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Tesla to lay off everyone working on Superchargers, new vehicles
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
US needs to regulate chargers.
Yes, yes, market and all. But look at printers. Or charger cables for small electronic devices (EU stepped in). Lock-in of customers is an incentive working against common chargers.
100%. This should have been addressed years ago, honestly. No one would tolerate VW only being able to gas up at Shell stations due to different nozzles. This is no different.
Did Tesla not make their charger an open standard that every new ev is shipping with?
Eventually, yeah.
In the past Elon offered it as part of a bundle, with the deal being:
You get to use the Tesla connector and superchargers
Tesla still retains all rights and ownership of the standard and can revoke access whenever they wish
You agree agree not to use Tesla in the event they infringe on your parents
Unsurprisingly, nobody accepted that deal. I wonder what it was that prompted Tesla to have a change of heart? Were they expecting the government to step in and enforce a standard, a la EU, and they wanted to get ahead of it?
The part about not suing tesla over patent infringement was the true poison pill and why no one took them up on it. Ford has over 79000 patents alone and that's just one auto manufacture.
I’m not sure that was a valid concern, even if Ford thought that way. This is pretty common in the tech industry, as a form of Mutually Assured Destruction. Everyone has a big portfolio of patents but mainly use them defensively: I won’t nuke you if you don’t nuke me
I don’t get this concern: in the early stages when things were privately funded, there were incompatibilities, but with federal money and new standards, we seem to have a good set of regulations in place to ensure everything works together.
The beginnings of a market are chaos, but this one seems to have shaken that out
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/02/15/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-new-standards-and-major-progress-for-a-made-in-america-national-network-of-electric-vehicle-chargers/
Assuming it isn't strangled in the cradle by Red State infrastructure haters (like the HSR projects through the Midwest that Obama failed to implement), this could be a good thing.
But I've seen so many of these kinds of plans get a ton of money and produce vanishingly little in the way of material change. So we'll see where it all goes.