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Comment by sbierwagen | Hacker News Reader

  In case your eye skipped over the “for free” part, I would  
  like to emphasize that again – owning a Supercharger 
  enabled Model S really does mean free long distance travel 
  forever on our high speed charging network.

I really wish they'd stop saying this. They're essentially committing to building a nationwide electric car charging infrastructure for $nodollars, and never charging customers to use it, ever.

Which means either

  A.) They're not going to build more than 30 charging stations.
  B.) They're all going to be significantly far away from population 
      centers, and used only for interstate travel.

No matter what, a Tesla car is going to be spending 99.9% of its time charging at home or at work.

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I will guarantee it will not be free once electric cars get a bit more popular and legislators need money for roads. These charging stations provide a convenient venue for taxes.

I would also imagine some bill will show up asking electric companies to tax home charging stations separately.

Given the tax implications, I would also bet the 110v plug-ins will be made illegal for electric cars for "safety" reason ("safety of a state's road tax revenue").

>Given the tax implications, I would also bet the 110v plug-ins will be made illegal for electric cars for "safety" reason ("safety of a state's road tax revenue").

Meh, I don't think they'll need to. Somewhere on the Tesla website there is a cute little calculator that will tell you how long it takes to fully charge the Model S with the various charging adapters. As I recall, the 110V / 12A outlet takes something like 4 or 5 days. That's fast enough that most people could probably keep their drive-to-work car at a mid-range SoC by charging all night and while at work. But that doesn't leave any room to really use the car for any errands. I have a feeling that very few owners would consider that a viable option for long-term ownership.

True, very good point, but tax policy is generally not surgical, it is "nuke it from orbit". I will bet it says something like all charging must be through an approved plug and metered.

They don't claim all their customers forever will get the privilege. Just customers of this car. For as long as they're making the offer. And that's really not that many people. They're trying to do, what, 3000 a quarter?

That's many fewer, I would guess, than could possibly make the charging stations really profitable. And they need some solution to long-range travel, and nobody else is going to fix that for them. So the costs are sunk in pursuit of the real goal (selling cars), and they're not going to make much money selling power anyway, so why not turn it into a unique and reasonably cheap feature?

I would expect that once Tesla and/or electric cars are more established, they'll change the terms. At least they have the option. Note the "Supercharger enabled Model S" phrase--already laying the groundwork for future changes to their policies. Good reason to get in early, if you can.

Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if their long-term plan is to cede charging to the rest of the world. It's not really their focus as a company.

Probably neither A nor B. The total electricity cost over the lifetime of a Tesla Model S is surprisingly small, so small that it can effectively rolled into the price of the vehicle itself. In fact this is one of the problems with current electric vehicles: the battery alone may cost more than all the electricity you'd use to charge it over its lifetime.

Additionally they can certainly recoup costs on charging non-Tesla cars.

Life expectancy of a car 150,000 to 300,000 miles [1] Cost of electricity: 6 to 12 cents per kWh [2] Performance of Model S: 300 miles in 85 kWh [3] Cost of Model S: $57,400 to $77,400 [3]

Electricity cost: $2,550 to $10,200 Percentage of $57,400 vehicle cost: 4.44% to 17.77%

There's also a supercharger 'activation fee' for the models that don't have the highest end battery [4] which presumably rolls in some of that cost. So I agree this is probably economically feasible.

Of course, it all depends on what their profit margins are like when they get to serious production, what the charging efficiency is like, how much use Tesla's charge stations get, and how good a deal they can get on their electricity.

[1] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12040753/ns/business-consumer_ne... [2] http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S [4] http://www.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/update-supercharging...

I wonder if they've bought futures contracts for their electricity usage.

95%+ of that 300,000 miles will be charged at home, or the office. Not at the long-distance interstate charging stations.

That's the key - those superchargers are for long distance travel, not local travel.

I agree that's likely - the only reason I didn't say it is we don't yet know the full layout of Tesla's charger network.

"Free long distance travel" obviously means B. It's not like this is a secret.

It's tapdancing on the line between "creative wording" and "outright deception". They frontload the FREE CHARGING FOREVER part, then lightly skip over the fact that a Model S owner is still going to be spending a whole lot of money on power. (Gasoline is going to get more expensive. So is electricity! Until we figure out how to paint solar cells on flat surfaces, energy will never again be as cheap as it is right now.)

"Until we figure out how to paint solar cells on flat surfaces, energy will never again be as cheap as it is right now."

Oh, really?

What about natural gas, hydrated methane and the most important of all, nuclear fusion energy?

The universe is filled with billions of billions of billions of stars, it is not that fusion energy does not work, we only have to control it and we will.

We aren't going to see anything nuclear in the near future, sadly. The populace is just too afraid.

It doesn't matter that burning coal rains down radiation in the form of C-14- most people don't know that, and remain more afraid of anything with "nuclear" in the name.

Coal doesn't have any C14 in it. It's millions of years old. You're thinking of other elements, like uranium.

You are right, my mistake. Hah, that's what I get for saying most people don't know.

How about a nice marketing campaign then? DeBeers actually managed to convince people worldwide to buy diamonds, so why can't someone start convincing people that nuclear is good?

People have tried.

Even before DeBeers no one was actively against diamonds. Convincing someone to be positive towards something they from the outset where ignorant of or indifferent to is quite easy, especially if that things is harmless, pretty and shiny. Convincing someone to be positive towards something they've spent their entire life being warned against is Hard, especially if there is plenty of indisputable scientific evidence that that thing can in fact be very dangerous in many scenarios.

My take on it is that it's being used to subsidize SolarCity. If the charging stations really are break-even in operating costs, then it could be a viable plan. At the least, I'd guess the stations are much cheaper than traditional gas stations, so proliferation may not be as expensive as it seems.

Then again, I'm not a business expert, so perhaps there's bookkeeping shenanigans here as well.

Dont forget that even traditional gas stations make most of their profit from convenience store/restaurants.

I would actually be very interested in a citation for this.

The original quote is true, but he misphrased it.

The convenience store attached to a gas station is very profitable (huge markups on cheap food) but has relatively little revenue. The gasoline is not very profitable (razor thin margins due to competing with, essentially, everyone) but brings in a lot of revenue. (Every customer at a gas station buys gas)

The convenience store is the most profitable part, but that doesn't mean you can get rid of the gas pumps and just sell five dollar bottles of Coke.

It's 100% true. My uncle owns a fairly large gas/service station. The profit from gas sales effectively paid the rent for the service station. He paid all of his employees (and himself) with money coming from the car repair business. The gas pumps were irrelevant to his own profit, but required a lot of hassle/wasted time.

About 2 or 3 years ago he bought a larger building, hired more mechanics, and didn't build gas pumps. They're just not worth the hassle.

For perspective, the credit card companies made more money per gallon than he did as the gas station owner.

I don't know if there are citations, but there is a very well known trend in the retail gas industry of 0% margin on the fuel, and 100% of the profit coming from the mini-store.

I have a friend who runs about a dozen gas stations in the bay area, and they literally change the price for each tanker of gas that comes in - the pricing is so dynamic - and they get charged based on the neighborhood/market that they are in. Her goal is to not lose any money on gas sales, and make it all up in the store.

A family friend owned a gas station, and pricing was so competitive in the ~1million people city he lived in, he said that the one or two drive-offs he had per week cut his profits to zero. He was shocked that stores can offer 2-10cents per liter discount.

He sold up last year.

I'd be willing to bet that they make good money on premium gasoline.

Well there is one certain feature of many interstates in the US.... rest areas. NY to LA might not be hard to spread them out on.

Sure you can cross the country for free, provided you want to go this way.

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