If I was Tesla I wouldn’t open up the network.
The money received for doing so, less the magic dock (which is very clever) retrofit is a lot less than the money they’d make from selling more EVs at the expense of their competitors. I would not recommend anyone buy a CCS car at this time if they need to road trip, the network reliability and stall availability is that bad. The general public will figure this out. If Tesla maintains their current market share because of this they would dominate the auto industry. Getting a few million or even billion dollars for opening up the charging is not worth it vs the competitive advantage they have. That’s business. Not to mention annoying your actual customer base with cars whose charging port is not in a convenient location or charged painfully slowly clogging up chargers. If I were to arrive at a site and had to wait to charge because there were a bunch of Bolt EVs slowly charging over 90 minutes (during which you could charge 3 Teslas) I’d be p***ed. Same goes for a Taycan taking up two bays meaning I can’t charge because that’s the only available bay left.
This is a really bad idea which is going to cause even more tension at charging stations, a problem I’m already worried about, unless Tesla can take that money and do massive expansions across all their current sites to get ahead of the problem. Given how long it takes for permitting and provisioning of site power I don’t see it…
And other car makers need to move their charging ports to rear left or front right to make them compatible. They were late to the party and could put their charging port in one of those two spots instead of getting creative especially given that they don’t make and run the chargers themselves. And no, Tesla should not be required to lengthen their cables to accommodate, that would increase cost, slow charging and reduce reliability if the failed long cables on other networks are anything to go by.
The legacy auto makers have fought EVs for so long I have no sympathy for them, and the public networks are clearly just grabbing government money with no wish to maintain an actual service so I have no sympathy for them either. Finally I have no sympathy for anyone buying a bad road trip experience car just because they don’t like Musk or the styling of a Tesla or whatever. I did when Tesla prices were so jacked up and were not eligible for incentives, but now that they’re pretty much at price parity no/one who road trips should be buying a CCS car until the manufacturers and public networks get together and sort this out. I fail to see why Tesla should dig them out of the hole they made for themselves together.
And I say this as an owner of both a Tesla and a Mini and someone who would happily trade their Tesla for an ID Buzz or Rivian R1S if dependable charging was available for them (by whichever means).
