Two weeks ago, Elon Musk fired the Tesla Supercharger team, but now he’s rehiring them. The automaker is spending $500 million to develop the charging network, and there is no one to direct it.
The Supercharger network is arguably Tesla’s crown jewel. The company recognized early on that while owners are likely to charge at home every night, knowing they can quickly recharge their cars at any time is crucial to making an electric vehicle a viable alternative to existing vehicles. Since then, the company has built more than 2,000 charging stations in the United States alone, with more than 25,000 outlets, and 50,000 worldwide. The chargers work without exception, which is often not the case with other charging networks. Tesla says its network has an uptime of 99.95%, and real-world tests show that’s not far from the truth: According to a University of California-Berkeley survey of drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area, while non-Tesla drivers 25% experienced serious problems at public chargers, compared to only 4% of Tesla drivers at Superchargers.
The Supercharger network is so successful that last year virtually every other automaker that sells or plans to sell electric vehicles in the United States announced that it would abandon the CCS1 connector in favor of the J3400 standard originally developed by Tesla. But these announcements were about more than plug replacements: they also gave other automakers access to the Supercharger network for their customers. That’s why it was so hard to understand why Musk fired the entire team two weeks ago. Although the Supercharger network accounts for only about 5 percent of Tesla’s revenue, that percentage is expected to grow as more brands gain access. And while the charging experience for Tesla’s electric vehicles is generally flawless, that’s because it’s optimized for a single car brand with only five different models, but there’s no guarantee that will be true when other brands’ cars hit the grid.
Ahead of the layoffs, the Supercharger network looked set to extend its lead over competitors, and Tesla’s plan to build a higher-power charger that could power cars using 800V or 900V architectures also appeared to have been shelved. – including Audi, Porsche, Lucid and others – would benefit. (Tesla poles also support a maximum charging speed of 250 kW, while other networks top out at 350 kW.) Worse, construction on dozens of Supercharger sites in the works has reportedly stalled. Now Musk has announced that Tesla will spend more than $500 million to build more chargers, just days after he said he would instead focus on expanding existing locations. And for that, Tesla has to rehire a lot of people.
It is interesting that the expansion of existing sites is more expensive than the construction of a new one: in this case, lease contracts must be renegotiated, utility improvements must be coordinated, and the infrastructure must be developed in such a way that existing customers must still be served. Analysts say the Supercharger network could soon become a profit center, similar to Amazon when it opened up its cloud services to other companies.
Source: sg.hu
