Tesla CEO Elon Musk has finally provided a clear response regarding when it would make its Superchargers available for other auto manufacturers. According to a recent tweet from Musk, the company will give EVs from other brands access as early as this year. Tesla had already been discussing details on the access to its Superchargers with countries like Germany and Norway since last month.
In addition to attaching a timeline for the potential expansion of its charging network, Musk had also made sure to discuss the status of the company’s proprietary connectors in the aforementioned tweet. In his full tweet, Musk wrote: “We created our own connector, as there was no standard back then, and Tesla was the only maker of long range EVs. It’s one fairly slim connector for both low and high power charging. That said, we’re making our Supercharger network open to other EVs later this year.”
Tesla’s chargers in Europe are all known to be configured with the CCS connector, which makes it easier for third-party sharing in the region. As the company uses its exclusive TPC connector in the US and Taiwan, it would be necessary for non Tesla EVs to use adapters in these regions.
Tesla Taiwan announced just two weeks ago that it would configure duo specifications and standards on all Superchargers before the end of July in order to allow access for both TPC and CCS2 ; the company will also offer CCS2 support for the slower public chargers in the future, which would allow all 30 Superchargers in Taiwan to be used by EVs of other brands. This will help generate sizeable benefits for the overall development of EVs.
Of course, there is no free lunch in this world. A single Supercharger would cost several millions of dollars to set up, and it is unlikely that Tesla would allow free accesses to all of its 25K Superchargers around the world. As of now, the company has yet to disclose whether it will set up any future cost sharing agreements for its Superchargers. Auto brands that lack the resources to develop their own infrastructures are expected to join the Supercharger network of Tesla more quickly than the other brands.
The opening up of the Supercharger network is a win-win situation in theory, as Tesla will be able to generate additional revenue from the Superchargers, while the other EV manufacturers will be able to gain the trust of the consumers due to their use of the extensive Supercharger network of Tesla.
For the owners of the old Tesla models in Taiwan, the future situation with the Superchargers does not appear to be very ideal. Tesla has accumulated almost 20K users since it became available in Taiwan, and all of the models there are configured with the TPC socket. The existing owners of the Tesla models are worried that there will be fewer chargers to use in the future if Tesla replaces the new chargers with the CCS2 specification without a release of an adapter for TPC. Another issue that is of concern to the EV customer group in Taiwan is the fact that the TPC socket is not included in the charging standard regulated by the government; this is unusual considering that Tesla accounts for the largest EV segment in Taiwan with a ratio of almost 90%.
To make matters more complicated, it has been reported that Tesla Taiwan has started to incorporate the CCS2 specification at numerous Superchargers to conform to the national standard ; as EVs apart from Tesla in the Taiwanese market, including Audi e-tron, Benz EQC, and Porsche Taycan, all adopt the CCS1 specification, the use of the CCS2 standard would make the third-party sharing of Tesla’s Superchargers for EVs extremely difficult in the Taiwanese market.
It would be interesting to see how the situation in Taiwan will unfold as time goes by.
(Cover photo source: Tesla)