Musk Says Model 3 Owners Will Have To Pay To Use Supercharging Network

"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" and now the costs will start to pile on.

A really telling quote I read, attributed to Musk in another article, was something to the effect of, "It's not that we're trying to figure out how to make more money; we just can't figure out how to make them cheaper."

Personally, I think the idea of free recharging for life is an unsustainable business model, so Tesla couldn't do it for ever.

I don't see anything wrong with charging everyone for Supercharger Station power consumption. Plug in your credit card, get pre-authorized, and charge your car's batteries for the next hour. When you unplug, you get your bill for $5 and you drive for the next (alleged) 230 miles. Still a good deal* if you consider how far you'd get if you were buying gasoline in the US for the same dollars.

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*Especially if you don't factor in amortized battery replacement cost as part of the fuel bill.

Agreed.

If any utility offered "free" access to their resources, they'd soon risk bankruptcy. They have monthly/annual operating & maintenance costs. If you give your services away, your business will soon go away. If Tesla makes & sells every Model S/X they make, they may lose a lot future profit on their (under-priced) "supercharging for life" packages.

And as-is with any corporation, they're essentially operating with the mission of maximizing profits. And b/c the EV market is still a niche category, they can only decrease production & admin costs by only so much - before they lose money on every unit they make. Tesla is a still a boutique brand having only 2-3 models to sell & not having some other "hawt" product on the market to offset the loses they take on their current products & supercharging services.

Just to add to what "dumpsty" said, "free" recharging isn't truly free. Someone pays for it: Tesla, in the form of borrowed money and selling shares (they've never turned a profit, so they didn't use profit to pay for these capital investments). I believe the "free lifetime charging" policy served two vital purposes:

(1) It got people to pay attention to EVs and seriously consider them, even though Tesla's vehicles (so far) are targeted at the relatively affluent. The "free fuel" idea gets attention!

(2) Tesla's creation of an (admittedly sparse) nation-wide Supercharge infrastructure presented a viable argument that you (US citizen) could travel across the country in an EV* (*providing your entire route was from charging station to charging station). This helped ease the "range anxiety" and "EV is unsuitable as an only car" concerns to some degree.

I feel both points served to help shift public anti-EV perception to a more positive state. In the future, once EVs get more traction, there will be no need to offer "free lifetime charging at Supercharge stations" as an incentive. I believe it'll eventually be phased out for everyone, though possibly grandfathered to those who bought a new Tesla with this offering.

So Musk wants to treat Model 3 buyers as second-class citizens??

The better solution is to make all owners pay.

It'll come, Matt. It'll come.