(CTN News) – The Tesla Supercharger team had an impossible goal early in the year. A former team member told TechCrunch, “We were on an exponential trajectory,” calling the new goals “absolutely insane.”
Despite such expectations, “we achieved success each time they increased the metric.”
In April, CEO Elon Musk fired the whole division despite its profits from the year before.
Supercharger dominates EV rapid charging with over 50,000 charging ports worldwide and 25,000 in the US. The widespread, well-maintained, and fast network has changed how consumers view electric vehicles by reducing range anxiety for large sectors of the car-buying public. Musk’s cuts have placed doubt on the private infrastructure project.
Few expected the Supercharger division to be dissolved, but several expected cuts.
The former Tesla staffer told TechCrunch,
“We constructed the finest network on tour.” “Our attention was on the ship.” “There was no frivolity whatsoever.”
It failed to save the team. Instantly, hundreds of people who were building the organization’s fulcrum vanished. Former Tesla employees, shareholders, and industry analysts are considering how this calamity may affect electric vehicle owners and the company.
The automaker has struggled in recent months due to slow sales growth. In order to boost sales, price cuts have cut profits by 55% in the first quarter compared to previous year. Due to pressure on Tesla, Musk used a chainsaw instead of a scalpel to make modifications.
Tesla cut personnel, but it wasn’t the last. About 500 Supercharger employees were laid off in a second phase that ended in April.
Tesla will invest $500 million on Supercharger expansion and improvement,
Musk revealed Friday. However, inside intelligence suggests that achieving that goal without a team will be tough.
Before the cuts, the Supercharger network was prepared to overtake the competition.
A source said Tesla had streamlined Supercharger installation and production so each post could be placed for $20,000, less than half the cost of the nearest competition. Version 4 of the more powerful Supercharger hardware, formerly scheduled for delivery, looks to be suspended.
At the time of the redundancies, TechCrunch reported that dozens of Supercharger locations were in various stages of planning and construction. According to the insider, some nearly-launched sites are in purgatory or may never debut.
Previously, Tesla was well-positioned to obtain grants from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, a $5 billion government-sponsored plan to build a countrywide quick charging network.
They added that the company had focused its expansion plans on high-demand locations. According to the insider, Tesla’s policy team would prioritize NEVI funding for sites where the federal government expressed interest in improving coverage along a certain route but demand had not yet manifested.
“Everything was deliberate.” “There was a target for everything,” a TechCrunch insider said.
This often requires building Superchargers in new locations, which are easier to develop.
The source said expanding current ones is challenging since leases must be renegotiated, utility enhancements must be coordinated, and existing infrastructure must be circumvented while maintaining customer service. “Compared to a brand-new site, your cost per stall is exponentially greater.”
Long ago, observers hypothesized that the Supercharger network could swiftly become a profit center, like Amazon did when it started selling cloud services. A source said Tesla outpaced Amazon because the Supercharger team knew the network’s profitability before other manufacturers did.
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