Regardless of latest layoffs, the Tesla Supercharger community is due for an growth, CEO Elon Musk claims.
Tesla will spend “effectively over” $500 million on the Supercharger community this yr, Musk stated Friday on X (previously Twitter), the social media community he owns, including that this funding will fund “hundreds” of latest chargers and is separate from any working prices wanted to easily preserve the present community going. For perspective, there are at present 25,507 Tesla Supercharger ports within the U.S. and a pair of,264 station places, in keeping with the Vitality Division’s Various Fuels Information Middle.
Musk earlier this month fired practically all the Tesla Supercharger workforce, together with Rebecca Tinucci, the manager who has accelerated progress of the community in recent times and helped persuade practically all the U.S. EV market to change to Tesla’s North American Charging Commonplace (NACS) connector.
Simply to reiterate: Tesla will spend effectively over $500M increasing our Supercharger community to create hundreds of NEW chargers this yr.
That’s simply on new websites and expansions, not counting operations prices, that are a lot greater.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Might 10, 2024
Ford led the best way in adopting the Tesla cost port, in Might 2023, at a time of nice growth for the Supercharger community—and practically each different U.S. EV model quickly stepped as much as verify they’d additionally make the change.
Within the yr since Ford’s announcement, NACS has additionally turn into an official normal—SAE J3400. That is paving the best way for extra charging networks so as to add the NACS connector, together with BP, which simply this week stated it’s seeking to buy stranded Supercharger websites ought to Tesla contract the community.
EV advocates could also be hoping for elevated reliability from switching to NACS, given the Supercharger community’s strong popularity in that space. However reliability features throughout the business will take greater than a Tesla connector. With about 100 charging station producers and 500 mixtures of automobiles and chargers, it is so much that must be cross-compatible.
Ford EVs at Tesla Supercharger
Musk has additionally instructed up to now that the Supercharger community may cost further for slow-charging non-Tesla EVs. We’ll see if that is one thing the automaker introduces at some point.
There’s been little backstory about why the Supercharger division was practically shuttered. Musk had just lately truly praised the workforce as the important thing to its future. And he is given no indication how the Supercharger community will proceed to function at its present stage—not to mention develop—after so many key personnel had been dismissed.
