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 12 months 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 only some 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 companies that work with Tesla, have refused to cooperate with the corporate in assist of the strike.
Now, a kind of sympathy strikes is de facto 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 strain to carry them to the negotiation desk, and throughout the holidays, it’s leading to extraordinarily lengthy strains on the working Supercharger stations, as some posted on X (Nicklas Nilsso):
We’ve seen lengthy wait strains at Tesla Superchargers earlier than, however I feel this may 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 the moment required wait occasions 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 type of “sympathy strikes” is getting fairly impactful As forecasted, Swedish EV drivers are struggling and EV infrastructure is just not 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 may even proceed to speculate and construct websites for Swedish EV drivers, together with extra capability in Malung, Käppen, Vansbro, Idre, Särna, and Sunne. We admire 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 dealing with rising union pushbacks in Germany.
Electrek’s Take
That’s a bummer. As de Zegher says, wait strains at chargers are usually not an ideal 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 quite than an precise downside with EVs.
Now, in fact, Tesla blames it on the unions, and the unions blame it on Tesla for not participating with them.
Can’t we simply all be mates?
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