Elon Musk’s biggest coup ain’t rockets.
Illustration By Mike McQuadeWe know about the cars, rocket ships, and tunnels; Ludicrous, Twitter, and Grimes. But for all of Musk’s ventures, including Tesla producing and delivering
“JB was always stoked about the idea of charging fast,” says Troy Nergaard, a former Tesla senior engineer who led Supercharger development. “We were all excited about getting power into the car quickly, if the battery could accept it.” On the morning of September 24, 2012, Nergaard’s engineering team set out from Folsom, near Sacramento, in a pair of Model S cars. It was history’s first fast-charging long-distance EV road trip, likeminus explosions. “It was so fun to see it function in the wild for the first time,” Nergaard says. That afternoon, the team rolled into Tesla’s design center in Hawthorne, near Los Angeles, in time for Musk’s public reveal of the network.
So why didn’t other automakers build or fund their own networks or cut some partnership with Tesla? Martin Eberhard, who co-founded Tesla in 2003—before Musk notoriously forced him out in 2007—suggests a few reasons. Volkswagen’s German EV department, where he worked post-Tesla, was a Siberia for engineering “losers,” he says. They were tasked with making dreadful compliance cars to help the company prove the pointlessness of EVs, in Eberhard’s view.
Ford has taken matters into its own hands, sending teams of “Charge Angels” to test stations, diagnose issues, and nudge partners to fix them, pronto. The initiative underscores vulnerabilities for automakers that don’t build and operate their own networks.
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