Are Tesla Superchargers open to other electric vehicles in California?

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Are Tesla Superchargers open to other electric vehicles in California?

If you visited Elon Musk’s X on Saturday and clicked on Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office account, you might look at it Stop at a Tesla charging station, get out of an electric Ford Mustang Mach-E, and announce that Tesla Superchargers were now open to non-Tesla electric vehicles.

This is a questionable statement. Owners of Ford, Chevy, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Lucid, Nissan, Rivian and other electrics can’t count on this yet.

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Two days after Newsom’s video, on Monday, news broke that the Tesla Supercharger network was in disarray. Musk, according to several media reports and social media posts, had fired or fired its entire Supercharger team, including its senior director, Rebecca Tinucci.

A source, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation from Elon Musk, told the Times: “They didn’t fire the entire Supercharger team. They mainly licensed site acquisition, project management, marketing and many other things.

Whatever the damage, Musk has issued no denial. But he did it post on that Tesla plans to slow the growth of new Supercharger stations and focus on the stations it already has.

Meanwhile, on Monday, California electric vehicle sales numbers were released, and they were bleak, especially for Tesla, whose new registrations in California fell 7.8% in the first quarter of the year, following a Decrease of 9.8% compared to the previous quarter.

Sales for Overall Electric Vehicle Market in California increased in the first quarter – by 555 cars. The increase to 90,296 cars and light trucks, from 89,741, was less than 1%, a hair’s breadth from a flat, according to the California New Car Dealers Assn. The market share of electric vehicles also remained mostly stable, declining slightly from 21.2% of all new vehicles sold in the fourth quarter of last year to 20.9% for the first quarter of this year.

This is bad news for electric vehicle advocates and for Newsom, who in 2020 mandated that all new car sales by 2035 must be what the state calls zero-emission vehicles. (Plug-in hybrid cars burn fossil fuels and thus produce emissions, but because they can also run on batteries alone, California includes them in its definition. Up to 20% of new cars sold in 2035 could be plug-in hybrids .)

Under the mandate, automakers will have to sell such cars, but customers will not be forced to buy them. If the stagnant growth of electric vehicles becomes a trend and not an aberration, which could undermine a key pillar of the state’s plan for a cleaner climate.

“Everything from interest rates to inflation to increased awareness of the costs and challenges of electric vehicles has had a negative impact on demand for electric vehicles,” said industry analyst Karl Brauer at iSeeCars.com. “Even Tesla, the brand long considered a shining example of how every automaker should approach personal transportation, now looks a lot like a traditional automaker, with shrinking market share, stalled sales, declining profits and massive layoffs.”

One reason potential electric vehicle buyers give for sticking with gasoline: public charging stations subsidized by the state and federal government are too few and far between too unreliable. Tesla chargers are widely considered more reliable. They were built with money brought in by the exorbitant value of Tesla shares. Early last year, Tesla agreed to open its charger network in exchange for federal grants to help finance Tesla’s planned but now scaled-back charger expansion.

It’s unclear why the governor released his video at that time. Tesla itself has not made any recent announcements regarding access to non-Tesla chargers. The company began opening some stations for other brands in California and other states more than a year ago, in March 2023. The Times asked a Newsom spokesperson what actual news had been announced, but he has not yet received a response.

Whether intentional or not, this announcement created some misunderstanding in the media. Wrong titles – such as “Tesla compressors in California are now available for all electric vehicles” — began to appear.

Here’s what Newsom said: “Today we are announcing that Tesla is opening its charging network to additional models of electric vehicles. All this in an effort to expand the infrastructure of the state of California, which currently has 105,000 electric vehicle chargers for public use and approximately 10,000 of these charging stations.

No additional new models have been added. A quick read might suggest that all Tesla stations are now accessible to EV drivers who don’t drive a Tesla. But the real number is much lower than that. Tesla knows how much, but the company does not respond to media inquiries.

The state itself does not know this.

“We don’t have hard numbers on how many vehicles are open to other drivers at this time,” said Lindsay Buckley of the California Energy Commission, the state agency in charge of electric vehicle infrastructure. “I understand that the deployment will be gradual. Some chargers are now open to Ford and Rivian drivers. The plan is to open up to GM, Polestar and Volvo soon.

Tesla divides its chargers into three types. One is reserved for Tesla drivers. Another model concerns drivers of electric vehicles whose brands have been approved by Tesla. A third, currently very limited in number, can handle almost any electric vehicle with a built-in adapter called the Magic Dock that allows a Tesla charger plug to fit a non-Tesla electric vehicle.

A look at a Compressor location map on the Tesla site shows that the sites open to other brands remain in the minority. In the Palm Springs-Coachella area, there are five Tesla stations. Two of them will accept Fords or Rivians. There are no magic docks.

Between Culver City and Santa Monica there are six Tesla stations. Only two are open in Ford and Rivian. No magic docks.

According to Tesla’s map, there are three Magic Dock stations throughout California: two near Sacramento and one in Silicon Valley.

Why this incompatibility? The auto industry developed a charger plug standard that Tesla did not follow. Tesla’s version is smaller, lighter and more maneuverable. Some other brands have created snap-on adapters to give away or sell to their customers to access the Supercharger. Several, including Ford, have announced that future electric vehicles will be built to accept Tesla plugs without the need for adapters.

A Ford spokesperson relayed the company’s response to the Supercharger layoffs: “Our plans for our customers are not changing. » Asked whether Tesla’s leadership upheaval and Musk’s announcement of slowing Supercharger growth had given the company pause, the spokesperson declined to comment further.

Some electric vehicle advocates were looking for the silver lining. When asked about the Tesla Supercharger layoffs, Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator CEO Matt Petersen said, “While worrying, if there is a silver lining, it is that many great and talented people are at work. the provision of other companies in the field of chargers. »



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