Ford and GM recently announced joining hands with Tesla to use the latter’s charging infrastructure.
Former Ford CEO, Mark Fields said that Tesla has a ‘unique knack’ of getting revenue out of rivals. This statement comes days after Ford and GM announced that they have joined forces with Tesla to use the charging infrastructure of the latter. This has the potential to challenge the Biden government’s push for adopting CCS (Combined Charging System) as standard across the EV industry in the USA. Tesla, Ford and GM are the majority players when it comes to EVs. Hence, they have posed a challenge to third-party EV charging startups like ChargePoint and EVgo.
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Ford CEO on Tesla
The former Ford CEO acknowledges that the development of the charging infrastructure is not happening at the same pace as the companies are bringing out new EVs. Hence, innovative solutions are needed. He said, “That’s important for the automakers because, yes they’re giving some money to their competitor but at the same time they’re thinking about how they’re gonna you know turbocharge their own sales and also about repeat sales the next time the customer buys an EV comes back into the marketplace.”
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He made an interesting observation about the deal that was done between the three EV car makers. Tesla is only offering the sharing of charging infrastructure at 12,000 locations. This means that Tesla can decide which locations are best suited for non-Tesla users so that it doesn’t offer undesirable publicity to its rival EVs. Tesla collects data about the number of users in any particular location where it has installed its charging stations. Hence, it could leverage that to ensure that it generates the maximum revenue from all locations.
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What We Think
Tesla opening up its charging stations for non-Tesla EVs is great to promote the mass adoption of electric cars. That will give the EV owners peace of mind that there are more charging stations available for them to charge their electric cars on highways. Range anxiety is the biggest challenge facing car owners at the moment. It is preventing them from taking the plunge to buy EVs. But with such cooperation between carmakers and other charging companies, things could change drastically for everyone. We shall wait and see how things turn out from this partnership.