Tesla has thousands of Supercharger stations in construction/permit phase with new map coming, says Elon Musk

It looks like Tesla might have a surprise update to the Supercharger network, according to Elon Musk.

The CEO says that an updated map is coming as “thousands of Supercharger stations” are in the construction or permitting phase.

We just released a new report about the Tesla Supercharger network growing at a record pace in 2018 with 121 new stations in the first 4 months of the year.

At the time, we knew about roughly 100 new stations in the construction or permitting phase around the world, according to crowdsourced data by Supercharger tracker Supercharge.info.

But Musk now says that there are actually “thousands” of Supercharger stations currently in the works as Tesla might actually accelerate the already record pace at which it has been bringing online new stations this year.

He made the comment on Twitter in response to famed hacker turned security consultant Kevin Mitnick, who is now a new Tesla owner:

Yeah, there are thousands of Supercharger locations going through permitting/construction, including that area. Will publish an updated map in the next few days.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 17, 2018

It’s important to note here that Musk referred to “locations” and not “Superchargers”, which means new stations and not actual charge points.

It would represent a more than doubling of the current network, which currently consists of 1,252 stations and 9,721 Superchargers.

Tesla fell short of its goal to have 10,000 Superchargers in operation by the end of 2017, but it sounds like it could blow past that goal in 2018, according to this comment from Musk.

With the increased competition from other networks like Electrify America, Ionity, Ultra-E, and MEGA-E, it would make sense for Tesla to try to secure more locations quickly.

But it’s important to note that while stations can currently be in the construction or permitting phase, it can still take a long time for them to come online.

There are a lot of things that need to come together for Tesla to bring a Supercharger online. They need to arrange for a location with the property owner, acquire a permit with the city, ship the hardware, which is built in California, hire a contractor to install the hardware, and arrange for a connection with the electric utility.

A number of things can stall the entire process during any of those steps.

Tesla’s Supercharger team has obviously acquired a lot of experience over the years, but there are still many things outside of their control.

It will still be interesting to see where those stations are planned. We will keep an eye out for the updated map that Musk is promising.