When I finally got to the point of needing to trade in my car and get a new one, I was already half-way there in going electric.

While I read up on the Volt and Bolt and was dimly aware of the Leaf, my main interest was in the Tesla Model 3. The car’s reviews were generally through the roof and I was determined, since I figured it was time to trade in my current vehicle, to at least give the Model 3 a shot. I took a test drive and that completely won me over and I’m now a very proud owner of a Model 3.

But I have to admit, I didn’t cover all bases in my thinking. For example, though I was aware of the Supercharger Networks Tesla had, I must admit I wasn’t all that familiar with how many of them there were and how useful they would be if/when I should choose to make a trip far outside my home range.

You see, if you have a house or apartment with an accessible 220 V plug, having an electric car is a no-brainer… provided your use of the car is within the range of your batteries.

Or, to put it another way, if you have a theoretical range of, say, 200 miles on your vehicle, if your main/only source of charging is your home, you don’t want to get your car more than 100 miles out of the range of your house.

Now, 100 miles is a pretty long range to travel, and as I’m sure many of you are aware, there are more and more charging stations -not necessarily Tesla Superchargers- appearing in all kinds of places.

However, Brooke Cruthers at forbes.com notes that…

EV Charging Stations Are Still Few and Far Between – For The Rest of Us That Don’t Drive A Model 3

The upshot of the article, which is pretty clear in its title, is that if you drive an electric vehicle OTHER than a Tesla (Model 3 or the others) you may find it difficult sometimes to find a good charging station in which to charge your car.

It’s not impossible, mind you, and as I said before it seems more and more charging stations are coming online, but the reality is that Elon Musk and Tesla have done a great thing with their Superchargers, which are very numerous and spread out all over the country and allow Tesla owners like myself the convenience of being able to make trips far from home and not worry too much about finding a great place to quickly charge your car.

The problem for owners of other EV cars is that sometimes the charging stations available are either charging at a diminished rate (ie 1 hour to get maybe 60 miles of range), not working at all, or have a long line of vehicles also waiting to use the chargers.

Again, this is not, at least in my experience, a problem for my Tesla Model 3. As I wrote before, I’ve already driven across the state and had absolutely no problems with a mid-state charge up at a Tesla Supercharger Station and, once I arrived at my destination, was able to charge up at a Supercharger Station there.

I’ve looked at the Supercharger Maps available online and I’m quite sure I could make trips through most of the United States and not have much of a need for other charging stations beyond the Tesla Superchargers.

But if I had a Volt, Bolt, Leaf, or any other EV car that cannot use the Tesla Supercharging network, I’d be facing a far more interesting time finding and using other chargers out there and for the reasons I noted above.

Will the charger work? I’ve seen posts where people lament the fact that they head to a charging station and once there find that it is not working. The Tesla Superchargers are listed on your car’s navigational map. Further, if you tell your Tesla you want to charge up, it will offer instructions to get to the closest Supercharger and will even tell you how many docks are currently available. If the station is out, it will also inform you of that and redirect you to another.

Secondly, what “speed” will the charger operate at? Will it be a lower lever charger, one that might take a good hour plus to get you a decent range? With the Tesla Superchargers, I believe they are all at least Level 2, which means they charge up your car quickly. In my case, I charged some 190-200 miles of range in a matter of 30 minutes or so the times I was “low” and charged things fully (My car has a range of 310 miles if 100% charged but I tend to charge the car to roughly 270 miles. It is recommended you do not charge 100% to help the overall life of the battery, though you can do full charges when going on longer range trips).

Frankly, I wasn’t aware of issues regarding charging stations when I purchased my Tesla. As I said above, my main interest was the car itself, and the reviews and my test drive convinced me the car was absolutely for me. It wasn’t until afterwards I realized getting a Tesla also made sense BECAUSE of the charging stations, and that having this car allowed you to make longer trips without too much worry.

Which begs two question: 1) Why the hell haven’t other EV auto makers made their cars capable of using the Tesla Superchargers?

The answer is pretty simple: Elon Musk has stated he doesn’t mind allowing other EV cars use his network but he has asked the automakers to provide some funds to maintain them. It seems eminently logical to me and would be a great boon for other EV car makers to be able to say they use the Tesla Superchargers but these car companies either don’t want to pay or want to keep their product separate from the Tesla cars. A dumb move, IMHO. If the networks are available, why not take advantage of them, even if it means paying Tesla a little something to maintain them?

But no. So far the only cars that use these networks are the Teslas themselves.

Which brings us to question…

2) Why the hell don’t the other EV car makers have something similar? Why don’t companies such as GM (makers of the Volt and Bolt) or Nissan have their own Supercharger systems?

The answer is: I have no clue. It almost seems like these auto makers are doing half-assed attempts to burst into the electric market. They seem like they’re hedging their bets, coming out with one or two EV cars which are getting decent reviews but feel like maybe the EV market will dry up and fade away so they continue to work harder on their gas-powered cars.

It seems Tesla, a company solely devoted to EV, is the only company that really thought through the needs of the EV market. They not only created the best EV cars out there, they thought farther ahead and realized that such cars not only needed to be manufactured, they needed to have a vast network of reliable charging stations and undertook the difficult, surely quite expensive task of creating these networks for their vehicles.

I firmly believe that the days of the gas powered car are rapidly coming to an end. The EV vehicles, as exemplified by the Model 3, are simply better cars and, I strongly suspect, in a matter of a few years I wouldn’t be surprised if new battery innovations result in ranges of 500+ miles on a full charge. Perhaps even more.

I hope the other car companies put more of an effort into releasing their EV cars… and thinking through the things that need to be done outside of the car itself to make it more desirable for the common consumer.

In the end, competition benefits the consumer.