Tesla cars have rear charging port because of Elon Musk's rented garage

Elon Musk worried that he could trip over the Model S charging cable in his rented garage if the NACS port was at the front left of the electric vehicle as originally intended, so he instructed Tesla's engineers to move it to the rear.

This shining example of Elon overruling his disciples for a personal reason sounds straight out of Apple's Steve Jobs playbook, and comes directly from Lucid's CEO Rawlinson who worked as a lead engineer at Tesla before leaving to turn his own EV vision into reality.

He has since proved his mettle, crafting some of the most premium and efficient electric cars out there, like the new Gravity SUV that can go 40% longer on a charge than Tesla's Cybertruck with the same battery capacity.

Said Gravity was also the first non-Tesla vehicle with a NACS charging port that just got access to the Supercharger network and, surprise, surprise, Lucid put the port at the rear left corner so that the relatively short cable of the V3 Superchargers can reach it.

Originally, Rawlinson argued for a Model S charging port placement at the front, since most Americans don't bother backing up into a parking spot like Europeans are urged to in driving school. For the front, Tesla engineers chose a spot between the wheel well and the driver's door, so that the driver wouldn't have to go around the car to plug in.

They didn't want to put the charging port at the very front under the brand logo, though, as that spot is vulnerable, and even the most mundane of collisions could've rendered the port inoperable.

Elon Musk, however, balked at the front placement, as he thought that he couldn't walk over the charging cable in the garage of the LA house he was renting at the time:

He said it's going to be on the rear because he could trip over the cable. He was renting the property, and he didn't even own the place, but we put the charge port on the Model S on the left-hand rear because of the layout of his rented garage in Bel Air! Because of that, every Tesla charger across the land you have to reverse into because the charge port's in the rear, which is just nutty... So now we've put our charge portion on the left rear of Gravity to be compatible.

With most major EV makers gaining access to the Supercharger network and the Tesla NACS ports becoming the de facto charging standard, rear port placements will become increasingly common, despite that Tesla is rolling out upgraded V4 stations that are not only more powerful, but also offer longer cables that run on the outside of the pile.

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