....Tesla's job cuts are deep and across the board and geography.
....a single point of failure, what authorities don't consider in risk management
....and certainly a setback to the EV growth in the short and medium term.
....Elon Musk's action has derailed any further anticipation left that EV growth can progress without major hurdles/challenges...and you can sure bet that Trump will double down should he win the presidency. Tesla slashes jobs in Australian charging team Nick BonyhadyTechnology writer
May 10, 2024 – 11.45am
Tesla has made widespread redundancies in its Australian car-charging division and has sharply curbed plans for the rollout of its battery refuelling stations in a blow to the country’s plans for low-emission transport.
Numerous Australian staff in the charging division of Elon Musk’s electric vehicle manufacturer, which was responsible for building dozens of rapid “supercharger” stations, have disclosed their redundancies online. At least one planned charging station has been cancelled.
Tesla’s charging network is among the largest in the country, making it crucial to addressing driver fears that electric cars won’t last a trip and spurring sales.
The news: Musk began making cuts to Tesla’s then 140,000 strong workforce in mid-April because the company’s rapid growth had slowed. “With this rapid growth there has been duplication of roles and job functions in certain areas,” Musk wrote in an email to staff obtained by media outlets. He said he hated making cuts, but reducing staff “by more than 10 per cent globally” was necessary.
The head of Tesla’s charging division was laid off, along with her 500-person team, in the second week of four rounds of cuts that appear to be ongoing.
Those cuts have affected Australia. “Earlier this week ... I learned that my journey was coming to an end with the disbandment of the Tesla charging team,” wrote one Australian employee on LinkedIn.
Diving deeper: Tesla’s Australian office hasn’t commented on the layoffs, but they will hurt the rollout of its supercharger network, which numbers 83 stations. Electric vehicle industry site EFTM reported a Tesla legal representative told the owner of one lot in Victoria that was going to have chargers installed that “there will be no more supercharger sites moving forward”. Musk has said there will be more sites eventually, “just at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on 100 per cent uptime and expansion of existing locations”.
Between the lines: Tesla’s charging network was one of its great selling points. Its network started out only being available to Tesla vehicles. Now that some sites are accessible to other electric cars, Tesla owners get a discount. But Musk seems to have decided that logic no longer applies. And unlike other business leaders who make decisions haltingly, Musk tends to act fast. Witness his takeover of Twitter, where he fired the vast majority of staff and refused to pay the leases for buildings he thought no longer useful to the company.
Our take: There are a host of charging providers in Australia that will be eager to take any market share that Musk leaves behind. John Sullivan, the chief executive of Chargefox, which bills itself as the largest public charger network, says his network is cheaper than Tesla’s to use and has doubled in size over the past 12 months. “With the growth numbers on our network, I’m pretty confident our charge point operators partners on our network will take up any shortfall of new charging sites by Tesla,” Sullivan told The Breakdown via email. But Musk is not one to leave money on the table (unless it’s the consequence of his inflammatory posts) so it raises a question for the rest of the industry: what does he know that they don’t, or vice versa?
