The Department of Transportation announced on Friday that 49 applicants will receive another $636 million in funding for charging infrastructure for electric vehicles. Unfortunately, Tesla’s application for nearly $100 million to fund a charging route for big trucks was once again turned down.
While the list of winners was made public, Tesla’s name was not on it. The company’s partner on the project, California’s South Coast Air Quality Management District, told Parhlo World that Tesla had applied for this round.
Tesla has had a hard time getting its electric big rig program up and running, which is why they turned them down. A few early models of the so-called Tesla Semi have been sent to companies like Pepsi and Frito-Lay. But its bigger business plan hasn’t come together yet. It was announced in 2017 that the company was building an electric semi truck factory in Nevada. The building is still not finished.
In 2023, Tesla first asked for the money from the Charging and Fuelling Infrastructure (CFI) program. This program is part of a joint infrastructure deal that President Biden signed into law in 2021. At that time, the company planned to use that money along with $24 million of its own to build nine charging stations for electric semi-trucks from its old offices in northern California to the southern border of Texas.
For the government money to be given, each of those stations had to have eight 750kW chargers for the Tesla Semi and four other chargers that other electric trucks could use.
The project, TESSERACT, stands for “Transport Electrification Supporting Semis Operating in Arizona, California, and Texas.” It was not chosen when the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) of the Department of Transportation announced the first round of CFI awards in early 2024. 47 people who applied got $623 million in that first round.
In August 2024, the FHWA gave an extra $521 million to 51 applicants from the same group. They also started taking applications for a new round of funding in the middle of 2024.
It was claimed by Parhlo World in April 2024 that Tesla kept working on the charging corridor idea even after being turned down in the first round. At the time, Rohan Patel, who used to be VP of policy, said that some of the sites along the 1,800-mile route were “no-brainers even without funding.”
After that, though, it wasn’t clear what was going on with Project TESSERACT because Tesla fired more than 10% of its staff, including the charging team.
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The bipartisan infrastructure law set aside $2.5 billion for the CFI program, so there might be another round of cash available. On the FHWA website for the CFI program, there is currently “no estimated date” for the next “notice of funding opportunity.” It is also not clear how the goals of the new Trump administration will affect these kinds of programs.
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