spoiler
Tesla has fired its entire Supercharger division, staff who worked in the team say.
There are over 50,000 Superchargers globally, the company says, making it the world's largest fast-charging network for electric vehicles.
Boss Elon Musk said the firm would cut one in ten jobs, as it faces strong competition from less expensive rivals.
It needed to be "absolutely hard core" about cost reduction, he wrote in a memo first reported by The Information.
The BBC has approached Tesla for comment,
Multiple employees have confirmed their departures from the division, which had hundreds of employees.
William Jameson, strategic charging programs lead at Tesla, posted on X that Mr Musk had "let our entire charging org go".
"What a wild ride it has been", he wrote.
Also writing on X, Mr Musk said the company still planned to grow the Supercharger network, "just at a slower pace for new locations".
Andres Pinter, chief executive of Bullet EV Charging Solutions, a supplier to the charging network said that his team "woke up to a sharp kick in the pants this morning," Reuters reported.
He speculated that Mr Musk could "reconstitute the EV charger team in bigger, badder, more Muskian way" in order to continue to benefit from US government funding to develop the network. 'Extremely perplexed'
Tesla's network of chargers is widely seen as industry leading, and recently it cut deals with several rival car-makers in north America to adopt its "NACS" charging standard so that their vehicles could use the network.
Fred Lambert, editor-in-chief of electric vehicle news website Electrek, posted on social media he was "extremely perplexed" by the move.
"If one thing was a clear success at Tesla, it's the Supercharger network. Even from a talent perspective. No other charging team in the world has been able to do what Tesla did," he wrote.
The quality and reach of the Supercharger network has long been a huge advantage for Tesla, James Attwood, acting magazine editor of Autocar, told the BBC.
It was "a key selling point for potential buyers" he added.
"But with regulators in both Europe and the US pushing the firm to open the Supercharger network to owners of other electric vehicles, it will offer less of an advantage in the future."
Last year, seven large car manufacturers including Mercedes, Honda, BMW and Hyundai-Kia set-up a joint venture to build a rival fast-charging network.
As well as the cuts to the Supercharger department, the firm's entire public policy unit will also be cut the Financial Times reported.
The layoffs come days after the firm reported its first quarterly revenue decline since 2021.
It follows declining sales at the company, which is also having to deal with an investigation into the safety of its Autopilot assisted driving system, and a recall relating to its newest model, Cybertruck.
He'd rather burn down his charging network than open it up to the national EV market, let alone the Chinese EVs that normal people can afford. Hopefully the company continues to spiral and we see all hardware/software support cut for their entire fleet and charging network. Killing Tesla is step 1 to achieving anything Tesla claimed to want to do.
Which is ironic as it sounds like they had an opportunity to make the supercharger units an industry standard, which would’ve created a captured market/rentier income situation for Tesla. But no, Musk thought building a truck from an 80’s cyberpunk b-movie was the better move.
This is more or less what all these tech investors are burning their money to get, right? They want the winning lottery ticket that captures the market for a particular product/service. Baffling that they seemed like they were on the cusp of attaining that and just fire all the people that could help them get there.
starting to think that maybe Elon Musk doesn't have any idea what he's doing
I remember reading a report saying he was inspecting a Tesla department unannounced, and the developers there just switched to generic, long matrix-like terminal with a bunch of nonsense code. He just walks by and nodded his head in approval lol
comrade cmatrix
How long until one of his investors makes him disappear lol
Elon Musk only knows government subsidies, lay offs, and lie.
While the supercharger network has generally been better than its rivals that's mostly because its comparatively very simple to build everything from the hardware to the software for a single end user. You can standardise the equipment and software across all your own products, make owners use the app etc.
I expect laying off the supercharger team came after they told him what the cost and workload would be to open up their network. It could be a tantrum. It could be a tactic while he tries to challenge the rulings to open up their network. But if I had to guess, its likely a stalling tactic while cutting costs to keep the stock price high enough for him to sell yet more of his shares.
Oh, man. Now I want a Cyberprunk movie to be a real thing.
---
There's a sickening sound, the electronics immediately are inoperable, and there's an obnoxious and very loud warning tone so they have to sort of yell.
"What just happened?"
"We went into a pothole."
"A pothole?"
"Yeah. This happened before. We're shutdown. Now I gotta call a tow truck and then I gotta pay for repairs myself."
"Why?!"
An annoyed and aggrieved look. "Potholes are not covered by the warranty."
I wonder if the NACS thing is set in stone yet (are cars coming off the assembly line with it yet, mainly)...
Because elon somehow killing that adoption by making it useless would be very on brand.