Tesla is replacing Superchargers torched by protestors in two days as their prefab production may come in handy

When Elon Musk faced a demand slump and rising costs at Tesla last spring, he trimmed more than 10% of its staff to keep expenditures in check.

This included people from the Supercharger network department that is responsible for new station installations and the upkeep of existing ones. Musk, however, wasn't happy with the scale of the layoffs there, and when he got pushback from the department head Rebecca Tinucci, fired the whole 500-strong Supercharger team.

"Tesla still plans to grow the Supercharger network, just at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on 100% uptime and expansion of existing locations," said Musk at the time.

As these things go lately, he then rehired a big part of the Supercharger team, though Rebecca went to work for Uber.

Tesla may now need all the Supercharger network maintenance staff it has on hand, it seems, as Elon Musk's political activism has brought a lot of vandalism incidents to Tesla charging stations and showrooms.

Tesla has now pledged to replace any torched Superchargers in under 48 hours, and, if there is larger damage, the prefab concept created by the Tesla Giga New York team in Buffalo will be coming in handy. Called Prefabricated Supercharger Units, or PSUs, it includes multiple piles that come already mounted on a common concrete foundation with all the electrical wiring done, ready for connection to the grid.

"This helps us to get new sites up & running significantly faster - enabling construction to be completed within days, not weeks," said Tesla at the time, and the PSU approach now comes in handy at a time when Tesla is facing increasing threats from vandalism.

Previously, it just had to deal with having Supercharger cables often cut, whether as an anti-EV protest, or simply to take the copper inside and sell it. It dealt with the cable cutting issue by stamping its logo on them so that they couldn't be resold, but now that activists are directly torching Supercharger stations, Tesla needs to replace more than just cables.

When the first Tesla Supercharger station went up in flames in Littleton, Massachusetts during the night of March 3, for instance, Tesla had the damaged piles replaced by March 5 when owners could come and charge their cars as usual.

Thus, the same PSU production concept that allows it to expand the Supercharger network much faster and up to 70% cheaper than the competition, may now serve Tesla well to keep its Supercharger stations up and running amidst the current vandalism challenge.

Get the 80A Tesla Gen 2 Wall Connector with 24' cable on Amazon