Automakers form EV group; Tesla’s ‘Diversion Team’ revealed

In an apparent effort to compete with Tesla in the electric vehicle (EV) marketplace, a group of seven major automakers announced they are forming a new company. The company aims to roll out 30,000 chargers in North America.

Automakers involved in this new joint venture include:

• General Motors.
• Stellantis.
• Hyundai.
• Kia.
• Honda.
• BMW.
• Mercedes Benz.

A name for the venture was not announced. The automakers also did not specify how much they would invest individually or collectively.

For perspective, one charging station can cost anywhere from from less than $100,000 to more than $200,000 to build. Industry executives familiar with the cost of chargers said establishing this venture could cost multiple billions of dollars.

“The investment will be far less through this partnership than building individual charging networks,” Akshay Singh, a partner at consultancy PwC Strategy&, said. “They also get to control the customer experience and collect data.”

The White House supported the move by automakers to form the EV group in order to compete with Tesla. The Biden administration set a goal of having 500,000 chargers in the United States by 2030.

“That’s progress.  That’s going to help middle-class families,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at her daily briefing on Wednesday, July 26. “This is part of Bidenomics, as you hear us talk about. It’s creating new union jobs for installation and maintenance.”

Tesla, which accounted for more than 60% of U.S. EV sales in 2022, has the largest network of fast-chargers with almost 18,000 Superchargers. The company said it would open part of its charging network to EVs from rivals in order to be eligible for a share $7.5 billion in federal subsidies.

While Tesla is still the undisputed leader in EVs, the company may have a controversy on its hands. A new report from Reuters found Tesla rigged its vehicles’ dashboards to overestimate how far drivers could go before they need to recharge. The report cited the story of Alexandre Ponsin, a Tesla vehicle owner who noticed he would get less than half the range his car told him he had at times.

“Ponsin contacted Tesla and booked a service appointment in California. He later received two text messages, telling him that ‘remote diagnostics’ had determined his battery was fine, and then: ‘We would like to cancel your visit,'” the report read. “What Ponsin didn’t know was that Tesla employees had been instructed to thwart any customers complaining about poor driving range from bringing their vehicles in for service. Last summer, the company quietly created a ‘Diversion Team’ in Las Vegas to cancel as many range-related appointments as possible.”

Neither Tesla nor CEO Elon Musk responded to Reuters’ request for comment on the report.