Elon Musk has confirmed what the Tesla support pages had already hinted at: the company’s new vehicles will be delivered to their owners without the universal mobile chargersomething that the brand had been doing for years with each model that left its factories.
The charger in question It has quite limited features.. According to the support manual Tesla, is capable of delivering just under 3 kW of power when plugged into a plug schuko, widely used in Europe. This means that, to load the Model 3 with the smaller battery, you would need almost a whole day.
Why does Tesla offer a charger with such features? Simple: it is designed for specific cases in which a faster solution is not possible. For example: you go on a spiritual retreat for a week to a rural house, lost in the middle of the mountains, where it is impossible to find an electric car charger relatively close.
But why does Tesla’s decision make sense?
The three most common recharging methods for an electric car are the following:
- When the car is parked in the garage of your habitual residence, you connect it to the current using the wall charger that Tesla sells separately – known as wall charger– or using one from another company –such as Wallbox– that is compatible with the standard. These types of solutions are usually capable of fully charging the car battery overnight.
- When you are traveling – or if you find it impossible to install a charger at home – you turn to high-speed charging points. These, in about 30 minutes, can raise the battery charge level from 10 to 80%. And, by the way, the number of chargers of this speed is increasing significantly throughout the European geography.
- When you go to places like shopping malls, car parks or hotels that have recharging points –sometimes free–. You use them to get some electric juice while the vehicle is parked. They are known as destination charging points.
Given these three options, the number of times the owner of a Tesla ends up resorting to the aforementioned portable charger ends up being quite small, because you have more efficient solutions at your disposal almost all the time. And as the infrastructure increases, the cases in which it is needed are reduced more and more.
A reality that Elon Musk himself has confirmed on Twitter referring to internal company data. “Usage stats were super low, so it seemed like a waste,” he said.
And yes, from the point of view of the owner, it is normal to think that it would not hurt to include an accessory like this considering that the price of a Tesla exceeds 50,000 euros. But the company evaluates these decisions from a business point of view. And, from that prism, there is no point in continuing to give away an accessory that your customers barely use for free and, except in extremely specific cases, it does not affect the operation of your vehicles at all, so it is 100% expendable.
How much it costs Tesla to make such a charger is a mystery. But, whatever the number, we must multiply it by the total number of vehicles that the brand manufactures each year. In 2021, it was almost a million units. Therefore, reduce the production cost of each vehicle by $100 –assuming that this is the manufacturing price of the aforementioned charger– would result in a saving of about 100 million dollars each year.
If you add those figures to the usage statistics referenced by Elon Musk, it makes perfect sense for the company to make a decision like this. The impact on the experience of your customers is practically nil but the company instead saves several million dollars.
To compensate for this movement, Elon Musk ad that Tesla will lower the price of the portable charger to 200 dollars and will include more adapters in the package. In this way, those who urgently need a product like this for those very particular use cases, will be able to acquire it without problems.