Regardless of current layoffs, the Tesla Supercharger community is due for an enlargement, CEO Elon Musk claims.
Tesla will spend “effectively over” $500 million on the Supercharger community this 12 months, Musk stated Friday on X (previously Twitter), the social media community he owns, including that this funding will fund “1000’s” of recent chargers and is separate from any working prices wanted to easily hold the present community going. For perspective, there are at the moment 25,507 Tesla Supercharger ports within the U.S. and a pair of,264 station areas, based on the Vitality Division’s Various Fuels Information Heart.
Musk earlier this month fired practically the whole Tesla Supercharger staff, together with Rebecca Tinucci, the chief who has accelerated progress of the community lately and helped persuade practically the whole U.S. EV market to modify to Tesla’s North American Charging Commonplace (NACS) connector.
Simply to reiterate: Tesla will spend effectively over $500M increasing our Supercharger community to create 1000’s of NEW chargers this 12 months.
That’s simply on new websites and expansions, not counting operations prices, that are a lot larger.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Could 10, 2024
Ford led the way in which in adopting the Tesla cost port, in Could 2023, at a time of nice enlargement for the Supercharger community—and practically each different U.S. EV model quickly stepped as much as verify they’d additionally make the swap.
Within the 12 months since Ford’s announcement, NACS has additionally turn out to be an official customary—SAE J3400. That is paving the way in which 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 stable popularity in that space. However reliability beneficial properties throughout the trade will take greater than a Tesla connector. With about 100 charging station producers and 500 combos of vehicles and chargers, it is so much that must be cross-compatible.
Ford EVs at Tesla Supercharger
Musk has additionally urged 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 really praised the staff 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.
