Electric Vehicles

This is an incredibly lazy take from Politico. It's late so I'll just do a brain dump on things to consider. The last year has been very rocky for EV charging in the US.

1. Tesla had, so far, outbuilt every other DCFC network combined and out-sold every other EV carmaker, combined. This put a lot of very weird tension on the process.
2. Draft rulemaking from FWHA in 2022/early 2023 was only considering CCS as a funded connector.
3. November 2022, Tesla threw a grenade, opened up their connector as NACS, and claimed it could support CCS signalling. Aptera joined as the second NACS adoptee so maybe NACS technically isn't proprietary since it's now on more than 1 brand? Realistically though, nobody cared.
4. March 2023, FWHA's guidance drops. It standardizes CCS as the main connector to deploy, but optionally allows the deployment of "proprietary" connectors as long as the CCS requirement is met. By/around this point, some states like Texas and Washington decided they wanted to solicit bids for both CCS+NACS. Other states reasonably started this process only considering CCS.
5. May 2023, Ford surprises everyone by being the first important not-Tesla carmaker to adopt NACS.
6. In the background, several states were starting the process of planning locations and soliciting bids. CCS was pretty much still the primary consideration at this point when it came to figuring out equipment vendors.
7. June, July, August rolls by. More carmakers switch to NACS.
8. States are faced with having to figure out what to do with the bid process. Stick with the bid solicitation for CCS, or amend for CCS+NACS now that almost everyone's jumped over? Will the equipment vendors in some bids support NACS? Are they stuck on CCS? Is this even something some places are even aware is happening (lol)
9. It's now Sept/Oct. The CCS rule is silly at this point because in 16 months, cars will start shipping with native NACS connectors, and this equipment is supposed to last 5+ years. Will all DCFC makers support a cable swap from CCS to NACS? Would a cable swap even be permitted with NEVI funds?

For much of this year we didn't have a solid answer about which connector was going to work, nor did we have much information about what the DCFC makers were going to do. We didn't really have a clear idea that cable swaps would be possible for a long while either.

For all the chaos above, the major slowness in this process is that some states are trying to plan for reasonably fair coverage in charger placement, and making sure they pick the correct places on travel corridors to invest NEVI funds in. A lot of work is needed to ensure that more than just the wealthy/populated areas would get chargers. For example, Virginia took several months just on this, and I appreciate it. I'd rather them take a few extra months to work out placement and consideration for supporting the general population than just the places with money.

I want to see this money create the best competitor against Tesla's Supercharger network, not rush to become the next Electrify America.