Tesla Shows How Prefabricated Supercharger Units Save Time, Costs

The fully assembled Supercharger sites come with stalls mounted on a concrete slab and grid connectivity-ready electrical components.

Photo by: Tesla

By: Dan Mihalascu

Mar 17, 2023 at 9:24am ET

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Tesla shared new details about the Prefabricated Supercharger Units (PSUs) it makes at its plant in Buffalo, New York.

In a series of tweets accompanied by a short video and photos, the EV maker explained that PSUs are fully assembled Supercharger sites that come with stalls mounted on a concrete slab and electrical components prepared for grid connectivity.

This enables the company to get new Supercharger sites up and running significantly faster, reducing the time needed for construction to days instead of weeks. Obviously, this helps Tesla develop its Supercharger infrastructure much faster than competitors.

As of November 2022, Tesla said it had 40,000 Superchargers at over 4,000 different locations around the world, making it the largest global DC fast-charging network. The company pledged to add over 10,000 Superchargers this year.

US President Joe Biden recently commended Tesla for its role in the administration's target to have a national network of 500,000 chargers by 2030. Roughly 17,000 Tesla Superchargers are active in the United States.

More than half of the 40,000+ Superchargers around the world were made at the Buffalo plant by a team of 2,000 employees. They are now also building Prefabricated Supercharger Units (PSUs) using V3 Superchargers.

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Earlier this month at Tesla's Investor Day, Rebecca Tinucci, the company's head of charging infrastructure teams, mentioned briefly Giga New York's PSUs.

"We have extended our excellence in manufacturing to how we build Supercharger sites. We are pre-building four post Supercharger units at [Gigafactory New York]. We load them on a truck, we truck them to side, then we crane them into position."

She also revealed that Tesla saves 15 percent on deployment costs thanks to PSUs, in addition to the shorter installation time.

Tesla's tweets got a huge amount of attention, with Munro Live chiming in and asking if they can tear one Prefabricated Supercharger Unit down. At the time this article was published, the EV maker had not replied.

In one of the tweets, Tesla also said Giga New York is also making the next generation Superchargers – the V4 – and Semi chargers. Tesla reportedly plans to build prefabricated units at least for some of the V4 Superchargers, but it is yet to make an official announcement.