Entire Tesla Supercharger team fired (Update: Elon Musk says supercharger network growth will continue). ** ⚠️ ADMIN WARNING: NO POLITICS **

[Rivian_Hugh_III]

So... umm... who's going to handle site selection, permitting, utility contracts, etc. for all of these inductive chargers that will have to be installed to support your idea of a robotaxi network?

I imagine there will be hubs in major metropolitan areas; essentially warehouses with several hundred charging stations. For example, Amazon doesn't use retail chargers they have hubs.

People can install inductive chargers in their homes on their own.

In the wild there will be few inductive chargers. It'll be inductive in hubs for taxis and inductive at home for standard vehicles. Newly minted Teslas will have both options, so they'll use existing Superchargers when traveling and inductive at home.

A small new team can work on hubs and on expanding existing supercharging stations with inductive options. They won't need nearly as much manpower to expand existing stations as they needed to get new ones off the ground.

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[jplblue]

More details here: https://electrek.co/2024/05/01/elon-musk-throwing-weight-tesla-wrecking-ball/

Elon was MAD that Tinucci pushed back on his arbitrary % cut.

Also, the head of HR is out: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...man-resources-exits-as-staff-upheaval-spreads

 

[jjswan33]

The CyberTruck Cultist is stronnnngggg in here.

So if the CT is 800V, no SC stations are currently capable of 800V and the adapters don't work on the CT.

So is this the worst possible news for CT (or prospective) owners?

 

[azbill]

No. Most manufacturers aren't building any significant fast charging infrastructure. Elon said they will continue adding stalls to handle increased demand. Blaming the company building the most fast-charging infrastructure is silly in the extreme.

If all EV makers were building fast charging like Tesla is, we would have a glut of fast chargers. Why do people think Tesla should fund the infrastructure for the entire industry? It's not like GM, Ford, Volvo, Stellantis, Toyota, etc. don't have billions of dollars at their disposal, yet only one company is driving EV infrastructure forward.

https://www.ionna.com/

This is based on the Ionity network in Europe, which has been pretty reliable.

 

[manitou202]

Well this thread just took a dive. All the Elon apologists came out to defend his 4D chess moves.

 

[Dark-Fx]

More details here: https://electrek.co/2024/05/01/elon-musk-throwing-weight-tesla-wrecking-ball/

Elon was MAD that Tinucci pushed back on his arbitrary % cut.

Also, the head of HR is out: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...man-resources-exits-as-staff-upheaval-spreads

So, I'm guessing he's "back at Tesla" to help people justify paying for his ridiculous compensation package? I'm not a Tesla shareholder but this sure doesn't feel like a positive contribution.

 

[Riviaenz]

I think this whole thing is a big nothing-burger. It's fairly common knowledge among Tesla owners that the supercharger network has had some issues lately (think EA) and Musk seems to be forcing change to bring the standards back up to what they've been in the past. And no matter how you slice it, the Tesla Supercharger network is still leagues above anything else out there in terms of access, locations, and reliability.

It’s quite significant considering that only Ford and Rivian have been validated and enabled to access Tesla Superchargers. The rest of the EV manufacturers that are in queue and in process of going through validation now don’t have anyone to contact or work with. There is quite a bit of noise on that front from engineers at competitors that have lost contacts they were working with.

Consequently, does this immediately impact access to adapters by Ford and Rivian?

Is it retribution for opening up the network and devaluing/killing Tesla’s competitive advantage? Perhaps he perceives as the single most consequential reason Teslas have become hard to sell.

https://apple.news/AR0R6ZDW2Q6ed9VpTYxF-5A

Tinucci was responsible for Tesla’s EV charging business, including Supercharging, which means that the cutting of the Supercharger team may reflect a change in direction for Tesla. Tesla has been very successful at getting manufacturers to adopt its NACS plug – an effort led by Tinucci, which got her onto the TIME 100 Climate list (https://time.com/collection/time100-climate/6333178/rebecca-tinucci/) and #2 on Motor Trend’s auto industry power list (https://www.motortrend.com/news/2024-motortrend-power-list/)– leading many to suggest that it will be able to run a profitable energy delivery business for a long time to come (here’s
her presentation from Investor Day 2023 ()

The crazy thing is this undermines confidence in Tesla and Supercharging for Tesla owners as much as anyone else that was excited to gain access to Supercharging with their Non-Tesla. Why some people chose Tesla was because of Supercharging, then it wasn’t that much of a differentiator due agreements to opening up the network, and now there’s doubt about what will happen to Tesla Supercharging.

The upside is it becomes an opportunity for competing networks to suddenly get access to a wealth of experience… but many of the other networks aren’t in great position to benefit from sudden availability of experienced talent except for perhaps Iona (the joint venture).

 

[Redline]

I don't care if you don't like Kyle. He's knowledgeable on this topic and this video is only 20 mins

1. Utility side that builds out sites...all contacts are gone. Person had 40 some sites in the pipeline. None of their contacts are with Tesla. Everything in limbo.

2. Major contact in OEM situation. NACS isn't 100% anymore. This relationship will be hard to repair, and nobody trusts Tesla now.

 

[djsider2]

We can debate about whether this is a genius move by a CEO who is playing 10-dimensional business chess, or yet another poorly thought out decision by a petulant and mercurial chief executive completely lacking in self-control.

What is not really debatable is that Tesla's BOD is not exercising its primary function to ensure that the company operates in a responsible and effective manner.

He's just a gambler that thinks his methods will always work. Twitter/X is a disappointment

 

[Zorg]

I wouldn't be surprised if Elon rehires half the supercharger staff next month and goes "well maybe I went too far but I had to make an example".

 

[jeeden]

I think that the news was so shocking that nobody was prepared to react, but now the reactions are coming in the form of news articles, word getting out what happened, etc. It really is a head shaker.

A lot of Elon fanboys on reddit and twitter (before their posts are deleted off twitter) are jumping ship on this one. Some pretty interesting stories about electrical contractors that were in the middle of working on installs/upgrades/prep/etc that have lost all contact with Tesla.

If I was the head of EVs at any other car company last night I would have had a midnight strategy session on how to leverage this though. I'm not just talking about how to handle the impact because of the supercharger accesses, but I mean all of it including:

• How do we use this to our advantage to improve our charging experiences
• Do we hire some of these people and how
• How do we capture the people who want an EV and were about to buy a tesla because of the network, but now aren't sure?
• How do we use this to capture existing tesla owners?

 

[ksurfier]

Is Elon replacing the Supercharger group with AI? Tesla is after all an AI company…

 

[Mark_AZR1T]

I love this thread, but I'm sure it is borderline to being locked. If you are pro-Elon you're a fanboy or worse. The reactions are classic, to the point of wanting government action. This is a ripple in the grand scheme of things, but it will flesh out some things in the charging industry, rest assured on that.

 

[RedCanyon]

Interesting perspective….

Just curious can you point to any specific shortcomings you see with the Superchargers that makes you think the entire team is totally deficient and needs to be fired?

Yes... there is a story in Isaacson's books about Musk going to the Starling team and pushing them. He thought the satellites were big, too expensive and need better speed metrics. The team pushed back and so he fired them all. The was an uproar and many forecasted the end of Starling. Musk dropped in 8 SpaceX rocket engineers who didn't really know much about satellites, but they were smart "rocket engineers." A year later, the cost of a satellite had been drastically reduce, production was improved, performance was improved and they achieve deployed numbers that the previous team said were not achievable.

There are a bunch of stories like that in the book. They don't all tern out well (see story about the rushed data center move)... but more times then not he brings in smart teams that overcome impossible odds to achieve amazing things. I wouldn't be surprised to see that here.

 

[Autolycus]

Yes... there is a story in Isaacson's books about Musk going to the Starling team and pushing them. He thought the satellites were big, too expensive and need better speed metrics. The team pushed back and so he fired them all. The was an uproar and many forecasted the end of Starling. Musk dropped in 8 SpaceX rocket engineers who didn't really know much about satellites, but they were smart "rocket engineers." A year later, the cost of a satellite had been drastically reduce, production was improved, performance was improved and they achieve deployed numbers that the previous team said were not achievable.

There are a bunch of stories like that in the book. They don't all tern out well (see story about the rushed data center move)... but more times then not he brings in smart teams that overcome impossible odds to achieve amazing things. I wouldn't be surprised to see that here.

Do that too many times though, and don't you start to have a harder and harder time bringing in the new team because people become less willing to risk them being the next ones dumped impulsively?

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