I hear what you're saying and this is also my general observation as to what Musk is doing at Tesla. He's still running Tesla like a startup company in the early part of a disruption phase. To date, the vast majority of consumers who have bought Tesla's have been early adopters - divided up into alphas and betas. The alphas are the true believers, who oftentimes become the apologists for their fearless leader. These are the folks who take the marketshare from 0-5%. The second tranche are the beta early adopters - these are the more pragmatic early adopters - oftentimes labelled as skeptics by the alphas - that take the marketshare from 5-10%. Beyond 10% - we're getting into the tranches of traditional consumers. That's where we are right now - and despite all of the rationales and reasons about BEV adoption/demand falling off - it's primarily because of two simple reasons - range anxiety and lack of public charging infrastructure. No amount of education is going to convince more traditional consumers to buy a product that doesn't solve for these two primary blockers. That's why I think it's a really huge risk to deprioritize the Tesla SC network right now - it will actually result in even less demand for BEV purchases. It won't happen overnight, but it will likely happen if those traditional consumers see the market leader pull way back on investments in public charging networks. I get that at least some of the underlying issues are FUD - but the MSM isn't going to stop writing articles telling consumers about how Tesla has pulled back on key investments in the public charging networks - which is going to do one thing - negatively impact future sales/demand.
Yeah, it sure does! We're talking about ~550 sites/year and each site requires a blizzard of planning, permitting, and ordering to get it up and running and each site has to be planned months in advance.
Maybe not. But it does take more than zero, and per Elon, it's now zero:
And as reported, contractors now no longer have contacts in Tesla, and aren't getting paid.
Tesla was building more like 4 sites a day recently, and many of those are HUGE with 50-120 stalls per single site.
Meanwhile Elon demands 5x that as compensation package and even changed the state for the company because Delaware judge called it excessive…
This I think is the crux of why they were let go. The supercharger build-out has been slow as *sugar*. There should be easily 4x as many superchargers today as there are.
1500 sites and 13,000 stalls a year is slow, plus managing the existing 5,000 sites / 50K stalls, and expanding to new countries during that?
Growth is slow af compared to car sales, keep in mind, they need to keep up with ALL car manufacturers, not just their own car sales since everyone has pretty much committed to NACS. Graph looks near linear and should be more exponential as they got more experience and streamlined the process as they hired more people.
Not slow compared to other charge networks, but they also missed goals and if the other post is true, there were sites that had everything ready to go and were sitting for months waiting for activation.
Again, existing sites need to be managed and take resources. Not only new builds count. This is like saying service centers only need to be scaled to how many cars were delivered in a given year.
Even forgetting all that... Elon literally said they're going to slow down expansion. This wasn't a move to increase efficiency and increase ramp up. At best it was an ill advised cost cutting move. But I think the likely story is Elon saw Tinucci as a threat and decided to do this as a show of power to the rest of the execs.
Tinucci's team appears to be fired, but that what is being disputed is that was not the "entire supercharger team". I just watched a bit of the out of spec video and the claim is the maintenance team is still fully intact, so there will be no impact to supercharger operation, including for third parties.
great, so in the *best case* whatever we have right now won't break and will be maintained.... but GOOD LUCK with new installations / expanding existing installations or being an OEM and needing to work with Tesla on adapter / getting help with ensuring your customers can use the SC network. on the other hand that might be a good thing as other OEMs will compete with Tesla users for limited Superchargers which aren't going to be expanded anytime soon....
That's only in the short term view. In the long term, of theories thrown out there, that this was a power struggle between Elon and Tinucci seems most plausible to me, so there may be a skeleton crew or eventually people will be hired back to tie up loose ends on the sites currently in progress. Those people can then continue on working on new sites (which is officially Tesla/Elon's claim, even though people here seems to disregard that completely).
Even if one were to stipulate that is what is going on here (I am not), firing "everyone" makes absolutely no sense in that scenario.
Nobody is ignoring Elon saying that they are still working on new sites. It's been brought up over and over.
