Happy Friday! It’s June 28, 2024, and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. Here are the important stories you need to know. Walter Isaacson On Elon Musk(s) 1st Gear: Ram Good, Dodge Bad: JD Power JD Power’s latest Initial Quality Study … Read more
Image: Mark J. Terrill (AP) After some years, the automotive industry finally came together to agree on the automotive equivalent of the USB: the North American Charging Standard. Essentially everyone fell in line and agreed to use Tesla as the standard since the brand has an impressive network of Supercharging stations. While some brands have … Read more
Tesla’s charge port has become the North American Charging Standard (NACS), but what does it take for non-Tesla owners to take advantage of the brand’s ubiquitous Supercharger network? Online retailers like Amazon are full of NACS adapters that look like they would allow non-Tesla EVs to charge at Tesla Superchargers, but unfortunately none of these … Read more
The future of EV charging hinges on the Supercharger network department at Tesla. Unfortunately that entire department was fired in sweeping layoffs from company CEO Elon Musk last week. The world of electric vehicles was upended perhaps forever in 2023 when Musk’s coup to turn the once-proprietary Tesla charging plug into the soon-to-be-ubiquitous North American … Read more
Image: Hauke-Christian Dittrich (AP) Tesla’s latest round of layoffs have left both the auto industry and company stock holders shook. Falling sales have forced the automaker to cut 10 percent of its total staff. Its left broadsided workers confused as they try to make heads or tails of severance packages that look to be pretty … Read more
Things are not going well at Tesla right now. The stock is down more than $100 per share year-to-date, as many as 20,000 people are set to lose their jobs, the Cybertruck keeps breaking, operating profit is expected to be down 40 percent when it’s announced later today and the $25,000 electric vehicle that Tesla … Read more
America has a charging problem. It’s pretty common to have to drive several miles off your route, only to find that half the chargers don’t work, and the ones that do are charging much slower than they’re rated to. Now that everyone’s switched to Tesla’s North American Charging Standard, that should definitely make things easier, … Read more
Charging in the U.S. sucks. It’s getting better thanks to some massive new investments, but it’s still incredibly common to show up at a charge site and find the only available charger is broken. The Tesla Supercharger network is currently the best in the business, which helps explain why every automaker decided to switch to … Read more
Image: Voltpost Perhaps the largest hurdle for adoption of electric vehicles in the U.S. market right now is a lack of competent charging infrastructure. For those of us in a living situation that has dedicated garage space, charging is hardly an issue. We pull in, plug in, and barely ever have to worry about it. … Read more
Image: Rivian Rivian R1T and R1S trucks were allowed access to the previously Tesla-only Supercharger network in mid-March, as Tesla has been slowly allowing more electric vehicles to charge on its North American Charging Standard plugs with an adapter. A new Rivian owner was given something of a chilly reception when stopping for a top … Read more
