 Interesting story I bumped into today. I thought I thought was kind of curious, right? So there's there's a big deal now about electric vehicle charging stations, right? There are two standards for electric vehicle charges. Maybe you know this because you have an electric vehicle. One is NACS, the North American charging standard, which basically is the Tesla standard. And they called it the North American charging standard to kind of give it a kind of universal sense, but this is the Tesla standard. It's a standard by which the Tesla uses on all of its charging stations around the country for Tesla cars. And then there's a second one called the combined charging system. This is CCS. And CCS is kind of the non-Tesla charging stations, which I guess are different. They have a different plug and they have a different size and they're just they're just different. I'll give you some stats on them in a little bit. Anyway, the the the Biden administration in its I don't know what it was at the Inflation Reduction Act I think basically has launched a program to subsidize the creation of charging stations because you know we need to all be starting to drive electric cars. And to do that we need to be able to charge our cars. And to do that we need a network of charging stations. It's like we need a network of gas stations for gas cars. But of course we can't trust the private markets. Private markets will take forever. Private markets you know it'll be more expensive. Private markets won't know where to put the charging stations. We know that central planners and the governor are very very good at planning, very very good at deciding where to put the charging stations and how much to charge for them and what kind of standard to use and all of that. So the Biden administration has launched a campaign to fund and to subsidize charging stations all over the country. Make sure rural areas have charging stations. You don't make sure that you know make sure that you can lose money and still be okay. Which is basically what it is. Anyway, so in Tesla in the meantime is expanding its charging stations on the basis of the profit motive I guess and on the basis of providing its customers with available charging stations. And what's interesting is because Tesla has done so much and has produced so many charging stations. They have now signed a deal with both Ford and General Motors. Whereas Ford and General Motors will start using the Tesla charging stations and they'll be start using the North American charging standard. The standard developed by Tesla. So new Ford cars and new GM cars as my understanding goes will be using this new plug and this new system to charge their cars. Not up until now they've been using the combined charging system. The general charging system which is different than Tesla's. So Tesla's kind of selling this other automakers and trying to get them on board, trying to establish themselves as the standard. And it turns out by the way that if you own a car that charges in one way and you want to use a station to charge it the other way you just have to buy an adapter. The adapter can cost anywhere from $150 to $700. But you know it's not like you've just invested a huge amount of money in this car. It's not that big of a deal to buy an adapter so you have it in the back. So just in case you're stuck in a place that only has the other standard you can charge it's all doable. But you know it's a standard rule. It's a standard competition. Free markets are very good at this. And this is kind of standard to a lot of new technologies. Standards matter and therefore there's competition around the standards. Anyway the Biden administration announced today that they will start providing subsidies to Tesla charging stations. But only if they include the combined charging system. Not sure what exactly that means. I'm not sure if a plug and adapter would count. But you can all be now relieved and you can now be happy for Elon Musk because the reality is that whereas before he was not getting a subsidy moving forward Tesla will get a subsidy like everybody else in you know equal subsidy regime. There's I guess there was a like what do you call this an industry body that promotes that one of the charging standards the non Tesla charging state and it published it said public funding must continue to go forward to go towards open standards which is always better for the consumer. I'm happy to see the various central planners know what's good for the consumers. We don't want competition. We want government funded open standards. That is the best for the consumer because it's worked so well. And yeah the industry and we know that most of the progress we've made economically and otherwise in the last 200 years has been because of government investment in open standards. Really. I'm being cynical. All right. They continue public EV infrastructure funding should continue to only be approved for CCS standard enabled charges per federal minimum standard guidelines. Why. Of course no government funding should be used for any of this infrastructure. This is the kind of infrastructure exactly that needs to be developed by private businesses particularly auto companies that have a strong incentive in creating the kind of infrastructure that will make would make their electric cars usable. Right. That's what Tesla has done for Tesla's credit. They recognize the need for charging stations for their ability to sell their own cars. They've gone and invested a huge amount in these charging stations throughout their every car company should do that. Whether it's a standard or whether whatever whatever standard it is they should just go out there and do it and stop expecting the government to subsidize it all. Tesla already has 17,000 charges all over the United States and Canada. The other standard only has 11,000 so Tesla's way ahead even though the other standard has government subsidies and Tesla does not. I wonder how that happens. How does it how does anything get done without government subsidies? It's just it's kind of a mystery. It's it's truly intriguing. The Tesla charging stations are half the size and twice as powerful. Not too surprising given that the other was a public public government. 70% so electric vehicles in the United States 70% of them are owned by Tesla, GM and Ford. These are the three that have signed up for the Tesla standard. So that that is 70% of all autos and yet all government subsidies were going to just one standard. The standard that serves the other 30%. Anyway, let's see. Worldwide CCS has an advantage about 81,000 stations and 45,000 for Tesla. I guess there's a lot of those in China and yeah $175 it costs to get an adapter to use for the Tesla standard in order to charge at a CCS standard. In Europe because the Europeans are really really smart the Europeans don't allow you to use whatever plug you want or whatever device you want because in Europe they've mastered the ability to use central planners to decide exactly what cable, what plug, what connector, what anything you use. They've got it down. So in Europe Tesla is not allowed to use their own standard. In Europe Tesla has to use CCS. So Tesla cars in Europe use the alternative standard even though not as good, not as fast but that is Europe that only believes in standards set by central planners. God forbid the market has anything to do with it. All right, I thought you'd find that interesting just the charging wars this is only going to get more intense and it's only going to get more intense because government is subsidizing it and there's huge amounts of money, billions and billions of dollars going into this and who captures this, who gets to capture this money, who gets to build the charging stations. I mean you should probably start to think about starting a company that just builds charging statements, the government specs and you could rake in probably a lot of money, probably not a bad investment. All right, thank you for listening or watching the Iran Brook show. If you'd like to support the show we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. 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