Tesla faces a $7.5 billion ultimatum: The company’s decision to begin opening up chargers to competition

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As many of us know a recent announcement from the White House shows increased partnership with EV companies to push deployment of EV charging infrastructure. Tesla, which has been left out of many government EV meetings and plans, and which runs its own charging network (which are exclusive to Tesla) has more stalls than the other charging networks combined, by a lot.

Tesla has been facing increased pressure to begin sharing this network, or the company may find itself locked out of $7.5 billion in Biden administration subsidies. After a few days of silence a decision has been reached in the short term.

The announcement states Tesla will open a small fraction of its charging stalls to non-Tesla cars, which use the CCS charging plug used by all cars except Teslas, the Nissan Leaf and a few legacy cars. (However, there are only about 1/3rd as many CCS cars on the roads as there are Teslas.) Because Teslas can use the CCS network with an adapter whose price was just lowered to $175, they have access to around 28,000 stalls, while CCS cars have about 12,000 stalls with a reputation for low reliability. The details around this announcement are quite complex:

• Tesla and the White House announced that 7,500 Tesla chargers would become available to non-Tesla cars. That only includes 3,500 Tesla Supercharger stalls over the next two years, as Tesla doubles that network to 34,000 Superchargers. As such, CCS drivers will only get to use just over 10% of the Tesla chargers.
• The other opened stations are 4,000 of Tesla’s 35,000 lower-speed Destination chargers found at many hotels because Tesla gave them away to thousands of hotels. Drivers of other cars can already use these with a $150 adapter. Indeed, this probably just means Tesla will provide these adapters to some of the hotels.

Tesla Stock has jumped 1.77% on the news, despite extreme sell pressure that has impacted the technology sector over the last week. After a renewed wave of analyst predictions, Tesla forecasts are as high as $525 per share despite the looming recession.