Tesla plans to make its Supercharger network open to other EVs later this year, Elon Musk just shared on Twitter. He was replying to Raphael (aka @TesLatino) who shared his thoughts on how others are wondering why Tesla even created its own charging connector. Many think that it’s not fair to other EVs, and he pointed out that Elon Musk didn’t receive any support while he was advancing the technology. “His team created a reliable way to charge the fleet,” he said. “Deal with it!”
We created our own connector, as there was no standard back then & Tesla was only maker of long range electric cars.
It’s one fairly slim connector for both low & high power charging.
That said, we’re making our Supercharger network open to other EVs later this year.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 20, 2021
Elon explained that the reason why Tesla created its own connector was that there wasn’t a standard in those early days. In fact, back then, Tesla was the only maker of long-range EVs. No other vehicles could even make use of superfast charging if it was available to them. The Tesla connector is quite slim and works for both low and high-power charging.
This update from Elon Musk follows previous news that Tesla is opening two public Superchargers in Norway and 6 in Sweden. However, those are slated to be opened by Q3 of next year. For the case in Sweden, Tesla applied for 6 of the public stations from TM Sweden AB. Since funding is available for public charging — not private — that makes sense. Elbilen noted that these will most likely be public Superchargers as a result.
Do you realize in both Europe and China that Tesla doesn’t have to deploy any new hardware to allow other EVs to use its superchargers?
Only missing piece to allow open access is an app to manage membership access and billing. pic.twitter.com/dFRDqiM49D
— Brian_Henderson (@brian_henderson) July 20, 2021
One thing many Americans may not realize is that the Superchargers in Europe include CCS connectors already, and in China they have CHAdeMO 3.0, as our own Maarten Vinkhuyzen pointed out privately. That means that the hardware is already ready for charging from other EVs, and there are at least a couple of places where it was opened up in 2020 (Maarten charged his ZOE at one). So, in those markets, all that’s needed is for Tesla to open up permission to non-Teslas and also have an app ready to charge them (money-wise) for using the chargers. In the U.S., it seems that it will be a bit trickier. We’ll see.
Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the transition to sustainability, and by opening up its Supercharging network to other EVs, it’s doing just that. Of course, I’m sure Tesla will make extra money from the service, but that is unlikely to be the aim here.
With Tesla’s Superchargers soon to be open to other EVs, this brings an entire network of charging stations online for EV owners whose cars aren’t Teslas. This helps ease range anxiety, which is a common reason why some are reluctant to switch to EVs. It’s another way Tesla will be advancing EV sales.
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