Tesla is on the prowl for new places to build its Supercharger charging stations for their electric vehicles. The company announced on Twitter that voting would be “coming soon.”
Tesla owners rejoice, the company appears to have heard your rallying cries for increased charging infrastructure. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, Tesla is the electric vehicle company, holding a huge foothold in the market, but while Tesla has been churning out vehicles left and right, convenient public access to their chargers has been slow to follow. But no more, as Tesla is looking to hold a vote to determine the most in demand places to build a new wave of Superchargers.
The company’s charging-specific Twitter account (because that’s a thing) tweeted out: “Supercharger Voting coming soon. Reply with location suggestions – replies with the most likes will be included in the poll.”
This appears to be the first phase of a two part voting scheme, where Tesla will first solicit the most in demand areas via Twitter before finalising an official ballot. According to supercharge.info, there are currently 1,663 open Supercharger stations in the United States with 3,665 available worldwide as of September 5. For reference, a Supercharger is Tesla’s fast charger that the company claims can add 322 km worth of charge in 15 minutes.
Tesla’s have been lauded as a solution to our emission problems (if you ignore all the pollution related to the mining of precious metals to make their batteries), but as demand for Teslas has increased, it has outpaced plans for charging infrastructure. Couple that with the synergy of Tesla only letting its own cars use Tesla chargers — sort of like how you can’t charge an Android with an iPhone Lightning cable — then a true bottleneck on the path to sustainability has been created. However, there is a silver lining, as a White House memo released earlier this year indicates that Tesla will begin opening its Supercharger network to non-Tesla drivers.