Print Tesla Inc. promised to drop the wall on its so-called charging “walled garden” two years ago, making its Superchargers accessible to all EVs. In turn, virtually every brand in the auto industry pledged to put Tesla ports in its electric vehicles. Those commitments, once fulfilled, will make Tesla the standard for automobile plugs in America, particularly given Tesla’s reputation for its reliable, widespread network of EV fueling stations. But none of that is working yet for Mirriam Ferraro, a 45-year-old nurse in Chapel Hill, N.C. Ferraro regularly drives her Kia EV6 to visit her sister in Wilmington, 160 miles away. Charging stations are sparse and the nine Tesla Superchargers on the way still don’t support cars like hers. Kia has promised a Tesla charging adapter for the EV6, but it won’t ship until January. Many carmakers are waiting for Tesla to send them adapters, so they can deploy them to their customers. When it does ship, Ferraro will have to pay for it. Advertisement California receives $150 million for thousands of EV charging ports The funding from the Department of Transportation is part of a $521-million infrastructure package awarded to 29 states, eight federally recognized tribes and the District of Columbia. Aug. 27, 2024 “It will be worth it,” she says. “I absolutely love the car, but it’s definitely limited my travel.” Tesla “invited” other brands to adopt its charging port in late 2022. A few months later, it went a step further, promising to retrofit its stations for Chevys, Fords and other brands of electric vehicles that didn’t have a Tesla port, though it never provided a timeline. That month it started installing something dubbed the Magic Dock, a sleek retrofit that worked for cars that didn’t have a Tesla port or adapter. Yet today, only about 100 of the company’s 2,500 or so U.S. Supercharger stations feature the Magic Dock, according to a Bloomberg Green analysis. Huge swathes of the country are still off the Tesla charging map, with nary a retrofitted Supercharger in site for more than half of all states. And there seems to be little rhyme or reason behind the Magic Dock rollout. California, far and away the country’s EV leader, only has five stations with the adapters, while Florida, another electric hotspot, has a single Supercharger converted. Texas leads the country with 20 Magic Docks and they’re around every corner in New Jersey, but Oregonians are out of luck. What’s more, many of the Magic Docks were taken offline this fall. Advertisement “Tesla has not kept its promise,” said Conrad Layson, a senior analyst at AutoForecast Solutions LLC. “Tesla has given no reason for the delay in deploying more Magic Docks. Nor have they commented on [the] inability to follow-through on their promise.” The company also did not respond to interview requests for this article. In truth, Tesla hasn’t seemed too concerned about improving Supercharging for Teslas, let alone other kinds of vehicles. In April, Tesla fired its nearly 500 employees who worked on Supercharging. Some were eventually rehired. There still aren’t enough people to keep the system up and running, according to Layson. Starting next year, virtually every brand of electric vehicle will roll out of the factory with a Tesla port — dubbed the North American Charging Standard, or NACS. In the meantime, there is a huge crowd of drivers like Ferraro who bought too early to get a Tesla port and are scrambling for adapters, which are expensive and have been delayed, largely because Tesla is handling that hardware as well. Advertisement The loss of so many Supercharger workers at Tesla “certainly didn’t help,” said Brent Gruber, executive director of the EV practice at J.D. Power. “A lot of those people were working with these other auto manufacturers on these transitions.”