with higher power charging stations I'd have thought investment required must be escalating - you can't just suck the power off the grid, rather need significant battery storage on site.
There are literally only a handful of charging hubs in the whole UK that are supported by batteries.
In most of the Gridserve electric forecourts, the batteries are not there because of the chargers, its there because of the grid huge connection and they use it for grid services (e.g. frequency balancing) and not powering chargers. It's part of the economic case for building these sites, the exception is Cornwall Services, that is used for buffering an insufficient power supply.
There is only 1 Tesla installation that has a battery currently and that is South Mimms but that's getting a power supply upgrade so will be redundant shortly.
Is it though? Supercharger network was their USP and gave them a massive foothold initially.
They then opened this up to, IIRC, unlock further funding potential also giving themselves an additional revenue stream in the process.
Now if they continue to improve the network they are working to the benefit of not just themselves but all their competitors. 500 staff + land acquisition + infrastructure costs etc. so someone can go "Ooh, the charging situation is looking much better. Maybe I'll look into that *insert any other brand* again."
It's a big 'if' though. How do you improve the network if you have just fired the 'entire' team? (I'm sure it is not actually all of them)
While the Tesla network is good, its not in any stretch of the imagination 'finished' in terms of the number of locations. It is keeping pace with demand but only because they keep adding locations to diversify people away from the really busy ones which can't expand. A huge number of the sites are at hotels and other leisure/retail locations which are only going to want so many chargers on their estate.
The reason I say its a stupid decision is they have basically convinced America that their proprietary standard is the best and their chargers are the only ones worth using. They have a huge opportunity to take a stonking % of the charging market.
In the UK, they seem to be the only charging company that is able to deploy reliable chargers at scale for a reasonable price. Again, a huge opportunity to lock up a significant % of the market. In Europe, not so much and the landscape is more competitive over there but that is why they are nearly all open.
Just seems like business to me. All be it all in, people are just numbers on a spreadsheet, Musk style business.
Even that doesn't matter though. The guy could drop kick kittens for fun and people will still lap up the cars.
I don't disagree on that front, that's the American corporate way and its a ploy to pump the share price which is crashing hard at the moment. I guess the fortunate thing for their European employee's, they can't just be laid off like they can in America. I expect many of them will be re-hired within months when they realise they are actually needed.
I wouldn't go that far though, even some of the Tesla die hards are starting to get pretty vocal about Musk. His antics and political statements have certainly rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way and it is 100% putting off customers and costing them sales.
The company isn't a start up anymore and it could do with some adult leadership and I wouldn't be surprised if he is ousted at some point if he keeps up the current direction of travel. Looking beyond Musk, the product itself is actually decent and sold for a competitive price.
