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Department of Transport announcement Another $636 million in funding that will be awarded to 49 applicants for electric-vehicle charging infrastructure — and Tesla’s application for nearly $100 million to fund a big-rig charging corridor — were again passed on Friday.
Tesla was not among the published list of recipients, and the project’s partner, California’s South Coast Air Quality Management District, confirmed to TechCrunch that the company applied for this round.
The snub comes as Tesla has struggled to get its electric Big Rig program up and running. The company has delivered some Early version The so-called Tesla Semi to customers like Pepsi and Frito-Lay. But its larger commercial program is yet to materialize. The company is still building a facility in Nevada where it plans to build its electric semi truck, which was released in 2017.
Tesla first launched what’s known as the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) program in 2023, part of a bipartisan infrastructure deal that requested funding from President Biden. Signed into law in 2021. At the time, the company, along with $24 million of its own money, was hoping to use that funding to build nine electric semi-truck charging stations from its former headquarters in Northern California to the southern border of Texas.
Each of those stations was supposed to be equipped with eight 750kW chargers for Tesla Semis and four chargers that would be open to other electric trucks — a requirement for federal funding.
The project, officially known as “Transportation Electrification Supporting Semis Operating in Arizona, California and Texas,” or TESSERACT. Passed in early 2024 When the Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) announced the first round of CFI awards. That first round awarded $623 million in funding to 47 applicants.
FHWA awarded another $521 million to 51 consecutive applicants from the same pool In August 2024. The agency began accepting applications for the new round of funding in mid-2024.
Tesla is continuing the charging corridor concept after being eliminated from the first round, TechCrunch reports Report In April 2024. Former policy VP Rohan Patel said at the time that some sites along the 1,800-mile route “were a no-brainer without funding.”
The status of Project TESSERACT was unclear, although Tesla had laid off more than 10% of its workforce and, in particular, Its charging decimated the team.
Another round of CFI funding could theoretically be available, since bipartisan infrastructure legislation appropriated $2.5 billion for the program. of the FHWA website The CFI program currently states that “[n]Estimated dates for the next “Notice of Funding Opportunity,” though, and it’s unclear what impact the incoming Trump administration’s priorities will have on such programs.
