The recent firing of Tesla’s whole Supercharger team sent shockwaves through the EV scene. We were left with important questions about why a team that has been doing such excellent work all got sent home. But, what might get lost in the noise was another announcement from Elon Musk:
To be fair, gaps in the geographic reach of charging networks are only half the battle. As more EVs hit the road, there are many places that need more chargers. So, expansion at existing sites does make a lot of sense to focus on now that Tesla doesn’t appear to want to focus on both geographic and capacity expansion.At this point, it’s important to point out that other companies are already starting to fill in some of the charging gaps that Tesla hasn’t gotten to.
Even along the highways that are going to get funded, this pays for only 4 150 kW stations every 50 miles. If you’ve ever been stuck at the Electrify America station in Quartzsite, Arizona , you know that this is hopelessly and maybe even hilariously inadequate for future needs. For me, I’m going to shamelessly plug a project I’m already working on again: Charge to the Parks. Because national parks are often in rural areas, they make for a good benchmark to see how the EV charging network is doing. The public instinctively gets that if they can get to the parks, they can get anywhere, so it makes for low-friction communication of the basic idea that EVs are good enough, even if not perfect.