In the United States, the situation with public electric vehicle (EV) charging stations isn’t perfect. Even though there are more fast chargers now and they are more reliable, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still seen as the best. A recent study by J.D. Power found that many people who buy Teslas do so because they know they can easily find Superchargers to charge their cars. This raises concerns about why Elon Musk decided to lay off the entire team responsible for Superchargers.
In the survey, the top five electric vehicles bought mainly because of charging station availability were all Teslas. However, the study also found that people are becoming happier with charging stations from other companies, even though they’re not as good as Tesla’s. This suggests that laying off the Supercharger team might not have been a good move.
J.D. Power said that while Tesla is still the biggest in the market, it’s not guaranteed to stay that way. Also, Tesla’s score for how satisfied customers are has been going down for the past six months. This means other companies have a chance to catch up. Companies like Electrify America and EVGo have a lot to do to make their charging stations as good as Tesla’s, but if they keep improving, they could become a real challenge.
The big question for Tesla now is whether to start hiring people again for the Supercharger team. Even though they’ve hired some of the people they let go, what happened before made Tesla look unstable.
This worries the people who work for Tesla and the people who invest in it. Since so many buyers care about the Tesla charging experience, it doesn’t seem smart to ignore it. The Supercharger brand is so connected to Tesla’s that changing the charging experience could make a lot of people stop being loyal to the company.
