Elon Musk announced in May that Tesla would be partnering with (F) to bring Ford EV customers access to Tesla's Supercharger network. A few weeks later, General Motors CEO Mary Barra announced that GM would be following suit.
This partnership between legacy automakers and Tesla could change the EV industry, broadening the appeal of electric vehicles, former (TSLA) president and (GM) board member Jon McNeill told CNBC.
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"GM said, 'to get adoption of EVs, we need to have reliable charging.' And the most reliable charging on the market is Tesla standard," McNeill said. "You pull up to a Tesla charger, it works 99% of the time."
This reliability works to answer one of the biggest questions people have about EVs -- "What about the charging?"
And though some have said that the move will help Tesla's competition more than it will help the company itself, McNeill said that, one of the biggest things Musk cares about is just having more EVs on the road. But he added that the commercial benefit of these partnerships could be huge for Tesla.
"Elon really does have this purity of vision. But clearly, on the commercial side, Tesla's going to be able to access tax credits by opening this standard," McNeill said. "And this might be their AWS moment; they're going to have the ability to now make money off of this infrastructure that they've created. Now it's going to be a recurring revenue source."
In light of this latest partnership, McNeill said that the EV industry is about to experience some serious growth.
"In the U.S., there are about 40,000 fast chargers. In China, there are four million," he said. "It gives you a sense of the growth that we're about ready to see in the supercycle of the electrification of automobiles."
