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Tesla Charging -VS- All Other Charging

Tesla charging is about as simple and easy as it gets. Here, we show a video comparing the difference.
Tesla Charging -VS- All Other Charging

Tesla Charging and All Others

When you see a side by side comparison of a Tesla Supercharger station against a competitor charging station, the difference is staggering. For the Tesla, the process is:

* Take the cable and plug it in to your Tesla vehicle

That's it. Your credit card and information are already hooked up via the Tesla app and there is nothing else to do.

For the Electrify America charger, here is what you must do:

* Grab the cable and plug it in
* With your phone, select your charger
* Swipe to initiate a charge
* Make sure the charger is actually charging

Most 3rd party chargers besides Tesla follow this same set of steps. Another challenge 3rd party chargers have is they are often down or not working. I've never seen a Tesla Supercharger not work when I've used it with my Model 3 RWD.

Other EV companies are going to need to make charging networks that are reliable and easy if they are going to compete with Tesla. Or, they are simply going to have to accept that their vehicles will have to use the Tesla Supercharger network.

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There is another problem with 3rd party chargers as well. In some cases, you plug in the cable first and then swipe your credit card. In other cases, you need to swipe your credit card first and then plug in the charging cable. That can get confusing.

Of course, this is sort of a non-issue if you charge at home every night. When you charge at night between the hours of 11 PM to 7 AM, electricity prices are much cheaper. If you plan on traveling or doing a road trip, then the charging network you use becomes critically important.

I think a 3rd party charger like Electrify America needs to simplify their process. You need to be able to hook up a credit card automatically and not need to swipe. Then, the charger needs to recognize that it is your car. This can be done by registering your car with Electrify America. This is what Tesla does. It knows your car and credit card and makes it simple.

Electrify America and other 3rd party charging networks also need to stay up and not have downtime. Tesla has the best engineers working for it and other 3rd party charging networks need to create the hardware and software to make their chargers up 100% of the time.

If 3rd party chargers can make their experience the same as Tesla and stay up, then they have a chance. However, they still have large and clunky CCS chargers, which are much more difficult to carry than Tesla's slim chargers. That's one advantage Tesla has that other 3rd party chargers should adopt. They should just adopt the Tesla charging standard. If I was making an EV company, I would have the same plug as Tesla's. Aptera should do this.

What do you think of this video comparing charging of Tesla and other 3rd party chargers? Is there anything else these 3rd party chargers can do to be as good as Tesla?

In Related News: Tesla Autopilot ranked 7th by Consumer Reports

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Jeremy Johnson is a Tesla investor and supporter. He first invested in Tesla in 2017 after years of following Elon Musk and admiring his work ethic and intelligence. Since then, he's become a Tesla bull, covering anything about Tesla he can find, while also dabbling in other electric vehicle companies. Jeremy covers Tesla developments at Torque News. You can follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn to stay in touch and follow his Tesla news coverage on Torque News.

Image Credit, Tesla, Screenshot

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