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Tesla is eliminating its entire 500-person Supercharging team, which has a major presence at the company’s Buffalo factory, reports said.
Tesla plans to cut another 26 jobs at its Buffalo factory after the company decided earlier this week to disband its Supercharging unit that had most of its production based at the South Park Avenue factory.
The latest job cuts, which are on top of 285 positions that were eliminated at the local plant in cutbacks announced last month, are only a modest part of the 500 jobs that Tesla is eliminating companywide by disbanding its Supercharging operations.
Tesla disclosed the job cuts in a filing with the state Labor Department on Thursday. The company said the job cuts would begin at the end of July.
Combined with the previously announced job cuts, Tesla is cutting 311 positions in Buffalo – slightly more than 15% of its local workforce. The impact of Tesla’s job cutting program – which aims to reduce the company’s headcount by 10% – is more severe at the Buffalo plant than it is across the company.
But even with the announced job cuts, the company still will employ around 1,714 workers, comfortably more than the 1,460 employees that Tesla needs to maintain at the Buffalo factory to avoid paying a $41.2 million penalty to the state, which spent $958 million in taxpayer money to build and partially equip the local plant.
“Empire State Development is monitoring the situation and will work closely with our partners at the New York State Department of Labor to ensure that any impacted workers in New York receive resources and assistance,” said Pamm Lent, a spokesperson for the state economic development agency.
The Supercharging business is a significant part of the Buffalo plant’s operations, but because most of it is focused on production, the initial impact of the disbandment is largely occurring elsewhere.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Monday on X, formerly Twitter, that Tesla still planned to continue installing Superchargers, but would slow the pace of those installations.
“Tesla still plans to grow the Supercharger network, just at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on 100% uptime and expansion of existing locations,” Musk posted. “Sites under construction will be completed and we will add additional Superchargers anywhere where there are gaps.”
The Supercharging job cuts are in addition to the 14,000 jobs that Tesla said two weeks ago it was eliminating among its 140,000-person workforce after its electric vehicle sales slumped during the first quarter and Musk said the company’s costs had grown too much after years of rapid growth.
Tesla’s decision to disband the Supercharging business surprised analysts and caught the auto industry by surprise. Most of the other automakers that sell electric vehicles in the U.S. have agreed to join Tesla’s Supercharger network, which is the biggest in the nation.
“Tesla is aiming to adjust its capital expenditures investment and operating expenses to match a period of slower revenue, profit, and free cash flow growth over the next couple of years,” Morningstar Inc. analyst Seth Golodstein said in a note to investors.
“Initially, building out a supercharging network helped Tesla ease consumer road trip anxiety, particularly for early adopters in the U.S. and Europe,” Goldstein said.
“However, now that Tesla’s North American Charging Standard is the defacto charging standard in North America, we no longer see a competitive advantage from Tesla’s superchargers as most other U.S. EVs will be able to charge on Tesla chargers by 2025,” Goldstein said. “Going forward, we expect the majority of new superchargers built to come from other EV charging companies.”
If that happens, it still could have long-term implications for the Buffalo factory, where the Supercharging work has become a key source of local jobs after it has failed to become the hub for solar panel production that state officials originally envisioned.
The Supercharging work had given the Buffalo factory what was seen as a stable – and growing – source of work as more people bought electric vehicles and there was a growing need to build out a nationwide network of charging stations.
Tesla has been rapidly expanding its Supercharger network, which spans nearly 6.250 sites and includes more than 57,500 charging connection. Both grew at an annual rate of more than 25% over the past year.
But if Tesla slows its Supercharger installations in the coming months and years, that could change.
The company last year began making a new version of its Supercharger in Buffalo that could be prefabricated in Buffalo and then shipped to sites – a process that company officials said made them about 15% cheaper to install and reduced installation time to a few days.
Tesla also does power electronics production in Buffalo that makes components that increase energy density and allow for faster vehicle charging times while minimizing the size, weight and heat produced during charging, the company said in its annual report to state officials in February. It also makes adapters that allow electric vehicles with a different charging plug to use Tesla’s Superchargers.
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It has been a tough year at Tesla, with its stock sliding more than 40% amid slumping sales, confusing product decisions and more price cuts. …
Tesla is eliminating its entire 500-person Supercharging team, which has a major presence at the company’s Buffalo factory, reports said.
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