Tesla has agreed to open its US electric vehicle charging network to owners of rival models in a surprise move yesterday.
In a deal announced jointly with the White House, Tesla said it would open at least 7,500 of its charging points to all users by the end of 2024.
At present, non-Tesla owners have to buy an adapter, but US President Joe Biden said that the move by Elon Musk's company was a 'big deal' and would make a big difference to plans to establish a charging infrastructure network across the country.
Joe Biden wants the US to have 500,000 roadside EV chargers and another 60,000 charging stations by 2030, though the ultimate total will be around 2mln experts predict.
The US is backing up its plans with hefty sums of public money including US$7.5bn allocated to charging in the 2021 Infrastructure Act.
Other car makers are working with the US government to build more charging points including General Motors and Mercedes, while BP has announced two major charging acquisitions in the past 24 hours.
Last night the UK oil and gas giant unveiled a tie-up with hire car group Hertz covering a dozen US cities.
Today, it followed that with an agreement to buy truckstop owner TravelCenters of America for US$1.3bn.
At present, BP has around 22,000 EV charge points worldwide and it expects to grow the total to over 100,000 by the end of the decade.
Konrad Sippel, Head of Research at Solactive, which runs EV charging ETF ELEC, said: "The Tesla announcement to open parts of its supercharger network in the US to other EVs shows that availability of charging infrastructure remains a critical point in EV adoption in general.”
He adds that Tesla is probably willing to give up its current competitive advantage because of the numbers involved.
"The White House announcement talks about at least 7,500 Tesla chargers to be made available to all EVs. And while that number sounds big, it merely represents a drop in the ocean compared to the over two million new public fast chargers that will need to be installed in the US to sustain an estimated 20 million EVs on the roads by 2030.
"If we assume that Tesla aims to command a dominant share of that market, … it would have to install hundreds of thousands of new chargers and find the respective real estate to place them.
"Instead, Tesla and other manufacturers invest in a uniform charging infrastructure to be built up by the dedicated players in the EV charging industry."