I resent my go-to charging depot.
Don’t get me wrong: I was psyched when Tesla opened a Supercharger in the parking lot of a nearby In-N-Out burger. The other local Supercharger is located in a garage that charges for parking by the hour. Plus, it’s fun to grab a neapolitan shake while your vehicle gets juice. The problem is that everybody in Southern California loves In-N-Out, so reaching the chargers at dinnertime means navigating through the unruly drive-thru line. This sucks, especially when the battery is nearly depleted and the burger faithful won’t get out of the way.
More than a year ago, salvation was promised in the form of a new Supercharger at a nearby mall, one where I already frequent the Petco. But construction has mysteriously stalled. I stare at the charging map and repeatedly refresh, waiting for the station to come online.
I shouldn’t be surprised at Supercharger deployment being stuck, of course. Earlier this year, in a move nominally intended to keep Tesla nimble and innovative, Elon Musk laid off the team responsible for the Supercharger network at a moment when they were perhaps the most useful people at the company.
While the rest of Tesla sputtered with the rollout of the Cybertruck and reversed course on what to do next, the Supercharger team was preparing for a future in which drivers in EVs from basically all the other car brands could stop at Tesla’s fast-chargers and give the company their money. Instead of leaning into this advantage, Tesla has done the opposite. The Supercharger network is growing, but deployment has proceeded at a slower pace than during the same period in 2023. Before the mass layoff, Tesla was opening more than 30 new Supercharger sites per week; that number dipped to about 15 afterward.
The slowdown matters to a lot of people on the road. Despite Tesla’s recent sales slowdown, its cars make up the vast majority of EVs in America. Deprioritizing the Supercharger network is an annoyance for all those drivers, who may have a harder time taking a road trip to Big Bend National Park, Branson, or Aunt Betty’s house in the boondocks if promised charging depots stay in limbo.
Fewer new Superchargers will make existing stations more congested, too, and that’s before vehicles from other car companies begin to arrive en masse. On a road trip to Lake Tahoe last week I saw my first Rivian plugged into a Tesla station. Ford EVs are starting to get their adapters. Next year, carmakers will begin to build their EVs with Tesla’s North American Charging Standard plug, which will greatly increase congestion at existing Superchargers, especially on popular highway routes.
Whether future EV road trips are convenient or frustrating depends in large part on whether the rest of the industry can pick up the slack should Tesla continue to slow down Supercharger deployment. The track record of competitors like Electrify America and EVgo isn’t inspiring, as their stations have, to date, tended to be rarer, smaller, and more prone to mechanical failure.
Other car companies have pledged to build their own charging depots, which would ease some of the strain. Hope for a better charging future, however, lies largely with the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, which came out of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 and allocated $5 billion to build fast-charging stations along designated highway corridors across the country — see a map of them here.
That money is slowly rolling out in tranches to the states, which had the responsibility of putting forth plans for where they’d build plugs with the money. The result is a patchwork, state-by-state agenda for upgrading the American charging network, but the work is underway. Ohio began construction of the first NEVI-funded charger last October, and you can see where Alabama and Virginia, for example, plan to put theirs. Crucially, much of the funding has already been dispersed. If an EV-unfriendly new president takes office in January, the ball is already rolling.
What’s unclear is whether all these charging depots can match the standard of excellence the Supercharger team created before Musk blew it to bits. Take Alabama’s chargers, which will mostly be built at existing Love’s gas stations. The new stations meet the bare minimum required for NEVI, which is that they have four plugs each capable of delivering 150 kilowatts of power. Tesla’s newest batch of Superchargers deliver 250 kilowatts; Electrify America has some that reach 350. The 20-odd Superchargers already in Alabama offer at least six to eight plugs, with many stations hosting 12 or 16.
Every plug counts. Every time a new station fills in a spot on the nation’s charging map, drivers will be a little more confident that an EV will be able to take them anywhere they need to go. But if the Biden dollars dispersed through NEVI are going to take the place of Tesla’s Supercharger outfit, then the states need to do more than the bare minimum.
MTA
