Tesla fires many on charger team, raising doubts about expansion ( www.seattletimes.com )

Elon Musk has gutted the part of Tesla responsible for building electric vehicle charging stations, sowing uncertainty about the future of the largest and most reliable U.S. charging network.

The layoffs of about 500 Tesla employees, which many of them posted about on social media on Tuesday, raised questions about deals that Musk, Tesla’s CEO, struck with the leaders of General Motors, Ford Motor and other automakers last year allowing cars made by other companies to use Tesla Supercharger stations.

Tesla’s agreements with other makers of electric cars assured buyers that they would be able to find fast chargers on road trips, addressing one of the main reasons that many people are hesitant to buy such cars. It was also seen as a coup for Musk, validating Tesla’s technology and giving the company outsize influence over the auto industry.

Numerous laid-off Tesla employees discussed the job cuts publicly. Musk “has let our entire charging org go,” William Navarro Jameson, a senior manager at Tesla’s charging operation, said on X. “What this means for the charging network, NACS, and all the exciting work we were doing across the industry, I don’t yet know.”

NACS, or the North American Charging Standard, was developed by Tesla and has a reputation for being a reliable and easy-to-use charging technology.

The latest layoffs, two weeks after Tesla said it was firing 14,000 people worldwide, unsettled investors who had been regaining confidence in the company after it reported last week a 55% drop in its first quarter profit.

The automaker has been a major beneficiary of federal funds to build charging networks. As other carmakers like Hyundai and Ford have chipped away at Tesla’s market share, Musk may have concluded that it was not in Tesla’s interest to build many more charging stations, which would help its rivals sell cars.

AmbiguousProps OP ,

So, Tesla successfully lobbies the government to get the grant money to apply to NACS instead of CCS, making it the new defacto standard. Now, they're seemingly pulling out? Seems like Tesla just didn't want to have to update their chargers to work with CCS (something that would have been required for that government money, before the lobbying). I love government grants to billion dollar corporations /s

On top of that, the lobbying successfully stunted CCS development, even after 700 kW CCS charging had been demonstrated, with future increases planned. Tesla basically killed all of their charging competition with this move.

I'm sure the auto industry is happy to hear this headline after they started to change their vehicles over to NACS and made promises to customers about access to the Tesla network. Rivian, for example, has already begun shipping complimentary NACS adapters for R1 owners, but this will probably throw a wrench into that.

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