Road trips lose power as charger outages leave northern Ontario EV drivers stranded
Road trips lose power as charger outages leave northern Ontario EV drivers stranded
Non-Tesla EV drivers couldn't go from Thunder Bay to Sault Ste. Marie much of June (Heather Kitching / CBC News)
There really needs to be a common, open standard for EV charging, it's honestly one of the biggest things holding back higher adoption. The worst part is that there is one, but the most popular vehicle refuses to implement it because they have control over a huge proprietary network.
Imagine if there was "Ford gas" and "Honda gas", and even though they were the same fuel, you couldn't fit the fill nozzle into your car with the other one. That would be absolutely insane.
People hate thinking about dongles and connectors, it just needs to work.
It looks like NACS (or the Tesla connector) is now going to be the common standard. Most automakers have now committed to switching. And at least the SAE is fast tracking making it a standard. Yes, we will have to put up with dongles for a couple of years, but I think this is the best move.
Tesla was colossally stupid to wait so long to make their charger free and open. Previously, it was only available to automakers who opened their patent portfolio in return for access to Tesla's patent portfolio... But of course, the car company that's only been around for 10 years doesn't have as many patents as the car companies that have been around for 50 or 100 years.
When iPods first hit the scene there wasn't anything particularly special about them, the magic was the Apple Music store, ll the music in one place, virus free for .99 per song. I feel this way with Tesla, the cars aren't all that special, what makes them attractive is the charging network.