Tesla and Uber Unlikely to Survive...
Discussion
stuckmojo said:
my man math for a free supercharging model S factors that I will go and spend £5 in Costa while the fuel is free.
Key part of my business plan to buy one.
We stopped for coffee on the way to visit grandparents this weekend (saw both set of grandparents same day there was alot of coffee been drunk!!).Key part of my business plan to buy one.
By the time I had plugged in and got back into the car and we decided what to get the charger had added 3kWh, by the time my wife returned with the order 19kWh, or roughly 60 miles of range which was more than what we needed for the trip. We actually arrived and left before any of the combustion cars around us, and driving past the petrol station on the way out, I would say 95% of the people at the services were having a human fuel break rather than fueling up - actually in the previous 15 years+ of combustion car ownership I can only remember filling up at a service station half a dozen times.
To people who haven't experienced EV charging, just go and try charging any other EV using anyother pubic charging network than try a Tesla on the Supercharger, the difference is quite simply astounding.
Given a Model 3 can charge nearly twice as fast on a V3 SC, and gain more range per charge, those things will almost charge TOO QUICKLY for a human comfort/fuel break!!
Service stations might also turn a nice profit from refueling EVs much more than petrol cars, I see Instavolt charges 35p per kWh, and Fastned charges £0.59 per kWh, given our home electricity if only billed at 8p per kWh overnight and 14p per kWh day time that's some profit margin, and clearly the faster you can deliver that charge the better it is from the profit/turn over point of view.
No idea how much profit is on a tank if fuel but 350KW charging at 15-20p per kWh profit over whole sale cost cannot be too bad?
Edited by gangzoom on Monday 15th July 07:39
Smiljan said:
Who has done the motorway services deal you mention? Current ecotricity monopoly is crap.
Both BP and Shell. They obviously already have contracts in place for fuelling and can put chargers on their real estate but the core objective is to utilise the main car parking. Ecotricity’s Electric Highway is a junk business that exists purely to pay salaries from Government grants and subsidies. The strength of its ‘exclusivity’ clauses have already been tested by Tesla and the lobbying by the fuel companies to the CMA have begun.
What’s key though is that the Electric Highway barely generates any revenue at all. It was about £400,000 as of the last filed accounts. So just think about that number for a brief moment. Currently the whole long distance charging business ex Tesla has a total revenue of £400k per annum.
It’s that number right there that shows is the landscape. There is no revenue so obviously no profit. And this isn’t a situation that is suddenly going to change. It will be a slow steady climb over years and years.
The real money is in suburban and urban charging. That’s where the affluent consumers are, that’s where the EVs are, that’s where the businesses are that want to attract those consumers. This isn’t America where big, allfuent cities are thousands of miles apart and people need to travel between them by road. This is the UK where almost no one with more than £5 in their pocket is much more than the crappeat EV Range away from the centre of London. We are a tiny country with our consumer wealth very firmly located within the urban and suburban environments and an extremely low daily average car milaeage.
As seen from Ecotricity’s accounts there is no money in motorway charging and there won’t be for a very, very long time. The money is to be found at suburban and urban retail destinations.
I think that early adopters of EVs have a very different view of the importance of motorway charging because of the nature of their purchase. They want to use an EV for all these journeys and they will tolerate invonveniencesbto thebpoint that they don’t even see them as inconveniences but the future for EVs doesn’t lie in the hands of early adopters but in the hands of the boggo suburban individual with their completely conventional and predictable life routine, their multiple cars, their driveways and the UK private finance charging network will be built around where these people live, shop and work as that is where profit can be made.
The big question is whether the Govt will expand its use of taxpayer funds to infill where there is zero profit potential?
gangzoom said:
Instavolt charges 35p per kWh, and Fastned charges £0.59 per kWh,
And Tesla charge 27pYou need to try one of the fastned or instavolt chargers as they're hardly difficult to use.
gangzoom said:
that's some profit margin
Nearly as much as they make on a cup of coffee, £3 for a coffee you seem to like that costs probably 30p, a 90% margin as opposed to around 60% on electrcirty.gangzoom said:
Given a Model 3 can charge nearly twice as fast on a V3 SC,
which won't be in the UK anytime soon as they require a larger power supply and Tesla are proving inept at securing these, hence the complete stalling of the supercharger expansion in the UK, even at the current speeds. Plus the latest CCS chargers are already faster than the current supercharging network in the UK.
And not to mention Tesla are having some kind of schizophrenia while on the one hand they are ramping up the headline figures and on the other they're reducing chanrging speed if you charge too oftern and significantly reducing battery capacity because of the risk of fire.
DonkeyApple said:
boggo suburban individual with their completely conventional and predictable life routine, their multiple cars, their driveways and the UK private finance charging network will be built around where these people live, shop and work as that is where profit can be made.
How much profit can be made if a huge portion of car owners will simply fuel from their home for 'traiff' cost?Unlike petrol cars there is no need to outsource your fuel costs to the likes BP/Shell. If we doubled our solar PV setup and combined with battery storage that would provide enough energy to reduce even our main grid draw by 2/3rds at least.
Why would I pay even 1p per kWh more to charge my car anywhere else but home??
Heres Johnny said:
Nearly as much as they make on a cup of coffee, £3 for a coffee you seem to like that costs probably 30p, a 90% margin as opposed to around 60% on electrcirty.
Isn't that the point? Next time you stop at the services see how many people are buying a coffee/food and not fuel. With EVs services can atleast make some money on fuel AND food/drink which people are already buying.
Oh and if you can get a BlueLight card, cuts Coffee costs by 20%
.gangzoom said:
How much profit can be made if a huge portion of car owners will simply fuel from their home for 'traiff' cost?
gangzoom said:
With EVs services can atleast make some money on fuel AND food/drink which people are already buying.
I'm confused, do we need large scale, accessible public charging or not?gangzoom said:
DonkeyApple said:
boggo suburban individual with their completely conventional and predictable life routine, their multiple cars, their driveways and the UK private finance charging network will be built around where these people live, shop and work as that is where profit can be made.
How much profit can be made if a huge portion of car owners will simply fuel from their home for 'traiff' cost?Unlike petrol cars there is no need to outsource your fuel costs to the likes BP/Shell. If we doubled our solar PV setup and combined with battery storage that would provide enough energy to reduce even our main grid draw by 2/3rds at least.
Why would I pay even 1p per kWh more to charge my car anywhere else but home??
This is the point that I have been making for some time that charging an EV is actually a different proposition to selling petrol and it will evolve in a different direction and that direction is more likely to be along the lines of how a landowner monetises a car park as opposed to trying to get EV charging to fit the business model of the traditional petrol forecourt.
Even the petrol forecourts have had to evolve over the last two decades because there isn’t the profit in selling fuel alone to run a stand-alone enterprise. And just think that electricity has to be price competitive to petrol which already cannot stand alone and that’s with how many millions of consumers needing to make a purchase extremely regularly. The EV market is not only tiny but as you point out the bulk of the electricity purchases are made through a domestic utility contract so what you have is a business that has very few customers who have very little need but your pricing can never be set to be profitable at that low demand level because your upper pricing limit is capped by a competing industry that operates in a completely different way.
Another way to look at this is that if a stand alone charging base was even close to being a profitable business unit then not only would investment capital be flooding in but so would private ownership.
And the big issue isn’t that charging points are currently loss making but that this is going to remain the case for an extremely long time, if not permanently. And that is why the whole business model must evolve in a completely different way to that of petrol and the most obvious alternative is how car parking spaces are monetised.
Witchfinder said:
gangzoom said:
With EVs services can atleast make some money on fuel AND food/drink which people are already buying.
I'm confused, do we need large scale, accessible public charging or not?DonkeyApple said:
Smiljan said:
Who has done the motorway services deal you mention? Current ecotricity monopoly is crap.
Both BP and Shell. They obviously already have contracts in place for fuelling and can put chargers on their real estate but the core objective is to utilise the main car parking. Ecotricity’s Electric Highway is a junk business that exists purely to pay salaries from Government grants and subsidies. The strength of its ‘exclusivity’ clauses have already been tested by Tesla and the lobbying by the fuel companies to the CMA have begun.
What’s key though is that the Electric Highway barely generates any revenue at all. It was about £400,000 as of the last filed accounts. So just think about that number for a brief moment. Currently the whole long distance charging business ex Tesla has a total revenue of £400k per annum.
It’s that number right there that shows is the landscape. There is no revenue so obviously no profit. And this isn’t a situation that is suddenly going to change. It will be a slow steady climb over years and years.
The real money is in suburban and urban charging. That’s where the affluent consumers are, that’s where the EVs are, that’s where the businesses are that want to attract those consumers. This isn’t America where big, allfuent cities are thousands of miles apart and people need to travel between them by road. This is the UK where almost no one with more than £5 in their pocket is much more than the crappeat EV Range away from the centre of London. We are a tiny country with our consumer wealth very firmly located within the urban and suburban environments and an extremely low daily average car milaeage.
As seen from Ecotricity’s accounts there is no money in motorway charging and there won’t be for a very, very long time. The money is to be found at suburban and urban retail destinations.
I think that early adopters of EVs have a very different view of the importance of motorway charging because of the nature of their purchase. They want to use an EV for all these journeys and they will tolerate invonveniencesbto thebpoint that they don’t even see them as inconveniences but the future for EVs doesn’t lie in the hands of early adopters but in the hands of the boggo suburban individual with their completely conventional and predictable life routine, their multiple cars, their driveways and the UK private finance charging network will be built around where these people live, shop and work as that is where profit can be made.
The big question is whether the Govt will expand its use of taxpayer funds to infill where there is zero profit potential?
Smiljan said:
Thanks I thought you meant someone had done a deal to install chargers in the services. Currently I believe only ecotricity have the permission to do so.
More rights to than permission - ecotricity tucked up the services contractually a few years ago and there was an almighty spat with Tesla at one point but I believe they still have the exclusive rights for general access chargers which is why you only see their shockingly bad chargers installed.When Dale Vince was doing his ecotricity thing back in the 2014/5 everyone thought he was god. He's now probably single handly doing more to put back EV adoption than any other individual in this country because or these contracts.
There almost certainly IS money in service centre chargers. The issue is the current ecotricity ones are rubbish, badly maintained and go on free vend which loses all the profit when they do bill, if you can get them to work at all. He also set up a dubiuos cross subside scheem between his companies were his domestic elecricity business gave away free charging on the EV business chargers (with no obvious exchange of money between the companies) in an attempt to get people to swtich their energy supplier. The maths are far more comple than just looking at the charging business accounts.
Edited by Heres Johnny on Monday 15th July 10:24
Heres Johnny said:
When Dale Vince was doing his ecotricity thing back in the 2014/5 everyone thought he was god. He's now probably single handly doing more to put back EV adoption than any other individual in this country because or these contracts.
That's one thing we can both 100% agree on!!Some one I know has just bought an iPace, his super excited to pick it up in a few weeks, and was keenly asking me to show him the ropes on how to use the Mway service chargers.....
To say am not looking fowards to that experience is an understatement, especially as he loves to hear about how we take our EV up/down the country with little worry about charging.
JPJPJP said:
Yes, the membership / unique card / app that charging networks seem to like to aim for is rubbish. Just make it easy to roll up and pay and charge and go: card / phone like most other fuel retail
As if by magichttps://www.gov.uk/government/news/all-new-rapid-c...
^Polar just apparently sent out an email about new contactless chargers and new pricing.
40p per kWh on a rapid charger with contactless with minimal connection charge. Thats nearly 5 times more than our home fuelling costs.
Forget that, if this is the future of EV rapid charging I'll be sticking to our 'free for life' SC Tesla for a long long time!!
40p per kWh on a rapid charger with contactless with minimal connection charge. Thats nearly 5 times more than our home fuelling costs.
Forget that, if this is the future of EV rapid charging I'll be sticking to our 'free for life' SC Tesla for a long long time!!
gangzoom said:
^Polar just apparently sent out an email about new contactless chargers and new pricing.
40p per kWh on a rapid charger with contactless with minimal connection charge. Thats nearly 5 times more than our home fuelling costs.
Forget that, if this is the future of EV rapid charging I'll be sticking to our 'free for life' SC Tesla for a long long time!!
Yup. Tesla has used investor capital to build the network and then give away access to attract consumers to the more valuable good. 40p per kWh on a rapid charger with contactless with minimal connection charge. Thats nearly 5 times more than our home fuelling costs.
Forget that, if this is the future of EV rapid charging I'll be sticking to our 'free for life' SC Tesla for a long long time!!
This is the only model that can be followed by others as you couldn’t install a charger and have that charger directly pay for its own installation and running costs and return a profit.
It isn’t feasible for the exact model to be copied, even Tesla now cannot continue with it in the same way as they don’t have the investor capital anymore and the rewards from the sale of cars isn’t yet enough.
But charge points don’t pay their own way so partnership models are required where one of the partners earns sufficient ancillary revenues to make the venture profitable. Unless the State throws free money into the pot. This is why the existing car park model is the most obvious as it is already in place and with partners making it work.
Dale’s network can’t suceed long term as his business lacks the capital and the chargers lack the revenue. The energy companies can break his contract whenever they want as all it takes is money but to spend that money there first needs to be the reward waiting on the other side.
None of this is a remotely unresolvable issue it is simply a matter of time. Time for the consumer market to build to a size that delivers the financial reward for the investment cost required.
Recent Scottish EV roadtrip averaging nearly 200 miles per day over 5 days. Didn't seem that difficult?
http://nievo.org/the-tesla-model-3-and-the-scottis...
http://nievo.org/the-tesla-model-3-and-the-scottis...
What is a fair price for use of a rapid charger?
if the actual cost of the fuel is something like 4.2p / kWH (not out of the ordinary https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/data-portal/all-charts/po...
How much over that are EV drivers prepared to pay for the convenience (or necessity) of rapid charging in the wild?
I've used AFH rapid charging twice in the last 12 months, both times on the same journey in fact.
So I'm not especially price sensitive, nor am I someone that charging network operators could look at as a customer when planning a business. For me 40p / kWH doesn't feel out of line with the premium price I would pay for fuelling an ICE car at a motorway service station. It isn't cheap, but if I needed it, I would pay it without hesitation.
For people with no access to any other source of EV charging, 40p/kWh means more than 10p per mile and is probably a non starter.
How much to buy a rapid charger? Maybe £30k, maybe a bit more.
How much to install it? Maybe another £30k?
How much to maintain it? Maybe £500 a year?
What cost the land it is on? Maybe £2500 a year?
I reckon a rapid charger at 40p / kWH needs at least 30 customers a week to make it pay... How far out am I?
if the actual cost of the fuel is something like 4.2p / kWH (not out of the ordinary https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/data-portal/all-charts/po...
How much over that are EV drivers prepared to pay for the convenience (or necessity) of rapid charging in the wild?
I've used AFH rapid charging twice in the last 12 months, both times on the same journey in fact.
So I'm not especially price sensitive, nor am I someone that charging network operators could look at as a customer when planning a business. For me 40p / kWH doesn't feel out of line with the premium price I would pay for fuelling an ICE car at a motorway service station. It isn't cheap, but if I needed it, I would pay it without hesitation.
For people with no access to any other source of EV charging, 40p/kWh means more than 10p per mile and is probably a non starter.
How much to buy a rapid charger? Maybe £30k, maybe a bit more.
How much to install it? Maybe another £30k?
How much to maintain it? Maybe £500 a year?
What cost the land it is on? Maybe £2500 a year?
I reckon a rapid charger at 40p / kWH needs at least 30 customers a week to make it pay... How far out am I?
mids said:
Recent Scottish EV roadtrip averaging nearly 200 miles per day over 5 days. Didn't seem that difficult?
http://nievo.org/the-tesla-model-3-and-the-scottis...
So quite a few 7kw destination chargers dotted around, graphics can mean anything. At least a model 3 will charge in a dozen hours. As a comparison, post the Tesla supercharger map of Scotland. You will only need 1 hand to count them. Our town has 1 single type 2 50kw, 20 miles to the next one and 100 miles for a Tesla one. You can imagine how often the single rapid chargers are busy / broken / ice'd. Like most other single charge points around the country.http://nievo.org/the-tesla-model-3-and-the-scottis...
If you need to go a 40 mile round trip hoping it is clear when you get there it does not fill you with enthusiasm. Apart from having to join a stack of networks. The various players in the charging network need to get their act together and make it easier for customers.
DragonflyTrumpeter said:
So quite a few 7kw destination chargers dotted around, graphics can mean anything. At least a model 3 will charge in a dozen hours. As a comparison, post the Tesla supercharger map of Scotland. You will only need 1 hand to count them. Our town has 1 single type 2 50kw, 20 miles to the next one and 100 miles for a Tesla one. You can imagine how often the single rapid chargers are busy / broken / ice'd. Like most other single charge points around the country.
If you need to go a 40 mile round trip hoping it is clear when you get there it does not fill you with enthusiasm. Apart from having to join a stack of networks. The various players in the charging network need to get their act together and make it easier for customers.
Unless its deteriated I toured Scotland quite happily topping up on 50kw Chademo chargers once a day and all on 1 network (CYC). All but 1 were free vend too although I think a few more are now charging. And that was 3 years ago.If you need to go a 40 mile round trip hoping it is clear when you get there it does not fill you with enthusiasm. Apart from having to join a stack of networks. The various players in the charging network need to get their act together and make it easier for customers.
Even with Scotlands low density population I don't recall any being more than about 60 mile apart back then so no issue.
Wales on the other hand...
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