> Not dissimilar from retailers deciding whether to embrace Amazon as a distribution channel or not.
Honestly, I wonder if Tesla will be similar. They just won the charging standard war. Watching the battery presentation a while back, they're chipping away at battery technology, and every % adds up.
The ICE car companies have "embraced" EVs, but are losing money on every car right now. Will tesla start making their cars cheaper and cheaper while the other companies eventually try to buy their way out via tesla batteries?
Nobody “won” the charging standard war except for the consumer. Tesla had a great connector and a huge charging network, but it was closed and proprietary with a non-interoperable digital protocol. Government and the rest of the industry demanded an open standard with an interoperable digital protocol that allowed for payments. Tesla thus faced the choice of having everyone adopt the inferior (open) CCS connector, making their current cars basically obsolete; or else releasing their excellent physical connector and opening their chargers to the whole world and adopting the existing CCS digital protocol. They rationally chose the latter and all of North America moved onto it. This is certainly “winning” in the sense that Tesla chose the option that wasn’t a total disaster for Tesla and their customers, and the world got to benefit from an excellent open standard.
ETA: If believing that this is “winning” causes Tesla folks to encourage further positive-sum behavior, ignore everything I said: Tesla kicked everyone’s ass. Rah.
Tesla tried to get their charging standard adopted years ago from the outset of their business. The incumbents rejected the standard. Now they are adopting it.
As I understand it, it came with strings attached, and incumbents understandably rejected it. Now they really opened the system, that's what drove the adoption.
Another thing: Not the whole world adopted the Tesla connector, only North America (that's why it is called NACS). Europe uses CCS-2, including for Tesla cars. CCS-2 is better than CCS, and arguably better than NACS in Europe as it supports 3-phase AC.
North America uses CCS-1. CCS usually refers to the charging protocol.
Important change is that NACS is the Tesla connector with the open CCS protocol. That means can use dumb adapters for CCS-1. And chargers can change to better connector without changing electronics.
3 Phase is (normally, in Europe) 3x400V+N. Single phase is 230V.
AC chargers here (Belgium) are usually 11kW or 22kW capable (at least nominally). This is 16 or 32A. A normal household socket ciruict is 20A here, so this is not very abnormal wiring wise. Most homes are actually hooked up to three phase power, but just have a single phase meter, so an upgrade is usually affordable.
If you want to offer 11kW or 22kW single phase, you'd need 47A or 95A service, with massive cables etc. Hence why most single phase chargers are 7.4kW limited here (32A). Also: Almost no cars would even take that in on 1 phase as far as I know.
Higher amperage is what costs more in terms of losses and cables, so less amps is good.
3x230V also exists, but at least here, is being phased out.
Is there still a N needed for 3phase? The big selling point of triphased power is that you don't need a neutral line, which is obviously a big benefit for transport. Is there a benefit to add a neutral line for battery loading?
No on the distribution network (aka up to the transformer in the street usually, but for sure not on the xxx kV lines) because there the lines are balanced.
In your house, you do, because the voltage between 2 phases is 400V, but the voltage between 1 phase and N is 230V. So you have "low" voltage for "normal" appliances, but high-voltage (and thus high-power) available for high power applications. For example: EV charging, induction cooking, home heating / AC etc.
For an EV usually the N wouldn't be needed, if you always charged at a balanced power on all phases. But from my experience, the full 3 phase power is only used when the battery is empty. At some point the charger switches back to single phase to better modulate the current I guess.
Sidenote:
On a 3x230V net, you don't have an N, but that means you also don't have a non-power conducting wire either! Meaning: double pole switches and breakers are required to prevent shocks. This is why these are generally required in Belgium btw.
I think it's more, 3-phase+N can be converted to 1-phase whenever needed with simple wiring. So even in France, you might have 3+N coming to the breaker panel, and then 1-phase from there on.
The neutrals in either of these situations are used when you want to use some partial multiple of the power, instead of a full multiple for some or all of the load. For example, most US electric clothes dryers will use the full split phase 240V for the heating element, but 120V for the light and sometimes the motor. Same with US electric stoves. So they need a neutral to be able to do so.
If they don’t need that 120V (half the voltage), they can just use straight 240V, and no neutral.
Same with 3 phase - if connected in a delta configuration, you have three distinct loads, each connected phase to phase.
Same as in split phase, if you have two 120V phases, each connected to one half of the split.
When designing AC->DC rectifiers a key concern is ripple (aka how consistent the DC output voltage is per unit time). 120V half phase AC is particularly terrible for this, but a single phase of a 3 phase system will also be not great. You spend a lot of the cycle with no meaningful power available, and need to smooth out that very spikey output with capacitors or the like.
The ripple on three phase (if using all three phases) is going to be a lot lower, and power flow will be much more consistent, as you’ll have 3 waveform ‘peaks’ per cycle, unlike split phase which has 1, or tapping a single phase of 3 phase which has one. (Depending on your definition of peak - some would double the count as the negative voltage side of the waveform technically counts too!). That means with only minimal additional component count, you have a nearly perfect continuous flow of power.
At the type of power levels we’re talking about, the capacitors for smoothing out the ripple (assuming it’s needed when charging the batteries - I would assume so, but I’m no EE), will be enormous and expensive if using single phase.
I know for industrial motors, the smoother/more continuous waveforms are a huge help in making smoother and more powerful (for their size/weight) motors. Almost all industrial motors run on 3 phase AC, and it’s common for even small hobby machine shops to either get 3 phase pulled in, or use phase converters.
It's better in general because it can deliver continuous power rather than power at twice the line frequency. If you're going to convert AC->DC and want a constant current to the battery, there will need to be a rather large capacitor to smooth the 100Hz or 120Hz power coming in.
Yes consumers won but I don't understand how it's not a win for Tesla.
Every other company on Earth had a chance to make a superior system and failed. Tesla said fine use this based on ours, and they rightly recognized it was superior. Win for Tesla, win for consumers.
Nobody really lost there, either, which maybe why it doesn't feel like a typical win.
It was not entirely voluntary, that's the point. The US government pushed very hard for an interoperable standard, and conditioned a big pile of IRA funding on supporting a fully-open standard. That was the carrot. The rest of the industry (manufacturers and chargers) also standardized and started building cars and charging infrastructure with CCS connectors. The farther this process went, the less likely it would have been that Tesla would have been able to force a switch, and so they would have had to (expensively) update their new and older cars to this standard. This was the stick.
But yes, it was all done through encouragement and coordinated coercion. Nobody showed up at Tesla's HQ with guns and forced this to happen.
More like voluntarily pushed or strong-armed by the prospect of governments mandating Tesla support a different connector thus forcing more complexity in their cars and chargers.
Arguably there's no evidence for Tesla ever wanting to use its plug as a moat. The Tesla connector pre-dates CCS1 as a standard. By the time that it was clear that the rest of the industry would converge on CCS1 in North America, the investments made by Tesla (and its customers) on their connector was far too great to contemplate shifting.
Whereas in other markets, the business case for converging on CCS2 was more compelling. Europe chose to compel CCS2 as their standard, but in Australia, Tesla pivoted to CCS2 without any government pressure.
They offered their patent conditioned on a reciprocal patent grant (or agreement not to enforce any patents against Tesla) from the takers, as far as I understand. The difference with NACS is that they genuinely opened the connector and removed that requirement.
> I don't understand how it's not a win for Tesla.
It's a win for Tesla insofar as they won't have to bear the burden of transitioning to a different plug standard, and their customers won't bear the burden of consumer confusion and frustration which come with transition.
> Nobody really lost there, either
One might argue that the main losers are the charging networks which invested in CCS1 infrastructure. They'll have to work even harder to remain relevant, all while gaining Tesla as a direct competitor and having to deploy NACS across the country.
Tesla didn't "win" the charging standard war. They finally made it possible to make a standard based on their connector and most manufacturers agreed to use it in the US. But then Elon fired the supercharger team in a temper tantrum and spooked the industry.
It's also not true that all other manufacturers are losing money on EVs. BMW and VW notably have been profitable on theirs.
Lastly stop giving so much credence to what Tesla claims in presentation and start paying attention to what they actually sell. So far they have sold 4680 cells in two cars and both have had disappointing charging curves. Not impressive at the moment especially compared to what Chinese companies are offering.
> Tesla didn't "win" the charging standard war. They finally made it possible to make a standard based on their connector and most manufacturers agreed to use it in the US.
By that definition it was impossible for anybody to "win", which means it was never a war in the first place.
You're missing firesteelrail's point. Musk fired the Starlink team in 2018 after it failed to meet goals, and basically took personal charge. Today Starlink is by far the world's leader in two-way satellite data. Despite it being a business Musk himself acknowledged has historically been a surefire money-loser, it is now generating an estimated $600 billion in FCF annually and is an important part of SpaceX's overall growth.
The report you're probably basing this claim on says $600 million FCF, and that is an estimate for 2024. The same report assumes an 80% revenue growth in 2024 compared to 2023. But it's hard to estimate how much their market will actually grow, especially as they've lost the broadband subsidies from the US government.
And the market price of launching the 6528 satellites that they launched is around 11.3 billion dollars (67 million dollars per Falcon 9 launch, 169 launches). Assuming this is more or less the density of satellites they will maintain, that amounts to 3.7 billion per year just in constellation maintenance costs (to which we should add peering costs, personnel, ground station costs, etc). It's really not an easy business to maintain, unless it really does grow massively, and in a distributed manner (since lots of people in a small area will compete for bandwidth).
Which is why they need the big f-g rocket to work - the business really starts printing cash if you can reduce cost to orbit per bird by 90%. Without it it’s dicey when competitors get their act together.
I assume any massive Musk hater has a weird parasocial relationship with the guy, and used to love him but feels betrayed. Obviously he's a bit flawed, and makes some bold and sometimes quesionable decisions, but that's not always bad.
And all it's got him is the richest person in the world, with the best selling model car, most of the space launch industry, a global isp, and some minor social network the news media are obsessed with
But that subsidy is not Tesla-specific. It's strictly pay-for-performance: The more cars a carmaker sells, the more subsidies (well, tax credits) are provided.
If Tesla has received "billions", the only reason other carmakers haven't received the same amount is because their cars aren't as popular.
Eh, there was also the episode where Tesla introduced a battery swapping scheme only to claim higher green tax credits, without actually rolling it out. It's a deceptive company.
Can you recommend any good sources to explain how the Chinese government subsidises BYD?
I’ve done a little bit of reading around and the term subsidy is often used without further clarification. For example, is it direct payments, or business tax breaks, or tax breaks on sales of EVs, or something else?
from an economics professor who examines the evidence about what is causing the trade war between china and the west.
The main thesis is that car manufacturing (and associated manufacturing such as batteries, electronics etc) is "strategic" enough that the west doesn't want to build a dependence on china for it.
In the event of a war, china can cripple the west by cutting off the exports, and/or potentially install backdoors into the devices and shut them down to disrupt etc.
Not to mention that by allowing china to own the manufacturing, they will have built up the massive industrial capacity for which it is easy to convert to a war time factory. The west's dwindling manufacturing capacity would mean that china will out-produce and win - lessons that is learnt from WW2.
It’s a bad thing if it increases China’s confidence that it can win. Wars are often launched as soon as one side thinks it has a winning strategy that might slip away over time.
Taiwan is part of China and both ROC and PRC have claims on the whole China.
As for the Pacific ocean, it's not an American gulf, it's literally half a planet. Nobody can control it, even the US with all their military bases on Pacific islands.
no, under the proposed dependency scenario, it makes china hold an outsized bargaining position because china _can_ withstand a war while the west wouldn't. It's not a symmetrical relationship - china can survive their stopping of exports, as they are an autocracy, which means the citizens cannot complain (much). The west's citizens would not want to make sacrifices or suffer as imports get stopped, and thus will acquiesce policies on china when it is actually not advantageous to do so otherwise. For example, reneging on the sort of defacto protection being offered for a lot of the east asian countries (japan, korea etc).
The war that russia is waging against ukraine is clear evidence used to support this point - that being dependent on russian gas/oil was a mistake and europe is paying dearly for it.
There are very significant budget/capability differences between any of the Arab Spring states and China. Also internal religious and ideological differences - there is no large armed faction in China.
They come with the high cost of potentially killing the local industry and after a while all you'll end up with is a bunch of cheap network connected Chinese cars, possibly backdoored by CCC, with no ability to build or maintain your own.
Then you're at China's mercy, it's not always about money.
It should be law in EU/US and other countries that all imported "smart"/connected firmware must be replaceable by local variants (this includes iPhone, 5G networks, routers, etc)
> If the administration could have figured out a way of excluding Tesla from the EV tax credit system, it would have.
Oh, but they actually really tried at first. Like for example by considering Tesla Model Y as a sedan, thus not qualifying for a higher tax credit ceiling.
Honestly, I wonder if Tesla will be similar. They just won the charging standard war. Watching the battery presentation a while back, they're chipping away at battery technology, and every % adds up.
The ICE car companies have "embraced" EVs, but are losing money on every car right now. Will tesla start making their cars cheaper and cheaper while the other companies eventually try to buy their way out via tesla batteries?