Over the last couple of weeks, the EV charging industry and drivers have seen headlines around Tesla making its entire EV charging team redundant and the lack of clarity over its future plans and current projects.
However, at least one new project in Australia continues to be fitted out at Springwood, Queensland, with work on installing the facility shared on a Facebook group by Craig O and reshared on X by Charles G, an avid reader of The Driven.Ā
This time around it appears to be a six-supercharger stall site in a shopping centre car park south of Brisbane.Ā
Each of the stalls is capable of 250 kW of DC fast charging and all stalls are tucked away next to a wall. 5 stalls are parallel to the car park itself while one is perpendicular.
@LudicrousFeed @Rizflip @teslaownersau First sign of new activity in Australia since the mass sacking!
— ā”chuqtas (@chuqtas) May 19, 2024
The site is close access to the M1 motorway en route to the Gold Coast and northern New South Wales. Heading in the other direction, the M1 leads to Brisbane and other arterials heading further north or west of Brisbane.
Just over 12 months ago, Tesla opened a new site 8 km northwest of Springwood at a shopping centre in Rochedale. This was well received by many owners and now Tesla is doubling down to serve the growing number of EVs in southeast Queensland.
This is positive news after reports surfaced in early May stating that Tesla was to slow down the rollout of its Supercharger network to save costs. Part of this measure was the key executives and hundreds more employees being made redundant globally.
Since then the companyās CEO, Elon Musk clarified the status of the rollout in 2024 and beyond. Less than a fortnight ago, the company vowed to complete its current charging station contracts and invest over $US500 million into the network this year alone.
Just to reiterate: Tesla will spend well over $500M expanding our Supercharger network to create thousands of NEW chargers this year.
Thatās just on new sites and expansions, not counting operations costs, which are much higher.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 10, 2024
The Springwood development appears to be confirmation that Tesla will be honouring its Supercharger commitment in Australia, although how much the company grows its network in the future remains to be seen.
RizĀ is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.