This is Dana Perkins and you're listening to Switched on the BNEF podcast. When it comes to public electric vehicle chargers, the US has nearly one hundred and fifty eight thousand in the whole country. Now, this might seem like a big figure, but when you set it against Europe's six hundred and ninety three thousand and China's colossal two point one million, well then you start to realize the scale of the task that lies ahead as the US readies
itself for the upcoming electric vehicle era of transport. So looking back, in twenty twenty one, the Biden administration announced the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program or NEV for short. They had the intention of aiding the installation of charging infrastructure, which would be required for the mass rollout of electric vehicles across the States. However, complicating matters in the US
included the charging network itself. It's a patchwork quilt of different entities competing against one another, and at the heart of the battle has been an issue around whether your vehicle is compatible either with the Combined Charging System or CCS can not, or Tesla's own North American Charging Standard equivalent now. Tesla was early in its national role out of charging stations in ultrafast chargers, so it became a
dominant player. But with other electric vehicle brands now gaining in popularity, this begs the question can anyone compete with Tesla's charging network or will they have to join them? To find out more, on today's episode, I speak with beanuf's head of electric vehicle charging, Ryan Fisher, as well as a senior associate on our EV team, Corey Kanter.
The topics that we discuss include the number of fast and slow chargers across a variety of different US charging networks, who owns them, their failings and also their successes, and the subsidies on offer at the federal level as a part of the Nevy scheme. And lastly, Tesla's competitors and whether anyone can actually really challenge them or will their rivals need to accept the North American charging standard as
the national standard. As always, if you like this podcast, if you subscribe, you're going to receive updates on future episodes, and if you give us a review, it'll make us more discoverable by others. But right now, let's jump into our conversation with Ryan and Corey. Corey thank you for joining.
The show today, Thanks Dana, happy to be.
Here, and Ryan, thank you for being here.
Thanks Diana.
So we're going to talk about charging networks, specifically in the United States, where there's a lot of activity going on at the moment. So can you first explain what the NEVY is and then let's get into what that means for charging in the US.
So, yeah, it's seven point five billion of funds from the government, split into two main funds, five billion for highway largely highways fast charging, and then another two point five billion for initiatives in other areas called the Discretionary Grant. Some more details on that to come.
And to add to Ryan's point, the NEVY funding in the kind of five billion dollar pot is controlled a lot by the state, and so they've already begun setting out their plans and we're beginning to see the early stages of charging companies actually be selected by state, so
Ohio and May and there are two examples. And so even though the infrastructure law that began the funding of the NEVY program passed almost two years ago, as of this November, we haven't really seen any chargers built out yet so there's still a lot of work to do.
So before we get into any source of details about what we think will have in for the future of charging networks in the US, because there is so much focus on this at the moment, let's talk about the current state of play. So what does the existing charging infrastructure look like in the US, and you know what companies dominate it?
Yeah, So the infrastructure in the US, I think there's around one hundred and fifty hundred and sixty thousand connections. Now, if you think about this kind of fast versus slow charging, I want to take an hours, am I taking minutes to charge? Something like one hundred and twenty five thousands or thirty five thousand split. California maybe unsurprisingly dominate in terms of the total states. I think New York is second,
but quite far behind. In terms of the company, Teslar is kind of the key one out there installing, spending the money putting in that fast infrastructure. And obviously we've heard a lot about the deals with the other auto makers and I'm sure we'll talk about that later today. And then you've got others EVgo also putting in charges.
Electrify America, who's funded by VW and then Chardpoint, who is kind of this weird mix in that they're selling the hardware and the software but they're not ultimately the operators of that infrastructure. But many other examples, but they're the big ones.
So Corey, maybe you could shed some light on what the current state of play is in California from a charging standpoint.
Yeah, I mean, in terms of California specifically, what's interesting is the fact that it's a fairly robust EV ecosystem. For listeners of the show, to give you a sense, California in the first half of this year saw about a twenty five percent nearly one in four vehicles sold as electric, and so at BNF when we talk about electric vehicles, we're talking battery, electric and plug and how
productric vehicles. California has about one third of all of the electric vehicle chargers public charging connectors built as of the end of twenty twenty two. I've been working recently on a piece that folks should expect to see sometime this month around different EV state markets, and California actually looks quite good in terms of EV's per charging connector, around twenty seven to twenty eight or so and so
it's not perfect. California has its own challenges to deal with in terms of the grid and in terms of ensuring that higher level of EV adoption can coexist with a grid that's fairly reliable on renewable energy. But they have a robust charging build out, including a state sponsor of charging infrastructure, and they're even thinking ahead about what the NEV program means for them. So one thing that California does that's interesting with NEV is at the kind
of national level. NEV has a minimum requirement of one hundred and fifty kilowatts for many of their highway fast chargers. California is even looking at some sites where they're going to require three hundred and fifty kilowatts for high volume EV charging sites. So California, just like any country, has its challenges, but they've been fairly robuts with their EV charging build out.
The other thing about California we dicussed this when I was on the podcast with Jay last time, but is the Low Carbon Fuel Standard. The LCFS basically credits deficits built by the kind of oil and gas majors having to then buy them off people who saw low carbon fuels.
So if you're producing or selling electricity for charging, you basically can generate these credits and they are about ten percent of revenues for some of these charging companies, which kind of is cyclical, and then people were more likely to build infrastructure, so kind of plays into why California house more charges.
So when we think about these chargers, are the new ones going in, are they largely superchargers or is there an even split between these slower versus much quicker charging stations.
When you look most of the markets, you really see percentage wise, it's kind of eighty percent the slower chargers on a total number basis. If you then start to look at investment or the number of electrons that are being delivered from the chargers, it's really these fast and more powerful ones that are taking the line share of money and just cotributing electricity.
And we're talking specifically about public chargers at the slow range, not in people's homes as they're setting them up directly in their home after they've bought an electric vehicle.
Yeah, that's right, So they could be anywhere. Golf courses might have slow charges, hotels, these kind of destinations. But more so when you think shopping centers were competing for slow chargers. Now actually people are realizing, well, fast chargers are also suitable there. We're seeing more competition. Walmart is now getting in the game themselves, so.
They've recognized that essentially, if you're staying at a hotel, you're more than likely to stay overnight and you have enough time to get a charge, whereas if you're going to Walmart, you may not be spending your entire day there.
Yeah, exactly, and you kind of want to come out and have your car full. So even though there was this thing of oh, we'll have slow so people stay in the store forever, like, there's a limit to how long people probably want to stay in the in the store. And I think that forty five minutes. With the battery sizes we've got today on one hundred and fifty kilo, what charge, which is kind of in that fast range, would go from zero to eighteen ninety percent.
I mean, Corey and I both have these recent EXPERI variances where we've rented Tesla's actually in different states. So Corey, where were you when you rented your Tesla?
Yeah, my girlfriend and I were at a wedding in California, and it felt like the perfect opportunity to rent an EV given how many chargers again are in California. So we rented the Tesla Model three and when we're staying at a hotel that advertised free charging. Unfortunately, Dana, that charger, while offered and advertised, was so good that other people were using it for pretty much the entire time that we were there, So we ended up useeing fast charging
as a part of Tesla's supercharging network. But again, it is a nice perk. I wish the hotel had more chargers.
So I rented Tesla why in Massachusetts and ended up using it for three weeks across Massachusetts, New York State, and Rhode Island and did a bit of a road trip around there. And was definitely the stereotypical supercharger. Well the person that they're looking for, which essentially pulls into the parking lot, charges the car, and probably goes into every store that's in that particular parking lot they were at.
But the more important thing was that we exclusively use Tesla superchargers, and I am very interested to learn that those superchargers are actually now open to a number of other different types of car owners. Let's delve into that a little bit. What other companies now have access to Tesla superchargers in the US.
Oh, there's quite a few signed up, and it almost makes it seem like a landslide win that everybody's going to Tesla. So gm Ford were the first two, Mercedes Is on their Rivian, Fiska, Volvo. The list goes on. I think what's important is who's not on there, so Stalantis, Toyota, BMW, High on Ikea. There's still some big hitters who have not quite signed up yet, and they, whilst accounting for maybe a small percent of EV sales, account for a
lot of car sales. So let's say some of their strategy about how many evs they're going to sell comes true. Then they're still splitting from Tesla and maybe being a bit aware of the dominance and the strategic win that they may hand by signing up with them.
Connect Okay, at one point, Ryan, and to just about the Tesla dominance. So Tesla has rebranded its supercharging connector as next the North American Charging Standard as an effort to sort of broad in the reach of the network and position themselves really as the leading charging connector type here in the US and Canada. There's one stat you use in a lot of your presentations that I really appreciate because I think it really illustrates how much dominance
Tesla actually has. It was the installation of new superchargers last year, which I believe was around like three thousand or so, and these other networks are more, I think in the five hundred or so range in terms of new installations. And so there's a reason why these automakers have been unhappy with some of the charging build out to date, and I think that the numbers show it.
But also all of these announcements you just highlighted Ryan really drive the point that it's not necessarily that everyone wants to kind of jump on board with Tesla. It's just they're so far out ahead of the competition over here in the US that really the ev charging story in the US is Tesla and then there's everyone else.
Yeah, And like anecdotal stories are sometimes the best. And I was kind of sat on my sofa and I don't usually have Twitter, but a Twitter spaces pops up and it's Mary Barrow and it's Elon Musk, and I'm thinking, like, what is this, it's got to be some kind of big announcement. And this comes on the back of Tesla buying Twitter, GM not going on Twitter at all for like seven eight months as the first time. They've never
posted anything in the whole time. And GM is maybe the typical corporate car manufacturer, very organized, very explicit about what they're doing. I'm pretty sure Elon Musk was in his car. You could almost sound like you could hear a child in the back seat muffling around, and it was just so casual. So this massive strategic shift for GM.
It just showed that they were almost having to bow down to Tesla, and surely they didn't want to do it, but they just noticed all of the importance that was in it, and that setting did show that they really needed it. And Musk maybe was lauding it up a little bit.
And then Ford actually followed the very similar trajectories GM. I guess they predated it. So when did Ford sign on for this charging network?
I think Ford was a little bit earlier, maybe two three weeks earlier, and you could almost a bit of a scramble really for GM to sign up. And I think that falls through when you think about some of the things the issues that may be caused by this. You've got multiple connectors now in the US, some people using CCS, some people using Tesla's. If I'm buying a car, do i want to buy a car knowing that I'm going to have an adapter when I go to a
different network. There's a reason why you don't want to have these because they could be unsafe. Like you clip it in and you can largely if it's the automaker manufactured one not on clip it while you're charging. You're not going to get an electric shot. But if you buy one of the cheap ones online, it doesn't have the safety catch and somebody might get electrocuted. So there's all of these things coming out of it that are just not not exactly ideal. So it isn't like a
straight switch. Some of these are saying we're going to adopt this in two years on our vehicles, So it doesn't give the best gloss for the OEMs.
Now you mentioned CCS, No, Ryan, this just shows me that you have been working in the electric Vehicle team for a very very long time because CCS means something a little different to many of us at BNEF. What does CCS mean to you in this car text?
So I think the acronym is combined charging system. But essentially you can think of it if you go from a europe or to the US, or US to Europe. It's just a slightly different connector standard in terms of how the pins look and then maybe some of the actual software and communications behind it. So moving over to Tesla, once it works perfectly today you plug a Tesla into a Tesla supercharger. If you actually with one of these other OEMs, there isn't any real guarantee that it's going
to fully work. Are they going to be able to implement it the same? Are they going to want to implement it the same? So the problem for the other OEMs is you buy a Volkswagon and you go and charge somewhere it doesn't work. It's because everybody's using the same thing. They maybe not implemented the standard correctly, or they've all implemented it slightly different. And whilst the gloss of what Tesla is doing is there and like this ultimate oh, it's going to be the same pinnacle, the
same experience. I have to admit there's a bit of pessimism from me as to whether that will actually be the case when these other charge manufacturers go And Corey was maybe more in the detail on this, but there's a series on Charge TV, which is like a magazine. Somebody's gone out and they're discussing four part series on
this experience. They've gone out and they've interviewed a lot of people, and when you look in some of those details, it almost seemed like top down they decided at exec level, we're going to move to the Tesla charging connector, and some of the engineers maybe didn't quite know. And nobody's going to come out and say that full well, but that there was like a little bit of that appearing in the text and the sentiment of those articles.
Well, because this is why I keep harping on about when the dates were that these agreements were made, and GM and Ford were fairly recent, but perhaps the other
companies were quite a bit before that. And then I mean, maybe you can answer that question for me, because the reason I am fixated on is the fact that I did not see anything other than a Tesla on a Tesla supercharger, and trust me, I went to quite a few of them over the course of three weeks and I'm thinking maybe the owners of these other cars just don't know, or as you're inferring, maybe the experience isn't as seamless as we might think it will be.
Oh, so it was Ford was first. I must have been May, mid May, back end of May. That then GM in the June, I think, and then all of these other ones then followed over the preceding weeks.
So this is really extremely recent.
Yeah, extremely recent. So none of these are the cars. They've all still got the CCS connector. There's probably no adapters that you can buy yet, so they physically probably can't many of them go Some of the charger manufacturers have put Tesla's connector on the thing, so you went to a charge point one, it might now have the Tesla or Next connector as it's called.
So now when I go home next summer, it might be a very different experience, and I might be waiting in the queue for other cars to get off of these chargers, because that does happen when they get completely flooded. You have to kind of sit there and wait five minutes for somebody else to vacate the charger.
Yeah, and one of the things of this deal that didn't get well highlighted was that they only actually access twelve thousand of the superchargers and there's nineteen thousand in the system. So they're actually doing a little bit of probably analysis to say which ones have low utilization and can take other people, which one of the premium locations for Tesla drivers that we want to keep, So they're not giving access to everything. Now.
I want to talk about this in terms of profitability because when I thought about chargers a couple of years ago was when Tesla was initially launching this exclusive network. In many respects, I think a lot of this were thinking about the chargers as a way to facilitate Tesla ownership and that they themselves were not the business. But clearly, if Tesla's out there now selling the superchargers, it's not
an exclusive use situation anymore. And this begs the question what are the margins like for these chargers and are these themselves a business in their own right? And is the game really very much changed to being about cars and charging rather than focus specifically on selling the vehicles.
I mean, in one of the tweets Musk did, he said it was about we're not looking to make much profitabilities about ten percent margin we're looking for. Some of the companies are now if you look across Europe or Lego is one that is on the stock exchanges, and they do fast charging, and that's one of the main things they're now aiming at. They're saying, we can pay back these chargers in four years and the IRR can be twenty five percent. So certainly there's glimpses of it.
In BP's investor presentation recently, maybe three weeks ago, Bernard Loney was saying that a bit DA positive for Germany and China. So there's certainly signs that this is going in the right direction. If you look at some of the charge point operators though, so eve Goo is one
in the US, they're selling electricity. They have made their revenues have grown quite a lot, but if you look at the percentage of revenues, they've had to move into the game instead of selling electricity, building the chargers for other people, So sixty six percent of their total revenues were actually instead of their original business model, we're going to sell electricity, they're now making most of their revenue from building chargers for other networks.
Oh well, okay, so now, Corey, you have this experience recently in California using the Tesla network in where it is actually most prevalent. Did you go to any other chargers?
No? And you know what, it's more so because it's so integrated into the car experience and knowing what you do as a US driver. I mean the number of newspaper articles that pop up on a monthly or quarterly basis saying Electrify America charger down or four out of five down. It just makes you now want to even
con h those options. And Tesla makes it really easy with the app integration, so much so that when we were talking about the NEV program before, part of NEV requires all of the other charging operators, the charge Point, ev GO, Electrifi America to kind of come together to
have a common app experience. Tesla was exempt from that requirement because when the Biden administration struck a deal with Musk to get those superchargers open that Ryan was talking about, they basically said, Tesla, you can kind of keep your own app and keep your own data to yourself. So no, it wasn't a consideration, and frankly, without being confident in
the uptime, it's hard to make that decision. My dad also drives or drives a Tesla for his day to day life, and it was hard to even direct him when he was in a bit of a charging desert towards one of those other charging companies, just because if they were down, he would be so far away from the supercharger that was likely to be up that he could be in some real ev related i'd say range danger.
So no data, it's really sticking with the Tesla network has worked out quite well here and so yeah, from my experience, I wasn't even looking at so use a kind of other adapter.
So we certainly expect to see some real enhancements to the I guess guiding one two a charger and actual real time information regarding what's available, what's working, and what's not in the near term in order to facilitate I
guess the wider rollout. Does that then mean that that's going to provide an advantage to some of these other networks, or do we think that because Tesla's so far ahead, and now you're indicating that so many companies are actually jumping on to this particular existing network, that really that's the one most poised to expand.
It's not like Tesla's. It's a integration with these vehicles moving forward is going to be seamless. I mean, when you're operating the supercharger network to date, there's been four different vehicle models that they've had to work on, and you know, we're all still waiting for the cyber truck
to see if that's able to work seamlessly. Now, when you're talking about dozens of different models from different automakers before you're even getting to be adapter that Ryan mentioned, let's say we're you know, a year and a half, two years from now, that's still a lot for an
opt or to manage. On the other hand, when it comes to the competitors, and we could jump into the joint venture that was announced the joint Consortium of seven auto makers, at some point there just isn't kind of a clear game plan for how these guys are going to even kind of claim the number two spot in America. At least on my end, I could say there's definitely
a lot of charging need here. So while Tesla's probably growing stronger with a lot of these announcements, it's not a done deal that they'll be the only large charging network provider here. But on the other hand, at this early point, it's hard to say that you can jump on bandwagon of another charging infratructure operator to say that they will learn from the early stage and be able to take advantage of the market as it grows here.
So the US manufacturers have formed a consortium recently, so they're saying we're going to build thirty thousand charges, which is the biggest announcement we've seen. That will put them in a strong position. But then the question comes can they deliver that? Can they deliver what they've got? Can you go from a standing start to being something producing tas been doing this for probably I don't know what it was, twenty twelve, something like that, So delivering it
is difficult. Having the sites is difficult, getting the grid connections. As a kind of high level point, we don't know whether we're going from a position of this really reducing in costs significantly over time, because the key pieces of land might go, the good grid connections may go. What Tesla has that we've not discussed. There's low costs of hardware, and we've seen that come out in some of the Nevy grants. So that five states I think have been awarded.
We'd already analyzed this last year in our kind of charger survey. Most people are somewhere between one hundred and twenty and two hundred thousand dollars per connector on kind of a project level, and Tesla seemed down at like forty thousand. I was reading one today that said seventeen thousand per connector. So they're able to do this much cheaper.
Some of that is, I think the hardware production scale, and some of it I think is things like they're prefabricating the chargers, they're putting it like a big block of them in one go.
What are the companies that are essentially trying to pose competition for the incumbent?
So that deal and Corey, you might be able to correct me if I'm wrong, basically includes most of those in Ionity, so being able to be HYONDI Mercedes, Stalantis GM. It's maybe interesting in a way of who's not in it because Ford and Volkswagen are not in it, so Ford is not so obvious. Volkswagen have Electrify America, so maybe they're saying we don't want to fund the like another network we've already got on.
Network, so there's a third network. So essentially you would need to in some way well be allowed to use each of these three networks if you wanted to have one complete network that would enable you to avoid charging deserts. And I think this is one of the things that really differs from when you think about petrol stations, where essentially, not only are they everywhere, but more importantly, you can
go to anyone and anyone will take your money. Do we foresee a future in the US where these different networks, at least on a page you go basis, will be available to anybody with an electric vehicle or is it going to still continue to be quite restricted by brand to charger type.
That's what the Biden administration hopes, right. A lot of these heavy grant requirements is aiming for interoperability, and Ryan, to your point, we're only talking about two to three different charger types, right. We've talked to at CCS, and next there's an older version here called Chadmo, which is really only used by Nissan. So the networks are kind of I like to think of them as maybe gas
station companies or petrol station companies. It doesn't mean that the same EV can't work if they have a NAX connector available. But I think the bigger question around kind of these competitors that Ryan just got to is, is this new kind of joint consort SIAM going to be on the level of getting that land because right announce
spencer nice, but building EV chargers is more difficult. And now when you're seeing these really low Tesla bids, even if you're a state using nev funding attempting to kind of have a diversity of chargers, if Tesla is able to do, it's so much cheaper and they keep on winning these grants, they're going to only continue to gain more of that market power. But at least from a conceptual standpoint, if there's two or three or four big charging networks here in the US, that'd probably be a
good thing for consumers. It's less of a tech problem and more of a you know, making a profit and competitive advantage issue.
So you mentioned Electrify America, which is one of the larger US electric vehicle charging companies, but there has been some scrutiny recently over some of these failings. You referenced broken chargers showing up and things not quite working. So paint a picture in my mind of what exactly is going on there.
So I think there's two dynamics, one that is maybe less talked about and one that is a bit more of it. So one of them is that you've got all of these different vehicle manufacturers trying to work with one charger network rolling out. Then the technical standards are not working, some of them are turning off. Maybe you could argue this is like a separate side business of VW and they're not so interested in it. Fundamentally, this was legislated that because of diesel Gate, they had to
own this business. Even from there you could say, well, why wasn't the money given to other people? Why did it VW get to spend it themselves. They then had this kind of arguably strategic advantage. Then you've got the
like press versus reality side of it. So if you look at the statistics, in twenty twenty one, they delivered forty one gig what hours of energy and in twenty twenty two they'd delivered one hundred and seventy three gig what hours of energy, So there are actually delivering much more energy people are whilst they're all we hear about is failures they're delivering a lot of stuff, but no doubt there is a lot of talk about how bad
the situation is and that it never works. And I think that's led to a lot of the car manufacturers basically saying we're kind of annoyed behind the scenes at VW and maybe fed into this other network that they've the joint venture that's come together.
And you said, VW has this network because of diesel Gate, And first of all, explain what diesel gate is for those of us who have a short corporate memory. And secondly, why because of diesel Gate.
I'll give a short answer, and I'm sure Corey knows all of the details. But basically, diesel gate, they put devices on the cars that would perform in the test runs when you go out to see what emissions the car were giving, and they give a low score, and it was actually found in the wild that they were giving much more higher emissions. And therefore governments realized this and they said, well that's not correct, and they find them a lot of money.
So in the US there's a lot of guessoline over a diesel. But there was a part of the I think global Volkswagen issues with emissions testing in the Environmental Protection Agency back in about twenty fifteen called them out
on them and successfully negotiate the settlement. So, in terms of context of why this was happening and why not giving it to a bunch of charging companies, Tesla was an existing company at that point, But going back to twenty fifteen, evs were just a trickle in the bucket, and so what the EPA at the time was thinking is they did something bad, We're going to have them put the money towards funding things like charging infrastructure, maybe some school buses or buses to do something good right,
to kind of build out the network of the future. What's interesting is we've been talking a lot about NEV. Two billion dollars is one third of the NEV program just about and you could see maybe money doesn't go as far as it should. Volts Wagon I think Ryan, you're right that there is definitely a partier maybe reality
than the statistics show. And in that charge that EV magazine piece, which is by John Volker, a lot of the conversation in his piece is around the frustration they had there with electric fire a market in particular, just because they had such a long lead up time and it's even rubbed off to some extent on the other EV charging companies, even if it's not necessarily their fault.
What I'd say from an analyst perspective, and I think it'd be great for where both my team and Ryans seem to have more of this information, is just more transparent data on uptime. I think that's been a frustration for a lot of researchers in the US to get a sense of are things really as bad as news
reports say. Unfortunately, Electrified America in particular has been pretty protective of their data, you know, understandable in some ways because it's their customers, but to combat that narrative, and so when these Tesla announcements have been happening around automaker switching to next, there hasn't even been much of a
pushback from some of the CCS companies. If anything, they've said, okay, we'll just add a connector, as opposed to saying, well, the reality is CCS does provide some good benefits, in particular around vehicle to grid. Tesla says their chargers can do it, but we haven't really seen it to date. And in some of that three hundred and fifty kW charging that for example, the high end Dionic five uses Tesla says their V four of their supercharger, we'll be
able to do that. But again, a lot of this is depending on Tesla, and so you haven't even seen the CCS. Folks make the arguments that many of the cool ev technologies are built around ccs or CCS two in Europe PR battle.
It's almost like Tesla obviously wants you to think it's the best connector. It's this, that and the other. They've literally got Mary Barr saying it's a lighter connector, it's even better. After what was it five maybe what six years of them saying they're using ccs, they're just like totally bowing to Tesla. Yet you then look at the other side of the story and you think, well, why was elected fire America not out there with four times more energy distributed in one year and that all of
these good things. And I think there is a little bit of like the PR play and that obviously for Tesla. Now they've got all these automakers on their system, that system goes through standards that they want. They're going to their chargers. What if they said, oh, well, to use those twelve thousand chargers. Now you've got to pay a bigger deal in five years time. Like, we don't know the terms of those deals, but certainly seems quite quite strong for them. And it's not just the automakers that
are slightly worried about that. If you're a charging operator and you've decided to put the Tesla connector in what Tesla then say, oh, to use our connector. Now you have to pay some more money as well. So people are a bit unsure. But for Tesla, that was it was like a month or two months of just like positive news on everybody bow and all of a sudden they're in this dominant position. But there's a reason why the Toyota's Dealantis's high ond ikeas have not gone to
that way. Although when you read the news you might think everybody has the realities, they haven't.
One thing. I'll just say to give Tesla a little bit of credit and not just say that they're completely, not completely just pushing this on everyone. They have been working with the US Department of Energy and Transportation's Joint Office to basically work on sandradization through an organization known as SAE International. So they're charging Department of Engineers at
TESLA are doing a lot of the right things. This standardization process is expected to take through the rest of this year, which is on the expedited process that began in June. So assuming they dot the i's and cross the t's correctly, there is a lot of smart maneuvering the Tesla's doing. And want to at least say this isn't just completely at the you know, Elon tweeted it out and it's it's only happening via tweet. We don't
know what the contracts look like. And to Ryan's point, there is a lot of uncertainty in the space, but there is a really good charging in for structured division at TESLA, and they are going through the motions on a lot of the correct standards. Assuming that these processes are complete, I think to your point, Ryan, there's been almost too many news reports that says this is going to be super easy, this is only going to be a plus for the US consumer immediately, and I think
the reality is kind of somewhere in between. It has a lot of upside to make the US have a better charging network, but it's not a simple light switch that all the automakers are going to flip and that Tesla's going to necessarily play ball on everything. So I think you never want to give an answer where it's really uncertain. But I think the next six months are
going to determine how smoothly this goes. And then really it might take a full year until you're getting the model year twenty twenty five cars to even see really how successful is this rollout. And one last thing, I'll say that Ryan, maybe you've heard differently, but a lot of automakers when you ask them over here, are you just going to have a NAXT connector on your model twenty five cars or if you're going to have both CCS and next and they won't give a straight answer.
So even the automakers who have made the Tesla switch announcement having come out and said, you know, are we fully moving away from from ccs or are we going to kind of straddle a middle line? And so again, if I'm a consumer, you want to be patient. If you're buying a non Tesla car.
Wow, six months is not that long, but certainly you have So we've got automakers banding together trying to solve the solution by making let's say alliances with one another, and then the NEVY to stimulate some of the growth here in the federal government then looking to essentially see this through, to see this network become more robust, and
to really facilitate that change to electric vehicles. What then, is the role of state governments and have they been more of a facilitator or hindrance into some of this roll out across different parts of the US.
I think the state governments outside of California, they're very early on the EV trajectory. I mentioned the state EV market note that I've been working on, and you do have some states that are beginning to break through with their electric vehicle share of new car sales, which is an early indicator of how EV markets are changing. So places like Colorado, Nevada, I got to plug, my home
state of New Jersey are all doing quite well. And again, each state can be as large as some European countries, so it's not necessarily easy to do this for the first time. They've all submitted their plans for NEVY as of last year, and to Ryan's point, they're working on proposals now to get the charging companies that will eventually put up the chargers at their sites. I think ultimately the state governments are going to be helpful, but right now things are moving slower than I'm sure a lot
of EV consumers would want. I think the most important thing is less speed and more making sure that they've done it right. And frankly, the CCS and NACT kind of conundrum here has added another layer of complexity for these state governments to have to grapple with. I'll give you an example. So some states like Texas are now requiring Tesla's NAXT connector to be built on every NEVY funded charging site in the state of Texas. There are
some other states that are doing that as well. And so what that means is, if you're a charging infrastructure operator and you want to build in Texas, you have an additional requirement on top of all of the national requirements to boost Tesla's standing. Not necessarily because Texas houses Tesla. There might be a part of it the Austin factories there. But states don't have an easy job figuring out how
to navigate this. They do have a lot of federal resources and there's a ton of money, but they have to really make sure that this isn't a boondoggle. So I think the way they're going about this is taking their time to do this right as opposed to maybe speed. The law passed almost two years ago now, and we haven't seen really any chargers built, and.
You're saying that you expect to see things. Really I guess the dust is settle over the next six miths a twelve months. But what are the longer term Biden administration goals that are expected to outlive his administration? Perhaps you know what is it that they're actually shooting for with some of the different stimulus that they're looking at in this space.
By the administration for a long time has had a target of five hundred thousand V charging connectors by the end of the decade. Whether that's the stations themselves or the connectors. I've heard more on the connector's side, but that's a bit of a vageity there. In terms of the actual EV ship of sales, they had an executive order aiming for about fifty percent EV share of sale by twenty thirty and here at BNEF when we have our long term outlook, we expect they'll be able to
meet that target. And again they've put billions of dollars towards this electric vehicle transition from not just the charging side we've been talking a lot about, but also billions of dollars in electric vehicle tax credits. Just a couple of weeks ago, there was an announcement about fifteen billion dollars in EV manufacturing and retooling grants. So even outside of charging world that we spent a lot of time on today, the Biden administration is all in on kind
of fostering this EV growth. But again, when we're talking to not just auto companies and other stakeholders, but consumers, charging anxiety remains one of the main obstacles here. It's no longer the models themselves, or even the prices of some of these models, while still high, is more in line with the average car press for new vehicles. Charging is a pretty big hurdle.
I think that the if you think about our research, so the five hundred K target, I think is a great example of a politician setting something that they're easily going to meet. We think somewhere more like two million charges by the twenty thirty deadline that they're talking about. If you reflect that back to some of the conversation that we've had so far, we're saying there's thirty thousand today,
So whils we're saying Tesla is doing amazing. There is actually a big gap for other people in this next eight years which can be filled by those automakers and other people in Europe. We just see so many players and they're not quite in the US yet. So BP saying they're going to spend a billion in the US. SHELL have acquired a couple of companies and we'd expect them to come in as well. A little bit different where in EU you get a lot of utilities involved.
Not necessarily as easy for the utilities due to the structure of them in the US to be quite as involved. But overall, what I'd say is you've gone from a position in the US with limited momentum. There's not been the right regulation. The IRA has come in, and then these other people have decided, do you know what, Actually there's going to be a market for evs. We didn't
really believe it before, but now we believe it. It's like the Trump administration to the Biden, the IRA money then coming in, and nothing really shows it more than those automakers coming together six years after they realized they're going to have to do this in Europe. They've then done it in America. Like, really, they'd come to this conclusion in Europe six years ago and it's taken them that long to go Okay, well, really is real. The
US market is kind of evolving. Whether we're going to meet these targets has many dependencies, and one of the biggest ones you hear across the world is the grids. Can you build the grid to do so? And some of the regulators and energy commissions will have to focus on that area to get this going.
And certainly the necessity for a robust grid is something that we addressed in a show just a couple of weeks back. So it does underpin so much of the transition in the energy industry. And then you're in electric vehicles, so I think that actually, Corey, when you were talking a second ago, you referred to it as a potential boondoggle. And here's to hoping that when the dust settles, this
will be a much more robust charging network. For anybody out there who really wants to understand why people are so excited about superchargers and why they are such a point of reference, I will say that my personal experience of you know, spending nearly a month renting a car and then doing a road trip and trying to make it happen will certainly bring to light why thing that so many of us who are looking at this transition and actively engaged in it, see these solutions as something
that they're certainly interested in watching very closely because it facilitates how you build your Saturday, or build your road trip and live your life. So it's really interesting to see from your research that you think that there's a lot to gain and that there's a gap between these targets and where it is will actually end up. And so I would say I've got maybe the one thing that each of you are watching most closely. So I'm watching which percentage of these chargers are actually going to
end up being superchargers. What will be the one thing that you're most intrigued by at this point in time and kind of keeping your ear to the ground where you don't know if there is an answer yet.
How many charges actually go in from each of these companies saying they going to put charges in?
Oh right, And I think for me, I'm most curious to see if Tesla successfully finishes that certification process without any hiccups. And if automakers fully switch with only a NAX connector and once they're moving away from adapters, or if they choose to both live in CCS world and knocks at the same time by even having two adapters on each vehicle, both are potential pathways for them to take. But I'm curious to see if they're really all in on TESLA.
All right, well, let's keep an eye on all of the above. Thanks for joining today, Thanks Dana, Thanks Tana. Bloomberg NEF is a service provided by Bloomberg Finance LP in its affiliates. This recording does not constitute, nor should it be construed as investment advice, investment recommendations, or a recommendation as to an investment or other strategy. Bloomberg n EF should not be considered as information sufficient upon which
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