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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Right. No existing infrastructure, just cobbled together dealership charging stations. No autopilot in the Bolt. No OTA software updates (in the US, at least), as it violates the franchise agreement with dealerships. No high-voltage DC charging such that a Supercharger can offer (just the designed-by-committee CHAdeMO junk).

That's why Tesla is 5 years ahead.

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Tesla started putting out super chargers in 2011, even in 2013 it was anemic and nothing outside of their traditional bastions, from mid 2013 is when they ramped things up and have currently put out there. So 2 years. On Auto-Pilot front Audi, Volvo and Mercedes(these guys have a truck on auto-pilot) are out there and they are not lagging in pure technical terms, as I said deployment wise they have to do the ground work. It does not matter CHAdeMO is supercharger a 20-30 minute fast charging is NOT ideal(too much wait and too much screwing the battery), and people should be looking for better solutions.

Fine. Let's say any legacy automaker can deploy an entire network in 2-3 years. When does that start? Will it be starting soon?

Having used both chademo and supercharging extensively they are totally not the same.

One is 1/3rd the speed of the other in real-world usage.

Chademo charges a Leaf (or similar class car) to 80% in around the same time as SuperCharger does for a Tesla Model S, doesn't it?

If you want 100 miles of range, sure.

I can tell you charging chademo on a Model S is much slower.

Of course, but Chademo isn't designed for a Model S, it's designed for more affordable cars with smaller capacity batteries. The market requirement for both a Leaf and Model S DC fast-charge is the same: charge to roughly 80% capacity in 30 minutes.

As I said elsewhere, the Chademo connector can support higher currents when there is a need. When there are Leafs (and Souls? I think think those are the only two in the US on Chademo) with 200mi range batteries, I'm sure we'll see the existing chargers upgraded to the higher current capability.

You sure about that? When the model s chademo adapter came out Teslas were breaking chademo stations left & right because they weren't engineered to handle 25min @ 45kw.

I'm not aware of and chademos above 60kw today while Tesla has a while infrastructure deployed right now.

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