Kudos to Tesla. I basically despise Musk, but have to give credit where credit is due. Tesla was the only company that early on saw how important a robust, reliable charging network would be, and now other car companies are dealing with the fallout of depending on shitty 3rd party charging networks.
For example, just go to any (non-Tesla) EV owners' forum. In most of them you'll hear people talking about how they love their cars, but how so often 3rd party chargers are busted, or give cryptic error messages, or charge at a fraction of their advertised power.
Now that Tesla has rebranded their chargers as "North American Charging Standard" (which takes an amazing amount of chutzpah to begin with given how their chargers were proprietary for so long), they really will have a key advantage over other car makers.
You seem to be looking at this from a warped North American perspective. You need to understand that Europe is years ahead of North America in charging infrastructure.
Tesla's V3 chargers kind of suck compared to chargers from manufacturers like Alpitronic or Kempower. Here are 400 kW Alpitronic (on Fastned) and Kempower (on Shell) chargers. Faster speeds, longer cables, higher voltage than Tesla offers:
They could have done far more with charging by standardizing early and providing a bunch of open CAD and source files. It would have made them the unquestioned standard from the beginning.
Their actual Supercharges could have still been Tesla only either way.
But their destination and home charges would have had a much bigger market.
Yet another evidence, the EU is not interested in having an industry and even less a sovereign economy, instead is just a giant market for US corps
Tesla being subsidized is no surprise, it's a US DoD program
This is a wake up call for Europeans, these non elected leaders should be reminded who they are supposed to serve
It's also quite funny, Musk was crying out loud when Arianne received EU funding for various missions, calling it anti-competitive practice and "unfair"
You miss the point, why should Europeans fund a foreign proprietary tech to build a key infrastructure for the green transition? Haven't EU leaders learned from their Russian gas mistake? What's the goal?
I don't understand why Americans expect Europe to become their 51st state, and I don't understand why EU leaders keep funding their dependence to foreign companies, I can only ask questions
Take it the other way around, why should Huawei build US's 5G infrastructure?
Didn't we Americans entrust Volkswagen to build out some of our charging network through Electrify America (owned by Volkswagen?
I think this is a case of funding the companies of these charging stations that work and function well, Tesla being one of them.
You can try to draw a connection to Americans wanting Europe to be a 51st state. (wut??) but I think thats a little bit of a stretch, Tesla's will have to compete with the chinese electric cars and european grown electric cars in the market. At least they built a plant in Germany rather than try to meet demand by importing cars which would've been madness.
I'm certain europe will get economically defensive once their auto industries start to suffer more, its a huge economic bloc.
Edit: Original post should have read "Why can't Tesla build their own charging stations in Europe?"
Most of the responses focus on charging stations in the US. I should have remembered that HN's readership is mostly US.
Why can't Tesla build their own charging stations and if EVs are so great then why don't some entreprising companies build some charging stations without the taxpayer getting involved?
Tesla has invested over $1B in their global fast dc charging network. Taxpayers are contributing to accelerate the electrification of light vehicle transportation due to the climate change crisis. Public private partnerships are very common.
The network is successful because they are the benevolent dictator who built and maintain it, and it has rigorous uptime and availability, versus other networks. This soothes range anxiety of buyers, selling more Teslas (as well as any other EV model that has Supercharger access).
For the same reason all almost all infrastructure is partly sponsored by the state.
That said, I much rather see the money invested in removing cars from places and improving trains and bikes. But its not the worst thing in the world to build some chargers.
And Tesla has higher production of both fast and slow chargers then basically anybody else on the planet.
> Why can't Tesla build their own charging stations
They have. AFAIK, until recently there wasn't any major federal funding for charger installation in the US at least.
> if EVs are so great then why don't some entreprising companies build some charging stations without the taxpayer getting involved?
Because chargers have pretty thin margins and the upfront cost is extremely high (permits, hardware, grid hookup, etc.) It's the same reason there aren't all that many gas station startups.
Because the goal for taxpayer subsidies is to encourage behavior (or needs) that the government has decided they need more of. Europe wants more EV chargers. Simple as that.
More of is the most important part of this comment. Tesla would be building these anyway, since the stations will be built where the cars go, but the subsidy directly enables more stations, faster.
For example, just go to any (non-Tesla) EV owners' forum. In most of them you'll hear people talking about how they love their cars, but how so often 3rd party chargers are busted, or give cryptic error messages, or charge at a fraction of their advertised power.
Now that Tesla has rebranded their chargers as "North American Charging Standard" (which takes an amazing amount of chutzpah to begin with given how their chargers were proprietary for so long), they really will have a key advantage over other car makers.