Tesla has hired the product manager behind Apple Pay to lead the Supercharger experience. What improvements would you like to see?
Yesterday, Michael Rihani announced on LinkedIn that he left his position as senior product manager for Apple Card and Apple Cash at the Cupertino, California, company to join Tesla as the new product manager for “Supercharger User Experience and Strategy.”
Tesla has been praised for its Supercharger experience, which is built around the owner instead of as a profit center.
While most other automakers relied on third-party charging station companies to provide charging to its customers, Tesla decided to own the experience in order to make it as smooth as possible.
For a long time, Tesla didn’t even charge to supercharge at its stations.
Over the last few years, Tesla has started to put new vehicles, like Model 3 and Model Y, under a paid Supercharger program in order to finance the growth of the network.
With strong increases in sales in many markets, Tesla owners are experiencing some long wait times at Supercharger stations in places like Los Angeles and the Bay Area.
Another day, another long wait at the Tesla supercharger.$tsla $tslaq $sgf pic.twitter.com/OIiw0YOesZ
— Professor Lee (@MrLeeterman) December 27, 2019
The automaker has also been talking about opening up the Supercharger network to other automakers for years, but it has yet to happen.
Electrek’s Take
What do you want Tesla to improve with the Supercharger user experience? Let us know in the comment section below, as Rihani will be reading the comments.
With Rihani’s background with transactional systems, I expect he will help Tesla improve on that.
The system is already pretty simple. You just plug in, the Supercharger does a handshake with your car, and Tesla will charge the credit card affiliated with the account linked to the car.
However, I’ve seen several reports on errors in those transactions. Tesla should definitely put some work into nailing this.
As for the experience at the station, Tesla definitely needs to add stalls in many markets with dense Tesla vehicle populations.
It would be nice to have more services at Supercharger stations. At the most popular stations, things like car washes would be nice.
What do you think?
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