Tesla drivers in Sweden are caught in wait strains at Superchargers stations. Tesla blames union strikes stopping them from connecting their new stations to the grid.
For greater than a yr now, Tesla service employees in Sweden have been on strike, demanding inclusion in a collective settlement.
Tesla has traditionally opposed unions and efficiently resisted unionization at its manufacturing services. Initially, this strike in Sweden appeared manageable, involving just a few dozen employees. Nevertheless, Tesla underestimated the energy of solidarity amongst Swedish employees.
Whereas the automaker managed to get across the service employees strike, it’s now feeling the influence of “sympathy strikes” from different unions in Sweden.
A number of different unions within the nation, together with port employees, electricians, and cleansing providers that work with Tesla, have refused to cooperate with the corporate in assist of the strike.
Now, a type of sympathy strikes is admittedly beginning to trigger hassle to Tesla homeowners, and different EV homeowners.
Union IF Metall used its affect to forestall Tesla from powering new Supercharger stations to place stress to convey them to the negotiation desk, and through the holidays, it’s leading to extraordinarily lengthy strains on the working Supercharger stations, as some posted on X (Nicklas Nilsso):
We’ve got seen lengthy wait strains at Tesla Superchargers earlier than, however I feel this is likely to be the longest I’ve ever seen.
The identical Tesla proprietor posted a neighborhood Supercharger map that confirmed that the overwhelming majority of stations within the nation at present required wait instances to entry a charger:
Max de Zegher, Tesla’s head of charging, commented on the state of affairs and blamed the union strikes for stopping over 100 new Superchargers from being energized:
A kind of “sympathy strikes” is getting fairly impactful As forecasted, Swedish EV drivers are struggling and EV infrastructure just isn’t maintaining except Superchargers get energized by the utilities blocking them from getting energized. Tesla Superchargers are important infrastructure, particularly for peak journey days like this. 100+ stalls in Sweden would have been energized this winter, if it wasn’t for sympathy strikes.
He added that there’s “no clear path” to fixing the state of affairs:
Regardless of no clear path but to getting turned on, we can even proceed to speculate and construct websites for Swedish EV drivers, together with extra capability in Malung, Käppen, Vansbro, Idre, Särna, and Sunne. We respect the assist from the general public to assist us get Superchargers energized asap. Ready in line like that is tremendous painful, hurts EV adoption and completely fixable!
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has taken a tough line towards unions and proven unwillingness to barter with them.
The automaker can be going through rising union pushbacks in Germany.
Electrek’s Take
That’s a bummer. As de Zegher says, wait strains at chargers should not an excellent search for EVs. The excellent news is that most individuals know the rationale for this downside on this particular case is that this union dispute moderately than an precise downside with EVs.
Now, in fact, Tesla blames it on the unions, and the unions blame it on Tesla for not partaking with them.
Can’t we simply all be pals?
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