Tesla Supercharger network grows at record pace in 2018 as competition heats up

Several new electric vehicle fast-charging networks are currently under construction, but Tesla’s Supercharger network is still the one to beat.

The California-based automaker is not sitting on its EV charging infrastructure lead as it has been deploying new chargers at a record pace this year.

According to the Supercharger tracker Supercharge.info, Tesla started the year with 1,124 stations around the world and it has already added 121 new stations in the first 4 months of the year.

That’s close to a new station every day, but Tesla has also been adding many new charge points to existing Supercharger stations over the last few months.

Tesla added 1,324 Superchargers to its network since the beginning of the year, which is where the company is still differentiating itself from other EV charging networks who often only deploy a few charge points per station.

Now Tesla’s new stations often have 10 or 12 charge points and the company is adding some to other stations with as many as 50 charge points.

In America, Tesla’s biggest stations have 40 stalls. The company has two of them – both located in California and one of them features a whole new concept with a lounge.

Tesla is also planning an expansion of its Fremont factory Supercharger station with 40 stalls and it has several other expansion projects, which the company is planning based on where they have a lot of Model 3 reservations and where they are already seeing a high Supercharger usage rate from the Model S and Model X fleet.

But there’s still a lot of work to be done based on Tesla’s map of planned stations – especially on the trans-Canadian route:

With this said, Tesla’s Supercharger team already secured the construction permits for a few of those stations and it looks like they are still pushing to have them up and running by the end of the year.

It doesn’t look like the pace is about to slow down with 34 more stations under construction in the US alone and over 50 around the world.

Tesla’s three world’s biggest Supercharger stations each with 50 stalls are all located in China, where the local Supercharger network has also been growing quite fast.

Rafał Michałowicz stopped by and shared a few images with Electrek of the latest 50-stall Supercharger station in the country:

Tesla is also now using revenue from the Supercharger network to build more stations.

The automaker officially introduced its paid Supercharger network access plan over a year ago, but it’s only now starting to have a greater impact since virtually only Model 3 owners are on it and the vehicle is just now starting to hit the roads in greater numbers.

Earlier this year, Tesla increased the cost of using its Supercharger stations.

In the US, Electrify America is now coming up with its own fast-charging network and in Europe, there are several new networks currently under construction, including Ionity, Ultra-E, and MEGA-E.

Tesla owners will also be able to take advantage of those stations, which often have CHAdeMO connectors, but Tesla will also be competing with the networks for the best charging station locations.