Back in May, Tesla CEO Elon Musk reiterated the company’s plan to allow other manufacturers’ EVs to recharge at its Supercharger stations. He’d actually first announced it a little more than a year ago on Twitter, with a plan to formally start servicing non-Tesla products before 2021 was over. We’re more than halfway through 2022 and still waiting, but it seems we might be getting closer to a formal rollout, based on insights gleaned from Tesla’s own app.
Late Tuesday night, Tesla owners began noticing the presence of a new membership option within the company’s software allowing users to sign up for Supercharger access with a lower per-kilowatt price. Now it seems Tesla will not force all non-Tesla owners to subscribe to use Superchargers, but rather that those who pay for membership will receive discounts.
The pricing at the time the option went live was $0.99 a month. That seemed awfully low and led some to believe it wasn’t a final implementation. Those suspicions were confirmed when the membership was reported as missing from the app just a few hours later.
So, no — you still can’t top up your Bolt or Polestar or Mach-E or whatever at a Supercharger, but the day you can appears to be coming very soon. As a matter of fact, it’s already happened outside of the States, in several European countries.
In May, Musk said it was easier to pull off overseas because the company had already outfitted its stalls in Europe with both its own proprietary plug and the more widely used CCS one, to support the European Model 3 which does indeed feature a CCS port. That’s obviously not the case for American-sold Teslas, so the manufacturer will either have to sell its own CCS adapters or include such hardware at its facilities. We’ll have to wait to see which path it chooses, and how much Supercharging will cost the rest of the EV-driving public.