Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug

Aren't superchargers just the endpoint? Isn't the actual infrastructure mostly the power/energy companies?

Just go try them both. CCS2 Has separate AC and DC conductors, and the plug is huge owing to having 2 pair of charging pins and backward compatibility. They are more awkward and heavier than a fuel pump, and significantly heavier than the Tesla plugs. It's terrible.

It is the default for building hookups (i.e. excluding individual apartments/condos/flats, but EV chargers don't make sense there anyway) at least in the Western European countries - can't speak for much of Eastern Europe but Croatia where it is also the default. Even during the 60s when the home of my grandparents was built in back-then Communist Yugoslavia, it was already 3 phase.

Our transmission grid (that actually extends even down to Africa and parts of Asia!) is already three phases, we're not sparsely settled to require SWER anywhere, so it doesn't save the utilities any money to not lay three-phase AC to every building by default.

> The price of charging is already dominated by the marginal cost of electricity

No it isn't. Most level 3 chargers are 3x-4x the price of electricity.

This makes me sad in a way that's a little hard to articulate. But I'll try!

I plug my $9000 2013 Nissan Leaf into an ordinary 120V extension cord each night so I can commute to a neighboring city for work, and the electricity costs me $20/mo. I also have a 1986 Toyota pickup like on Back to the Future that I had to gas up every other week, using 30 gallons of gas per month and costing over $100. So the operating cost of an EV is about 3-5 times lower than a gas vehicle.

My friend has an EV charging dongle that we jokingly call the octopus, which has a dozen adapters for plugging into every kind of 120/240V outlet like on ovens and dryers. So he charges his car in 4 hours out of whatever outlet is available, for the same $20/mo that I pay.

So convincing the public that everyone needs to buy a $500-1000 charging station for their EV was a social engineering campaign to slow the adoption of EVs.

The real engineering work to let us plug EVs into any outlet has not been done yet. But it would look like this:

* Level 2 J1772 chargers have a resistor that tells the EV how much wattage to draw. But that just passes the buck to the user, who now must ensure that the outlet can provide that wattage. A better system would have a smart power manager that senses current saturation or voltage drop near the point where the circuit breaker trips. We also need smart breakers that add noise/harmonics/phase as they approach their limit, which EVs would detect to self-regulate. And we need breakers that trip for a nominal time like 1 second or shorter, or however long power supplies can continue to operate uninterrupted, so that a tripped breaker isn't a showstopper.

* Nearly all US portable battery power stations come in only 120V with a 30A TT-30 plug normally used for RVs, with no 240V option unless you connect two stations for twice the price. If we want a 5000Wh/240V station so we can charge our EVs on solar power, we'll have to go to Europe or Alibaba to get it.

* Battery chargers, BMSs and inverters are notoriously finicky. They often won't charge below a certain voltage threshold, causing some solar installations to spend part of the day off. We need 95% efficient 10kW rectifiers/inverters that can take any AC/DC voltage from 0-500V and output standard 12/24/48/96/120/240/480V in all phases without requiring configuration from the user, for under $1000.

If we had these ubiquitous power tools, then choice of NACS/CCS/CHAdeMO would be moot.

Edit: I forgot to add that before Google fell, they held their Little Box Challenge in 2014 to develop a high-efficiency low-cost 95% efficient 2 kW inverter similar to the one I mentioned, so the tech has been available for almost a decade now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Box_Challenge