Tesla is already pulling back Supercharger plans after Elon Musk came in like a wrecking ball and fired the whole charing team.
As reported earlier today and since confirmed by many departing Tesla employees, Elon Musk has fired Tesla’s entire charging team.
In an email announcing the move, the CEO said that Tesla would continue building Supercharger stations that are currently under construction without further commenting on how the lack of charging team will impact Tesla’s plan to grow the critical EV charging network.
We now learn that there are already direct impacts on planned future Supercharger stations.
Sources familiar with the matter told Electrek that Tesla backed out of four leases for upcoming Supercharger locations in New York: one in Maspeth, South Bronx, two in Queens, and one in Gateway Center, Brooklyn.
These were new stations recently announced to address concerns with overcrowded Supercharger stations in New York.
We reported on this issue in January when several stations saw long wait times to access a charger.
The problem was partly due to a surge in Tesla vehicles used by Uber drivers due to a new incentive for the city to electrify its ride-sharing fleet.
In order to address the situation, Tesla promised to deploy 100 additional chargers around New York City by the end of the year and even worked directly with Uber to gather data to locate the new stations at optimal locations.
These four new locations represented the bulk of these planned new stations in the city, and they are gone.
Three of the four sites were “power-ready” – as some work was already being done to prepare them to become charging stations for Tesla.
There’s a silver lining. When contacted, Revel, which operates its own fleet of electric taxis and charging stations in New York, expressed interest in these sites because of their location and capacity for high-volume fast charging stations.
Tesla deployed a record number of Superchargers last quarter and now operates 57,579 Superchargers at 6,249 locations around the world.
Electrek’s Take
I’m really perplexed by Tesla firing its charging team. If one thing was a clear success at Tesla, it’s the Supercharger network.
Tesla had just won the charging standard battle – making NACS the new standard in North America and all other automakers adopting and jumping onboard with the Supercharger network.
Now more than ever, Tesla needs to grow the network to support the onboarding of non-Tesla EVs and its own growing fleet. And yet, Tesla fired the team instead and slowed down Supercharger installations – if not stopped entirely.
This is a bearish move if I have ever seen one.