“Demand in our footprint just isn’t there quite yet,” President and CEO Darren Rebelez said during a Q&A session after announcing earnings results. “We’re taking a measured approach in terms of having chargers and being able to understand the consumer dynamic around the charging experience. … We don’t want to get too aggressive on the investment side because we believe that the charging technology will continue to evolve over time, as it has already.
In short, it sounds like the company wants to hold off for now and wait for the technology to improve instead of investing in today’s charging technology.Before I get to why I think this isn’t the right call, I’d like to be fair and provide some reasons that this could be a reasonable call for someone bound by fiduciary duty. I’ll shoot this down after, but I want to share what the company and others like it are probably thinking so we can all be on the same page.
Where’s CHAdeMO today? Basically dead. CHAdeMO cars will be able to charge at CCS/CHAdeMO stations until station owners wise up and replace the cords with NACS connectors to get more customers. CHAdeMO-only stations simply don’t see enough business today to stay afloat or get maintained. Many other CCS/CHAdeMO stations from this era that only provided 50 kW max experienced hardware failures and weren’t repaired.
First off, we’ve seen charging standards come together. CHAdeMO is about to no longer be a thing for new cars. CCS is going to be largely phased out starting next year as manufacturers switch to the NACS standard, based on Tesla’s connector. So, it’s now a very safe bet to build a station that charges NACS vehicles without needing to worry about NACS dying off and other standards taking over.