The Division of Transportation introduced Friday one other $636 million in funding that shall be awarded to 49 candidates for electric-vehicle charging infrastructure — and Tesla’s utility for practically $100 million to fund a big-rig charging hall was as soon as once more handed over.
Tesla’s identify was not among the many listing of recipients launched, and its accomplice on the mission, California’s South Coast Air High quality Administration District, confirmed to TechCrunch the corporate had utilized for this spherical.
The snub comes as Tesla has struggled to get its electrical huge rig program up and working. The corporate has delivered some early variations of the so-called Tesla Semi to prospects like Pepsi and Frito-Lay. However its bigger industrial program has but to materialize. The corporate remains to be developing a facility in Nevada the place it plans to construct its electrical semi truck, which was revealed in 2017.
Tesla first requested the funding in 2023 from what’s often known as the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) program, a part of a bipartisan infrastructure deal that President Biden signed into regulation in 2021. On the time, the corporate hoped to make use of that funding, together with $24 million of its personal cash, to construct 9 electrical semi-truck charging stations between its former headquarters in northern California to the southern border of Texas.
Every of these stations was alleged to be outfitted with eight 750kW chargers for the Tesla Semi, and 4 different chargers that might be open to different electrical vans — a requirement for federal funding.
The mission, formally referred to as “Transport Electrification Supporting Semis Operating in Arizona, California, and Texas,” or TESSERACT, was handed over in early 2024 when the Division of Transportation’s Federal Freeway Administration (FHWA) introduced the primary spherical of CFI awards. That first spherical noticed $623 million in funding go to 47 candidates.
The FHWA doled out one other $521 million to 51 candidates pulled from the identical pool in August 2024. The company additionally started accepting purposes for a brand new spherical of funding in mid-2024.
Tesla continued pursuing the charging hall concept even after being omitted of the primary spherical, TechCrunch reported in April 2024. Former coverage VP Rohan Patel stated on the time that a few of the websites alongside the 1,800-mile route had been “no-brainers even without funding.”
The standing of Challenge TESSERACT was unclear following that, although, as Tesla laid off greater than 10% of its workforce and, specifically, gutted its charging group.
There may theoretically be one other spherical of CFI funds out there, because the bipartisan infrastructure regulation allotted $2.5 billion for this system. The FHWA’s web site for the CFI program at present says there may be “[n]o estimated date” for the subsequent “notice of funding opportunity,” although, and it’s unclear what impact the incoming Trump administration’s priorities could have on packages like this.
