Did Tesla really lay off the whole supercharger team? Really??

Extracts of an opinion article that appeared in Clean Technica questioning the reports on alleged layoff of its Supercharger team

According to a recent report by Electrek that repeated paywalled reporting by The Information, Tesla has conducted another round of layoffs, this time getting rid of the entire Supercharger team. Without further confirmation from a company that notoriously maintains no press contacts (and may automatically send you a poop emoji if you email them with a question), we can’t relay this reporting as fact just yet. But it merits some discussion.

What The Information and Electrek Reported

We’ve already reported on Tesla’s other recent layoffs. Those are confirmed, and nobody’s denying that 10% of the workforce was dismissed. Among those who departed the company were Rohan Patel, the head of policy and a former Obama administration official, and Drew Baglino, head of powertrain and energy engineering. The company also fired the whole advertising team, a division that had not been set up for very long.

But there were rumors that the carnage wasn’t over. Some were saying that up to 20% of the workforce could get the axe (in total).

The scale of the layoffs hasn’t yet reached rumored levels, but according to an Elon Musk email anonymously supplied to The Information, the company did conduct another round of layoffs recently. If the email is real, the layoffs aren’t over yet, and have already hit some key teams.

First off, the biggest news in the alleged email was that either most of, or the entire Supercharger team had been laid off, along with its leader, Rebecca Tinucci. In whole, the team included 500 people. This seems very strange because Tinucci led the company’s successful effort to bring NACS charging to other companies, and she had even been given a slot in the TIME 100 climate list due to this work!

The email (if real) says that Tesla’s Supercharging effort won’t be stalled out due to these layoffs. New Superchargers are supposed to still happen, and those under construction will be finished. Whether this would actually slow things down? Who knows.

Other firings/layoffs include other executives and teams. Rohan Patel left during the initial round of layoffs, and now his entire public policy team has reportedly been eliminated. Also, Daniel Ho, leader of Vehicle Programs and New Product Initiatives, is reportedly out. Both of these teams seem to be very essential.

The alleged email goes on to say that further layoffs are necessary and that they need to be “hard core.” In it, Musk says that any manager who doesn’t do sufficient layoffs in order to only keep “excellent, necessary, and trustworthy” employees will themselves be relieved.

How could a team that has done excellent work like this deserve to be handed swords for figurative seppuku? I can’t answer that. The only possible issue was that other companies beyond Ford and Rivian weren’t given access as fast as Musk would have liked, but that’s purely wild speculation. We have no idea what the reasoning was for this move, assuming there was any.

The same is true for other teams, like the public policy team. Tesla’s facing some severe challenges in that area, and it needs seasoned and experienced people to deal with those.

So, absent some real confirmation from more sources, CleanTechnica cannot report this as fact yet. It’s just too outlandish to 100% believe at this point. I hope we find out in the coming days that it was a prank or something.

Confusion

The job cuts have left executives at at least one other automaker, Rivian Automotive Inc., confused and concerned, according to another person familiar with internal company discussions. Rivian, Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. are among the carmakers adopting Tesla’s charging connectors for their battery-powered cars, giving thousands of customers access to the Tesla charging network.

Vehicles from those automakers were initially designed to use a standard called the Combined Charging System. There are fewer CCS chargers in the US than Tesla Superchargers, which use what Tesla has called the North American Charging Standard. Tesla’s infrastructure is also considered faster and more reliable.

The job eliminations mean Rivian, Ford and others have lost their main points of contact in Tesla’s charging unit shortly before the kickoff of the busy summer driving season. Tinucci was one of the main executives building and managing outside partnerships and was thought of highly, two people who had worked with her inside and outside of Tesla said. 

Bloomberg confirmed that Tinucci was no longer listed on internal organizational charts as of Tuesday. One of Tesla’s highest-ranking female executives, she spoke at the company’s Investor Day in March 2023. She didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Some of the Supercharger servicing team, which manages third-party access to the network, remains intact, according to one of the people

Tesla has been building CCS-to-NACS adapters in Buffalo, New York, and shipping them to partnering carmakers. Companies that have signed charging contracts with Tesla are mostly using the adapters as a short-term fix. For example, Ford EV customers can use the Supercharger network with an adapter now, and the technology will be built into the vehicles beginning in 2025.

Rivian and Ford are both still shipping adapters to their customers, according to statements from the companies. Ford told its EV owners on Friday, before the elimination of the broader Tesla Supercharger team, deliveries may be delayed in some cases due to “constraints” with the supplier.

Easy access to high-speed charging is widely seen as critical to EV adoption, and Tesla invested billions of dollars into developing a global network of Superchargers that became the envy of other automakers. It’s also a critical component of Tesla sales, and the carmaker said the division was growing during its first-quarter results last week.

The Musk-led company has also signed charging partnerships with carmakers including Stellantis NV, Volvo, Polestar, Kia, Honda, Mercedes-Benz and BMW. 

Tesla had 6,249 Supercharger stations and more than 57,000 connectors as of the end of the first quarter. It has more fast chargers in the US than all other providers combined, according to BloombergNEF.

Clean Technica and Time