Tesla MagicDock upto around 75 locations now.

a better question is if tesla will open all of their super chargers to just NACS rather than being just tesla specific. The magic docks are kind of pointless because after the next year or two, the number of CCS cars on the road will be finite and decreasing. I think Land Rover is the only manufacturer that hasn't announced a switch over yet but they will because its dumb for them not to. Its just like with Chademo becoming obsolete. Virtually no reason to cater to it. Those cars can just get their own adapter. Most the EVs on the road use NACS anyways, so its not like the majority of EV drivers would be put out.

 

How many cars with CCS have been sold in, say, the past five or six years? So all of those drivers (us) can just "eat cake" then, because there will be fewer CCS cars on the road some time in future?

Do you drive a Tesla, by any chance?

 

Ford is giving adapters for free to owners of F150 Lightnings and Mustang Mach E. Mine is due to arrive next month. Not costing me anything but I guess Ford is paying Tesla for the adapters. Though my guess is Ford is getting them at a significantly discounted price. So it may not be that large of revenue stream at this point.

 

Less than 2 million and they can just get adapters from the manufacturers. Like I said, the number of CCS cars on the road will soon be finite. Just doesn't make sense to prioritize making the infrastructure compatible with a dead standard when there is a lot of infrastructure that is not compatible with what will be the new standard in less than a year (I checked again and basically every major non tesla car manufacturer is saying that 2025 will be the year they roll out the switch). It makes more sense to just hand out adapters and focus more on making the infrastructure more compatible with NACS in general. Especially when all future sales will be NACS anyways.

Its not just that there will be fewer CCS on the road 'sometime' in the future; its that the number of CCS cars will be finite and will reduce every year. There will be a rate of decay - people get in car accidents, cars will have random problems, people who don't need DC charging will buy them, etc. Why pressure tesla to spend money to roll out the magic docks if the majority of EVs already aren't compatible with CCS and all EVs going forward will be NACS? Have Ford, Chevrolet, etc. give their customers an adapter. If anyone should pay it should be them for choosing to make the switch.

No I don't drive a Tesla and you won't care about all this the next time you buy a car anyways. I don't drive any EV. Can't afford one yet and i'm not getting a car loan

 

Actually it makes more sense to install the Magic Dock then build a bunch of adapters, as it's going to be much cheaper, it may be safer, as many folks won't want to wait a year or more to receive an adapter, not every manufacture is going to hand out adapters for free, and many folks will buy a non-approved adapter that may brick the Tesla station.

 

It wont be any safer or cheaper. It would likely be more expensive to install magic docks. The existing CCS infrastructure won't disappear immediately so people can just use that. A station wont get bricked by a non compliant adapter, it either just wont work or will get hot with extended use - because the only things that could go wrong is bad communications connection or undersized terminals. CCS and NACs use the same communications protocols and the same DC pins, so it may be possible for CCS to be converted into NACS too.

 

I don't disagree with your logic. Just wonder how long it will take them to roll out Magic Docks to all of the V2 and V3 superchargers. I will take my adapter now which will give me access now rather than wait for a roll out of Magic Docks. Of course not every one has that option yet. I look forward to the day when all EV have NACS and we don't need adapters. But that's a ways off too.

 

So how long have these Chademos been around? And are there any new cars still using them? I still see them being installed with new CCS stations.

 

I believe the only new car still being sold with chademo is the Nissan Leaf. Leaf production ends in 2025. The Nissan Aria has a CCS1. The Aria will be switch to NACS next year.

 

The Outlander PHEV still uses chademo too.

 

Ok, so chademo vehicles are still being manufactured but as far as I know pretty much all CCS1 vehicles will convert to NACS in in 2025 or 2026. So about the same time as chademo goes away. Apparently this the last year for the Outlander PHV as well

 

I thought the leaf was stopping production this year. Its basically the only car that would make any use of chademo in the NA market anyways. The rest are really old models that are basically rounding errors in terms of numbers or PHEVs, which don't really use DC chargers anyways. I don't even think there are more than 200k Leafs on the road in the US and Canada combined anyways. Seems like that after checking wikipedia page and a few articles.

Its a waste of money to do that, in my opinion. Many of those stations getting built like that are done so with gov money and the gov money requires chademo to be included to get the funding. The stations that are getting built now will see most of their use after all cars are using NACS for their standard. Since EV sales can really only go up, that just means that the share of CCS and especially chademo will just decrease faster.

 

Because it was legislated, thus the vendors and equipment manufacturers simply added the cable. CHADEMO is actually an odd man out, but at the end of the day ALL the charging standards differ by at most a signal pin, and some software on a $1 chip inside the unit. Subsidy dollars are/were tied to having X plugs of whatever type, CHADEMO being listed as a requirement. The idiots we elect to office, and the bureaucratic fools are starting to back off of some of this.

The non-Tesla pedestals are just now getting marginally stable with CCS, but engineering the physical hardware for the various plugs is trivial. It will take some time for stability to improve across the various hardware platforms so they work well with every possible car and plug combination. Tesla is going to have to catch up to all the various quirks of the CCS based systems. I have an openEVSE if you read the software blogs and announcements it full of edge case patches and workarounds for various J1772 to car combinations. As the standards improve and the adherence to those standards improve, issues will diminish, and manufacturers will have stable hardware/software that work across the board.

 

Indeed. Currently, the platforms/pedestals are are expensive and not very robust/reliable. This is really no different than a modern gas pump, not too many folks get gas by hand pumping into a glass tank with lines marking gallons, which is then dropped down a hose into your tank . The forced rapid expansion of charging infrastructure has caused extreme money to be spent on soon to be obsolete charging pedestals. Current units will break, get examined, and then rebuilt/re-engineered/replaced over time. Tesla recently created a "flatbed drop in" station design, I think they've had 4 major releases of their hardware, I'd bet the software has had a zillion updates. I read something recently that one of the other big players is doing something similar, might have been EVGO. It will happen, we need to stop pushing and let the market get it stable.

 

An interesting evaluation.

 

exactly. Better to just back off and let the companies serious about delivering a good product survive and the bad ones die out.

 

The problem is this whole EV transition has been driven by govts. The free enterprise market had no role ensuring the best companies and products were produced and implemented. So how will this mess get fixed? More legislation?

 

Well, that is only half true. Battery prices were going to come down anyways because of the use of them in tech. EVs would eventually get built, but that is kind of irrelevant now. The problem will get fixed when the government starts to pull out of heavy influence in the market.