Tesla’s new supercharger strategy will allow the company to profit from collecting charging fees from customers of its competitors. (Prices vary by region, time of day, and whether the EV is Tesla or not, but it typically costs between $10 and $30 to charge a car.) And more automakers will follow Ford and GM, and Tesla Choosing to use the connector standard could future-proof Tesla vehicles by ensuring owners have easy access to public charging at all times. “Tesla’s walled garden business was a great short-term, but a losing strategy in the long-term,” said Tom Narayan, an automotive research analyst at RBC Capital Markets.
In this way, Tesla positions itself as an intermediary between app developers and its own customers, a bit like Apple when it launched the App Store, says management at the University of Sydney, who has written a book on Tesla strategy. Professor Daniel Schlagwine says: . More EV owners may have to go through Tesla to keep their cars going. “Conceptually, the auto industry was a race to sell cars, but seeing it as a race to power cars is a whole new way of looking at it,” he says.
One potential drawback of Tesla’s newly revitalized charging strategy is that Tesla’s own customers will have to share the management of the Supercharger with other EV drivers. Some early adopters are already feeling pressure from the company to reduce their network usage.
The electric car maker has been offering free and unlimited supercharging to people who bought Model S sedans and Model X SUVs for years before officially ending the promotion in 2018. Now, automakers appear to be trying to recapture that boon.
In an offer emailed to customers, the company suggested exchanging the free juice reward for $3,000 off a new car and three years of Supercharger, with the discount increased to $5,000. Until the end of this month, Tesla is offering six years of unlimited Supercharging to anyone willing to trade in an older S or X with unlimited charging indefinitely.
“There is no agreement,” said Model S owner Kagai Kinua, who lives between Maryland and Georgia. I didn’t charge at home because I wasn’t allowed to have a personal charging station in the parking lot of my high rise apartment building. As such, Kinyua does most of his charging at his local Tesla fast-charging station. He estimates that this benefit will save him about $3,000 a year.
Drivers are baffled by Tesla’s motives and tactics as it attempts to entice customers to give up on free, lifetime charging. “I think they understand that legacy owners are sticking with older cars,” Quinua said.
Or maybe Tesla fell into a trap where other tech companies that have offered early adopter-attracting perks like unlimited talk time and cloud storage realized they were too good to give away for free. I can’t. Musk made a similar statement in 2018, declaring that unlimited and free superchargers “are not really sustainable in mass production and are not the best incentive for action.” He concluded, “Maybe we should have ended it sooner.”
Tesla’s recent move to make its charging network’s capacity flexible suggests another motivation for moving away from unlimited free charging. Automakers are tearing down charging stations to make room for a large number of paying customers. Tesla reportedly disbanded its press team in 2021, but did not respond to a request for comment.
Vicente Perez, owner of a 2014 Model S, said he only uses the Supercharger network on road trips or when the battery dies far from his home in Los Angeles. But he’s not going to give up his unlimited free supercharger or the cars it entitles him to so easily. “I’m going to keep it until the wheel comes off,” he says.
