And yet not a single one of them was able to make electric cars attractive enough to buy until Tesla showed them the way.
In any case, infrastructure matters even more for EVs. I was in the market for an EV car in Japan, and ended up buying an ICE car, with the intent to switch in 5~10 years when the infrastructure catches up. I live in a brand new building and it's not even equipped for EVs! Crazy.
The only EV owners I know have houses. I hope things will change thanks to the new Suga administration that seems somewhat more forward thinking than the Abe one in these matters... We will see.
- Tesla battery production is overtaking the rest of the world combined. For electric cars you need batteries, and Tesla has them. Everyone else is at a minimum years behind in this regard.
- Tesla's prices keep going down, while some of the most competitive electric cars being released besides Teslas (Porsche Taycan for instance) are more than the price point TSLA was at 10 years ago.
- Tesla has the most extensive charging infrastructure of anyone, period.
Just go to any site showing chargers in your area. Turn on just the Tesla and Supercharger plugs. Then turn on just the J1772 and CCS plugs. See which one looks to be the bigger network.
Tesla was forced to make CCS compatible versions in Germany IIRC, so they could adopt the industry standard globally but instead choose to continue pushing vendor lock-in instead of open standards.
Either way that doesn't change the fact Tesla might be the single biggest network of chargers out there, but they're not the most common chargers out there. The majority of chargers out there will not work on a Tesla without an adapter.
If having the largest network of charging systems was really a long term play of theirs, you'd think they'd move to actually supporting the plugs which will probably be on ultimately the majority of cars on the road and take money from everyone instead of only customers of their cars. I question the long term importance of their charging network as more and more J1772/CCS cars get on the market and more J1772/CCS continue coming online. Imagine of Ford and Exxon had some exclusive pump and port agreement where Exxon stations could only sell gas to Ford cars but Ford gave adapters to allow Ford owners to fill anywhere, albeit with a bit more work. Sounds pretty dumb, right?
It's like people complaining that Apple doesn't use USB-C in their phones, forgetting that when Apple made the switch to Lightning, USB-C didn't exist.
I realize USB-C didn't exist when they made Lightning. It still doesn't make sense why they have not migrated to USB-C either, other than continued vendor lock-in/control over the accessory market. With practically all MacBooks and many iPads being on USB-C, it makes less and less sense to have Lightning and USB-C at the same time. There's a standard out there they've halfway adopted, but they choose to not commit to it. All of their portable devices could charge off USB-C, and sell small USB-C to Lightning tips for the brief transition.
I agree, Tesla is in somewhat the same situation. They could start producing CCS compatible cars in the US, they could retrofit ends on their chargers with J1772/CCS plugs, but instead they continue to build proprietary stations and proprietary cars.
You're right both companies are in the same boat and do a similar thing in relation to connector standards. This doesn't make these actions good though.
It wasn’t until VW started thinking about the Taycan and eTron that anyone actually deployed CCS chargers with more than about 50 kW in California (while Tesla customers were enjoying 120-150 kW). And most of the of public DCFC before about 2017-2018 in the US were actually Chademo, not CCS (which is why there is a Chademo adapter for Teslas).
Up until a few years ago, people were saying that Tesla should adopt Chademo because it was a common standard and offered more power than CCS (at the time) and there were more public chargers. Today, there are still more cars on the road in North America that can use Chademo than CCS. CCS is not commonly used in either China or Japan.
The best-selling electric car in many European countries is the Renault Zoe now, and it sells for about half the price of the cheapest Tesla.
First, that's only partly true i.e. a matter of timing.
Second, it doesn't really matter though.
They will sell cars and trucks that are much the same as today, that people want, but are electric.
The belief that all the other established automakers won't catch up is absurd.
Most other automakers... not so much.