraces Tesla's charging standard for EVs

#313

Post by sunflowerfly »

panick21_ wrote: post #253
wsatb wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big players are just late to the game, but have been making cars for decades. They will easily overtake Tesla on number of EVs built as they transition. Tesla isn’t good at making cars. And every year my confidence in full self driving goes down. They are good at charging though and will print money doing that.

Are you a time traveler from 2014? Tesla is now closing in on run rates of 1.5-2 million. They are on bath to overtake companies like BMW in total sales. They are already far more profitable. You seem to still think of Tesla as some small fish. Tesla is the biggest BEV producer in the world by a large margin. They produce more EV then all of the major German producers put together and at better margins. Volkswagen is…

If you include PHEV, Tesla is second behind BYD. Even if you look at EV only, the margin is not insurmountably large. When the big automakers (Ford, GM) truly change over they will dwarf Tesla.

https://www.ev-volumes.com

Re: Rivian embraces Tesla's charging standard for EVs

#314

Post by jp191919 »

hinkley wrote: post #300
mkozlows wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about how this is affects Tesla is "compared to what?" Compared to the historic status quo where there were no other chargers, and Tesla had exclusive access to a large-ish proprietary charging network, it looks like Tesla giving up their advantage, and seems bad. But the forward-looking status quo was going to be a gigantic network of CCS chargers that makes Tesla's proprietary network look small, with eve…

My friend who is not an EV driver got stuck with an EV rental (Bolt) for a semi-rural trip and boy was that a ton of drama. I’ve been thinking hard about an EV myself and now I’m looking at PHEVs instead. I’ve gotten a crash course in EV charging around here and it’s not good. Level 2 chargers are not for spontaneous trips and level 1 chargers are fucking pointless. It estimated two and a half days to charge from 40-…

A Bolt is about the worst EV someone could use for a road trip.

Re: Rivian embraces Tesla's charging standard for EVs

#315

Post by adventured »

dahfizz wrote: post #150
dagmx wrote: post #112

I’m glad there finally seems to be a push to a better standard in North America. I’m really curious how this affects Teslas market share though going forward. Their supercharger network is why we continue with them despite countless other issues. It’s their biggest moat as far as I’m concerned. Now I have significantly more options, and my next car will not be a Tesla. I’m sure I’m not alone in that. Is the brand nam…

The long term future of Tesla is a battery manufacturer and a charging network. Those are the two things they are good at. The cars themselves are quickly being beaten out by the larger players.

That means they have no future of consequence. Charging networks will be a mediocre low margin business and they'll be hyper plentiful with little to no serious moat. It'll be like owning gas pumps as a convenience store (yielding pennies on the dollar; the money will be in generation there, as it's in oil/gasoline in gas pumps). Batteries are and always will be a horrific business with low margins (just ask eg Panasonic and all the other players what their battery businesses are worth, especially compared to what Tesla has been making from automobiles).

Re: Rivian embraces Tesla's charging standard for EVs

#316

Post by skrtskrt »

HWR_14 wrote: post #295
skrtskrt wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the vast vast majority of people (non HN techies) at this stage don't care that nearly as much about self driving as they do about having an electric/Hybrid/PHEV car that's just a great total package of a car - something that the existing car manufacturers are far, far better at than Tesla. Even manufacturers like Chevy and Ford can run circles around Tesla in terms of overall quality. Anecdotally in LA which…

> Those people are not buying a Tesla in the meantime I've noticed people signing leases on ICE cars to wait out the delivery of their preferred EV solution.

it would be amazing if more people realized that keeping the car you have is still the most environmentally friendly solution.

I'm going to keep my ICE car until it is unreasonably old or impractical for me, which is probably at least 8 more years.

At that point who knows what the electric car landscape will look like, but certainly production will be massively more ramped up. PHEVs will be the perfect car for most people. It will do 99.9% of people's trips on pure electric, and not have any compromises on long road trips either.

Re: Rivian embraces Tesla's charging standard for EVs

#317

Post by ActorNightly »

sakopov wrote: post #282
outlace wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla Insurance is a kind of small moat. But I think Tesla is really banking on winning the automotive AI race. They currently don't seem to be winning, but that does appear to be their main gamble. If they can be the first to achieve level 4+ self-driving then they would definitely dominate regardless of charging infrastructure.

> They currently don't seem to be winning, but that does appear to be their main gamble. So who do you think is winning it?

In terms of usefulness, right now, not Tesla.

At some point there will be a research breakthrough in ML with models that can extrapolate physics which is the current thing that is missing from self driving being actually good.

At that point Tesla is going to be the winner without a doubt because they have the hardware and data to train en masse and deploy to cars.

Re: Rivian embraces Tesla's charging standard for EVs

#318

Post by Robotbeat »

wilg wrote: post #280
dagmx wrote: post #112

I’m glad there finally seems to be a push to a better standard in North America. I’m really curious how this affects Teslas market share though going forward. Their supercharger network is why we continue with them despite countless other issues. It’s their biggest moat as far as I’m concerned. Now I have significantly more options, and my next car will not be a Tesla. I’m sure I’m not alone in that. Is the brand nam…

Market share isn't a good metric for a company that started out with 100% market share and therefore has nowhere to go but down. I think Tesla will continue to be successful selling cars and grow the number of cars they sell at a high rate. Also, it sounds like this move is a really good incentive from a product perspective. If there really are a significant of people who only chose Tesla because of Superchargers, th…

Tesla did not have 100% market share. Nissan Leaf came out before the Model S. (And if you want to count the Roadster, you should count the EV1, etc.)

But I think the point is that electric cars will take over the whole market, and so if Tesla’s US market share falls to like 20-30% from the current 60% or whatever it is but that market is 10-30 times larger, that’s a huge win.

Re: Rivian embraces Tesla's charging standard for EVs

#319

Post by vegardx »

philg_jr wrote: post #138
saalweachter wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little confused by fast charging standards, to be honest. 1MW is 20x the maximum draw of a standard house, and 800x the average draw of a US house. The hydro plant down the road generates 5MW. It just sounds crazy to plan to pull that much power charging a car at a time.

You'll never need that much power at home. Level 2 AC 240V 30-50A is fine for overnight charging. The way Tesla Supercharging works is by using a large bank of batteries for the heavy bursts of power draw (>100kW) during the initial periods of charging when the battery is warm and at a low percent. The batteries at the station are backfilled with less current from the grid in the background during periods of low use.…

I don't know about the NA, but that is definitively not the case for most superchargers (or any other brand of fast chargers, for that matter) in Europe. Batteries are expensive so this is only done in very special cases. I know they've used battery banks at some of the electrical ferries in Norway, simply because the cost of running new high-voltage power lines was deemed more expensive and the schedule of the ferries makes it very easy to model.

Power grids are quite large, so any fluctuations across the grid is going to be minimal. They are quite good at modeling these things, otherwise we'd have rolling blackouts quite often. For homes it's the last mile that's usually the biggest limiting factor.

But I agree with what you said, for /most/ people anything more than 2kW (so 240V/10A) is more than enough to charge up overnight. A perk with CCS2 is the support for 3-phase power delivery. With very simple wiring and some smart(-ish) electronics you can opportunistically deliver around 11kW to a single car, or divide it with other house appliances or other cars. It's fairly common with 400V TN-system in some parts of Europe, which makes the support of 3-phase in CCS2 very handy.

Re: Rivian embraces Tesla's charging standard for EVs

#320

Post by sunflowerfly »

wlesieutre wrote: post #96
satrday wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having used both, NACS is more compact, so both the port on the car and the end of the cable are significantly smaller than CCS. The cable itself is also lighter and more "usable" than CCS. At least at the newest V3 superchargers, the NACS cable is so much more flexible and easier to manage. Munro Live took both connectors apart and did an overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmjofPpThWU

v4 are the new Superchargers, but they're mostly being installed in Europe where everything has been CCS for ages and Tesla needs the longer cable to support cars with ports in random corners. Unless all these other manufacturers move their charging ports around in addition to switching connectors, the short cables on all the v3 Supercharger infrastructure is going to be an issue here for a while. If your port is in…

Note that the CCS in Europe is different than the CCS in the US. We were already on our own unique standard.
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