Remember when people said Tesla was like “Apple for the car world”? Well, they have a point, now it’s gone full Apple and started charging you for stuff that used to be included.
Tesla has announced the mobile connector will not be included with every new car purchase from now on.
Instead, you will need to buy it for $400.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and Tesla boss, took to Twitter to explain the decision, claiming “usage statistics were super low, so [it] seemed wasteful”.
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Musk added the mobile connector price will be dropped to $200.
He said the mobile connector is not needed if you have a Tesla wall charger and/or if you use Tesla’s ‘Superchargers’ to charge the car.
This is a key point, by the way, because Tesla is still the only EV maker with its own proprietary network of charging points, called ‘Superchargers’.
This may not sound like a big deal for customers who live in geographies with good public infrastructure – Switzerland or Norway, for example.
But this is crucial in regions where you can’t really rely on public chargers for your EV.
As things stand, there are 32,000 (circa) Tesla Superchargers, located mostly in North America, (nearly) every country in Europe, Australia, NZ, China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, UAE, Jordan and Israel.
Apart from being faster than a ‘regular’ charger, the biggest advantage of using Superchargers is you can find info about them (available stalls, nearest location, etc) via the car’s GPS in live time.
Having said that, a lot of people still won’t like the news.
