Telsa and Ford today made an announcement that many Tesla owners have been dreading. In a Twitter Spaces talk, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his counterpart Jim Farley said that starting next spring all current and future Ford electric vehicles will get access to about 12,000 Tesla Supercharger stations in North America.
The move helps Tesla qualify for a share of billions of federal dollars on offer to improve the experience of charging electric vehicles in America, and will make life easier for Ford EV owners. For Tesla customers, however, it could mean longer wait times at charging stations—even as many have already complained about congestion at them.
“That’s the one thing that concerns me—whether it might add to congestion,” John Sergeant, a Tesla owner in Seattle, told the Wall Street Journal in February. He added that even without non-Teslas taking up coveted spaces, “they really need to put more superchargers in.”
Not that Musk hasn’t indicated the day would come. He signaled a few years ago that his carmaker would eventually open its network to others. Then in February, the White announced a “set of actions aimed at creating a convenient, reliable and Made-in-America electric vehicle (EV) charging network so that the great American road trip can be electrified,” as part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s $7.5 billion investment in EV charging.
The White House said that Tesla would for the first time “open a portion of its U.S. Supercharger and Destination Charger network to non-Tesla EVs, making at
