Supercharger to CCS adaptors

[Wivenhoe]

I read that about 50% of superchargers are available to non Tesla’s in the UK. Tesla went down the road of providing the unique infrastructure to not only make money but also to lock in owners to use it and encourage them to stay in the ‘brand’.

For once Europe (including the UK) agreed to use the CCS as the primary connector to avoid the fiasco years ago of VHS vs Betamax. Looks like the US didn’t.

The European manufacturers saw the success that owning and marketing a charging brand would provide. They collaborated not only on the connector but importantly are shareholders in IONITY. Porsche has gone one stage further by having agreements with other charging companies so that costs / kw are about 50% of normal prices. They normally charge £ 14 / month for this but for new Macan owners this is free for 3 years.

They have gone even further by agreeing with the other companies that they are plug & charge and Porsche bill you once a month for all charges using plug & charge. This brings significant cost savings for ‘road warriors’ but also a little known major advantage over other charging companies. In the UK, when you plug in at say a Shell charger they take £40 from your credit card and it can take over a week before the balance is repaid. A recent review confirmed that they plugged in and presented the card but no charge, plugged in a different charger so plugged in another charger plugged in and got a charge.. Amount of charging was £ 10 (it was a trial) and it took more than a week for Shell to credit the card with the 3 x £ 40 = £ 120 - £ 10 = £ 110 that they earn interest on whilst the user gets charged extortionate interest.

I’ve gone on a bit here to show the differences in approach and that Porsche UK fully realise the benefit of offering a charging network as Tesla did.

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[PrudentOcean]

I respectfully disagree. You can put 100+ L2 chargers for the price of 1 L3 charger. You arrive at the end of the day, plug it in and forget about it until checkout the next day. Otherwise, what? Are you going to get up at 2am to unplug and is the next guy going to be sitting in the parking at 2am to plug in for an hour? Then use-case heavily favours having several L2 chargers instead of a couple L3s at a fraction of the cost.

I think you would be correct if hotels had a large number of L2 chargers — they generally don’t, at least not in my area.

For example, the nearby Ritz-Carlton has a Porsche Destination Charger with four 11 KW plugs. They are always in use, even during the day.

Out Of Spec used these chargers as the starting point for an unofficial Macan range test before the car was released. I suspect Porsche reserved / commandeered one or more of the plugs.

 

[rcomeau]

I think a lot of people, including hotels are still trying to figure how all this will work out. It would be a lot cheaper for the hotel to put in, say 20 chargers (costing, what, $50k when all is said and done) that allow 20 guests to plug in their cars overnight. They could easily add a reservation option on the booking page so it is predictable and convenient to the guest and even pay on the hotel bill rather than standing in the parking downloading yet another obscure charging company app and set up yet another account. It completely fits the typical use-case. It is also easily scalable as demand scales (start with 5, then 10 etc…).

On the other hand, they can spend $200k+++ and put in 2 L3 chargers (that seem to break all the time) and have 20 guests play musical chairs all night each trying to get their 1hr on the plug all the while complaining to the front desk every time someone jumps the queue.

we’ll see how it evolves, but I think the path for the hotel is a no brainer.

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