Startup Request: Tesla SuperCharger adapter
I drive a BMW i3 with a range extender, so I can personally attest to how difficult it can be to get anywhere far if you can’t recharge before heading back. My range is 75 electric miles plus maybe 50 on gas, but if you’re using heat in your car and driving on the highway, your electric range can plummet to 45 miles. From Boston, NYC is out of the question, Cape Cod is too far, and Woods Hole, the port to Martha’s Vineyard, is almost possible, but too risky getting back without a recharge. I can make it to Providence if I rely on charge plus my 1.9 gallon gas tank, and charge the car for several hours before heading back.
My car can’t plug into all fast charging stations, and I can’t use the Tesla Supercharger station that I jealously eye on the way to Vermont (in a gas car). Even with careful trip planning, it’s hard to know which kind of stations are where, how long it’ll take to charge, and how fast my charge will drain on drives. And I’m not the only one struggling with this — across the board, multiple fast charging protocols create a major pain point for the electric vehicle industry.
Here’s Tesla’s SuperCharger footprint in the northeast. These stations only supports Tesla cars.
On the other hand, see below for stations for electric vehicle owners in the northeast. What you really want, if you’re trying to take your electric vehicle further than home to work, are the DC fast charge stations. But those orange stations on the map don’t support every electric car. The chart on the right shows the variety in stations being installed.
The number of charging devices and their specifications is incredibly complicated, so for the sake of simplicity let’s discuss the three most common in the U.S. under the “DC Fast charging” label : CHAdeMO, ComboCharging System (CCS), and the Tesla Supercharger. Cars have the chargers, and the charging stations have ports. Converting your car’s charger to fit a different port is next to impossible, and analysts predict that all three kinds are likely to coexist in the U.S. indefinitely.
Tesla actually makes a device (~$450 or $2,000 depending on the vehicle) to let its drivers’ Tesla car chargers adapt to CHAdeMO charging station ports (CHADdeMO chargers come on Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Kia), but Tesla doesn’t yet sell anything that would allow owners of other manufacturers’ cars to recharge at a SuperCharger station.
If you wanted to make an adapter, you could certainly aim to create an adapter for use between CHAdeMO and CCS stations, but the trend has been for newly deployed stations to support both. So if you had a CHAdeMO charger car, and pulled up to a new port, it will be more likely to have an option to support your recharge, and you wouldn’t need an adapter very often.
With the growth of the SuperCharger network and the need for fast charging for electric vehicles to be able to go longer distances, what’s really needed is an adapter from CCS/CHAdeMO cars (i.e. cars manufactured by companies other than Tesla) to the SuperCharger ports.
To want to build this, you’d have to be willing to bet on Tesla getting really serious about building SuperCharger stations, and you’d need to believe that a substantial volume of electric vehicles will continue to be sold by other manufacturers.
You’d also need to be okay with the idea that Tesla may themselves develop an adapter that lets cars from other manufacturers use SuperChargers. But here’s the catch: if you can sell an adapter for less than Tesla does, you could still dominate this market. And because all Tesla patents are public as of 2014, no patent lawsuits would occur from Tesla’s side — Elon Musk promised.
One comparison to creating this kind of adapter is off-label iPhone chargers — the kind you see at drug stores at check-out. The cable costs $25 from Apple, and about $5 at Walgreens. Sure, one’s branded, but at a much lower price point, the Walgreen’s cord still sells.
If Tesla’s adapter for other manufacturers to use SuperCharger stations cost anything close to $450/$2,000, I wouldn’t have been a customer. But at a $100–200 price point, I would definitely buy an adapter.
From a design perspective, the adapter would be pretty basic — it would need two pins for the DC power supply, which would “pass straight through from input socket to output connector, and with a contactor in the middle to disconnect when needed.”
An adapter for use at SuperCharger stations would need to regulate charge to avoid feeding too much charge to the wrong kind of vehicle. Most utility companies think 50KW devices are the most appropriate power level, but the SuperCharger can charge at up to 120KW. If you had difficulties with this aspect of the adapter, you could always reference Tesla’s design (waiting to imitate theirs rather than creating your own).
So that’s my startup request — make a reasonably priced adapter that electric car drivers (other than Tesla drivers) could buy to use the Supercharger network. At the very least, once you had a VC-backed startup in the electric car/energy world, you could top charts for the number of abbreviations you’d use per conversation :)
