Tesla has been building out its Supercharger network for over a decade. Now legacy car companies are taking a page from Elon Musk's playbook.
Car companies like Honda, BMW, and Hyundai are banding together to build an EV-charging network bigger than Tesla's Supercharger empire::Tesla has been building out its Supercharger network for over a decade. Now legacy car companies are taking a page from Elon Musk's playbook.
Pretty ridiculous to have multiple standards for this anyway. Imagine if you had to hunt down a gas station that served whatever proprietary fuel you needed.
Hydrogen is still likely to be a big part of vehicles going forward (either by combustion or fuel cell). Toyota's been putting a lot of money into developing it and heavy transit is going to need it since batteries take up too much weight. Infrastructure will be much easier to build when they finally get to market, though. Converting gas stations to hydrogen isn't terribly complicated.
Many high performance engines require higher than the 97 octane that most regular gas stations sell as their Premium. That doesn’t even count any vehicles that run on 85% ethanol.
It doesn’t take some sort of import exotic to run best on high octane racing fuel. Your redneck uncle with a mid-80’s Fox body Mustang with the 5.0L V8 very well might have the engine tuned to run that gas.
Certainly it’s intentional, and certainly an enthusiast like that will be willing to put up with the headache of sourcing fuel, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a headache…
That’s early adopter pain for you. In Europe there is one standard, and in the US, we’re getting there. Yes it’ll be a pain for a while that people with CCS ports will need to use adapters at NACS chargers and vice versa, but we’re settling on the underlying CCS technology being the standard, so it’ll just be a matter of connector. Much better than the three standards we had very recently (add chademo)
well with Ford and GM signing deals with Tesla to use their NACS, and Tesla releasing most to all of any ownership of NACS it could be the standard. It will be interesting to see. Some lobbying could get a new bill passed that allows gov funding for NACS super charger stations.
CCS communication protocol not the port itself. Tesla only used a proprietary communication protocol, now they also support CCS communication protocol. Basically means all you need is an adaptor and everything should be interoperable.
It's ridiculous but it's not quite the same. There are adapter plugs to make all the systems cross-compatible. It means having to carry around adapters though.
Not quite the same because adaptors don't solve the charge rate problem. Rather than not finding your gasoline at all, it's more like if you don't find your preferred station, your gasoline will take 45 minutes to dispense instead of 3. Tesla Roadsters have been abandoned by Tesla and would take 30 hours for a full charge on 120v, worst case.