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garlicroastedpotato t1_j8o9t0k wrote

Look, I don't own a Tesla but I know people own one. So this is entirely a strawman argument which hasn't been built up to be beaten but built up to try and represent their stance... which has flaws (hence strawman).

People who own Teslas believe that the company Tesla (and many believe specifically Elon Musk) is on the cusp of something great and an ever evolving company that will resolve all world problems through innovation. In just a short time Tesla has flown a car in space (wait that's Space-X), they've gotten men on Mars (wait... that hasn't happened yet), they've rescued children from a cave using a cool sub and owned a pedo over Twitter (wait... still not that company) and they've saved freedom on social media by liberating Twitter from corporate government lackies (oh gawd).

Tesla is a company that just always appears to come out with a new amazing life changing product every single six months. They had flamethrowers, home battery charging, solar roof panels (I'm pretty sure that's a different company sir!), full self driving, driver assist, all that cool TV stuff in your car, and no more dealers.

So it just seems like, if there's a company out there that's going to make the world better, it's going to be Tesla.

Now if you're a social Democrat you broadly hate unconstrained capitalism and if you're a Republican or libertarian you worry about surrendering to the authority of corporations and technology. These two forces come together to regulate innovation... and they do a very bad job at it. In the United States, Democrats will create a large number of procedural rules on regulatory organizations in order to create regulations that constrain innovation. The Republicans use these procedural rules to stall developments and block innovations.

So if today we said that USB-C is going to be the international standard for cord charging... that's going to be the standard forever. We'll be stuck with it forever. The countries and regions that locked in an electricity standard the latest have the more efficient electrical grids and more efficient plug ins. Companies could make them more efficient than they are.... but government regulation stops them from doing so. Similarly... baby food in the US can only be made by a couple of companies because regulations make it impossible to get a new baby food approved.

This is really the problem for these chargers. You make all chargers standard so they're universal to all cars to allow for faster growth in EVs... but then you'll be stuck with this technology forever. A technology eventually hits an end where you've maximized its output before you need to really start with a new curve. Something like ChatGPT is at the mid range of that curve.... still room to grow. Our electrical grid is at the end of it, it can't be improved anymore... we fundamentally need to make major changes in conductivity of power. The standard of charge can be improved a bit based on the change... but if some young inventor comes along and invents a better way of using it... we can't do that. Tesla has improved its charge ability a lot over the years and done recalls to make changes to allow for this kind of charging.

The other problem is money. When you buy a Tesla you're getting with it a subsidized rate.... in that Tesla doesn't profit off of their power.... only their vehicles. The superchargers were a huge loser for Tesla... which is why they slowed down the creation of their national network. But hypothetically if they're opened to everyone it also means that everyone gets the same rate (their are laws preventing preferential pricing in this manner). It means that the price of charging off of these things goes up to market rate.

It's kind of like how women are net benefactors of men paying more money on auto insurance. Most women don't actually want equality when it goes the other way. They're not willing to have their insurance rates go up in order for men to pay a fair price.

So yeah, tl;dr

Innovation concerns and price.

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