Fearing trouble after Tesla fired the entire Supercharger department

– There will be many more problems.

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Earlier this week, it became clear that Tesla is laying off almost the entire department that works with the Supercharger network, including manager Rebecca Tinucci. In total, close to 500 people in the department are said to have been fired.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk first communicated that the company was going to be “absolutely hardcore” regarding cost and employee cuts, but later clarified at X that the company still had plans to expand the Supercharger network, just at a slower pace and with a greater focus on maximum uptime and expansion of existing stations.

According to several sources, Tesla must have cut out all planned Supercharger stations where construction has not yet begun.

The website Electrek, for example, pointed to four planned stations in the New York area that had all been removed from the plans.

– The quality is going to get worse

According to InsideEVs, former Tesla employees are worried about the future of the Supercharger network after large parts of the department that worked on the development and maintenance of the charging stations were laid off.

– My personal opinion is that the quality is going to get worse, says “Angelo”, one of the dismissed employees.

– Customers will start to see that problems last longer than they are used to.

Angelo and “John,” another fired Tesla employee InsideEVs spoke with, worked on troubleshooting and maintaining the Superchargers. They fear that there will now be too few employees left to handle the enormous workload.

– We couldn’t keep up. And now the network is even bigger, says Angelo. – Now there are even more users. There are going to be many more problems that can arise.

John says he has heard that there are still some employees out in the field, but that he thinks they are going to be overloaded.

– I was mostly available 19 to 24 hours a day. I had to be available on the phone at all times. I sacrificed a lot of family time, he tells InsideEVs.

Final packages in Norway

In Norway, too, Tesla’s employee cuts are said to have had consequences. Bilbransje24 wrote earlier this week that Tesla should have gone wide with offers for end-of-life packages in Norway as well, although the specific effects of this are still unknown.

Tesla also does not want to comment on our questions about possible consequences for the Supercharger network in Norway.

– Thank you for the inquiry. Tesla has no further information to share about this beyond what appears on X, they write in an email and link to the message from Elon Musk that we reproduced earlier in the case.

Tesla has the world’s largest fast charging network for electric cars with over 57,000 Superchargers. Many major car manufacturers have announced that they will switch to Tesla’s charging connection in the US (where Tesla uses a different connection than the type 2 cable they use in Europe, the so-called NACS – North American Charging Standard), but the company is also set to get strong competition ahead.

Seven major car manufacturers – Mercedes, General Motors, Stellantis, Honda, BMW, Hyundai and Kia – have joined forces to establish their own charging network in the USA. It is called Ionna, and has plans for at least 30,000 charging points in the US and Canada – a kind of American version of the Ionity network we know in Europe.

Ionna will use both CCS and NACS connectors, and announced in February that they had received approval from the authorities to start operations.