Skeleton crew will have to fix any future problems.
Network Trouble
When Tesla CEO Elon Musk fired scores of employees in the past few weeks, he also got rid of practically everybody on the Supercharger team, who were working on developing the electric car company's vast network of EV chargers — predictably ticking off Tesla owners.
Now with Musk signaling he's shifting towards AI and robotaxis, recently fired ex-workers who serviced and maintained the chargers are sounding the alarm that the network is likely to decline, InsideEVs reports, because there aren't many service technicians left after Musk took a buzzsaw to the company roster.
"My personal opinion is that quality is going to deteriorate," an ex-worker told InsideEVs. "Customers are going to start seeing issues last longer than what they were used to."
Around the world, Tesla has upwards of 50,000 Supercharger stalls. It's unknown how many charger service technicians Tesla employed before this spate of brutal layoffs, but workers were apparently working around the clock and even skipping time with family, according to InsideEVs. Now imagine a skeleton screw trying to play whac-a-mole on any issues that may pop up in the Tesla Supercharger network.
"We couldn't keep up. And now the network is even larger," the former worker told InsideEVs. "Now, guess what? There are even more consumers. There's gonna be a lot more issues that could possibly come up."
Cloudy Future
The huge wrinkle with Musk pulling away from the Superchargers is that other car companies like Ford are reliant on the stalls to charge the batteries of their own electric vehicles. Other car companies who need the Superchargers include automakers such as Kia, Honda and Jaguar.
But automakers aren't totally hedging their bets on Tesla, where Musk has proved to be so erratic that he's sometimes alarmed other Tesla executives. Last year, a consortium of car companies came together and announced they will be building 30,000 chargers under the brand name Ionna.
That's a good thing. Even if the sales of electric vehicles are flatlining at the moment, they're still an important component in combating carbon emissions and tamping down climate change — so any infrastructure investments ultimately benefit us all.
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