Tesla has confirmed the first two automakers to adopt their electric vehicle (EV) charging technology, Ford and General Motors, will gain access to the Supercharger network in February. Tesla had previously committed to opening up […]
Looks like GM and Ford are soon able to join the NACS charging party!
With hundreds of supercharger sites (not chargers, sites!) deployed since the original announcements, it'll be interesting to see what impact this has on charger availability, if any.
That's a bold prediction but I like it. It'll be a 2050 fun fact ("Did you know Tesla started out making cars? They were just a lot better at charging them than making them.")
Energy has been a side-stream business for them for a while and continues to grow… exponentially. Solar production, battery manufacturing, software for energy management, charging network… these are all parts of the business that people talk about when they say Tesla isn’t “just a car company”, but traditional financial analysts aren’t factoring that part of the business in because legacy automakers don’t deal with all of that stuff.
Tesla will have a “gas station” model part of their business, but that’ll be a small part of it. Vehicle manufacturing, shipping and logistics, lending/banking, insurance, energy production and management, robotics and automation, server storage and compute power, data analytics… the business has a lot of arms and is taking steps to be an industry leader in each segment.
10 years from now Telsa won't have to do anything but just watch the numbers in their bank account keep going up from all the grid level batteries they'll have in place.
Not till they swap out all those charge cables with extra long ones. The charge port is not in the same place on non-Tesla cars.
And those cables aren't just regular wires. They have to be cooled and maybe retracted back to the charger when not in use so you don't drive over them.
Also, if they want to offer paying with credit cards, they'll have to add a card-reader to the side of each charger.
Or they can skip all these steps and call it a day just because GM added a NACS port or adapter.