The other US networks are at the whim of both 3rd party hardware suppliers & 3rd party software vendors. So they are just integrators really, and do a very terrible job of it. They are slow to get new parts, slow to send out repair teams, etc.
Further a lot of them have screwed up incentives, such that the person charging is not really their end customer. Also they all lose money.
Some of this is the result of legal settlement mandated networks (EA) or them pre-selling some amount of charging to automakers (EA) or partnering with states (evGo) or running an ad network (Volta)..
All of which means you, the person charging, are not the customer. Whether you can successfully charge or not is besides the point, and possibly increases their losses if you do charge!
Yes I know Tesla also receives government money, but it is just one part of the funding, and they are actually performing well as a charging network, because they want to sell more cars. They must make enough money off it that they are willing to open it up to 3rd parties now.
One particular instance that stands out is I pulled up to a Shell Recharge station and found it completely off; checked their own app and it showed as offline; and called their support and informed them so they could open a repair ticket, being unaware of any problem. There's really no excuse for this: Shell had the information that this station was offline, but didn't have any automated action in place.
You can change the UI and UX after deploying it. Say you want to illustrate the charging differently, you'd just deploy software updates rather than having to switch out a bunch of hardware panels. Company branding changed color and now you want to display those instead? OTA updates, instead of replacing charging station hardware.
Not saying it's great, I prefer good old interfaces myself, especially outside of the internet, but I can totally understand why companies consistently make this choice over and over again.
Perhaps the thought of crossing the wrong wires and being met with 400V at 625A is a deterrent.
That's smart: you can use thinner wires which are easier to handle, has less copper so isn't a target for theft comparatively.
And on the flip side; there's plenty of cases with thieves cutting into live high voltage lines. This one is the most visible example I know of though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuXeJ4_s8G8
I hope that changes and there's competition, but right now I would never even consider trying a non-Tesla charger. I've literally never found one that works properly, and 100% of the times I've used a Supercharger it was effortless.
From what I can tell, people press it instead of dealing with the touch screen.
90% of the problems I've had come down to payment processing issues. They all thought they should bundle a crappy social network with the ability to pay for charging, and installed buggy / broken card readers.
Ford made it pretty clear they're supporting NACS because they sent people to chargers to see if they could charge or not, and the failure rate was way above the networks' reported broken charger rate.
I don't think the switch to the supercharger network has anything to do with the charging technology.
Having said that, can you pay to charge a tesla with a credit card? Does it actually work reliably? If the other networks are any indicator, that's the hardest technical challenge in this space.
Next, electrically different cars also have different battery pack voltages. An Ioniq 5 has a much higher voltage than an ID.4. There's limited room for cars to change DC voltage so non-Tesla chargers tend to need to support a wider range of voltages.
Then there's the fact that the CCS connector is bulkier than the Tesla ones so people use more force, and are more likely to drop them if they have limited dexterity. This also accelerates reliability problems.
We as a country need to figure this shit out.
Tesla chargers have had no outages, so Tesla EV drivers are A-OK.
> Tesla chargers in the region were still working, according to reports on the forum PlugShare, where drivers update each other on charger status, but they are not currently compatible with non-Tesla vehicles.
> "June was a rough month for this area," said Real Deschatelets, a volunteer with the Electric Vehicle Association of Northern Ontario (EVANO).
