Tesla CEO Elon Musk and several other auto industry leaders, like GM’s Mary Barra, met with the Biden administration regarding electric vehicle charging infrastructure, according to a new release from the Department of Transport.
Last year, Tesla and Musk weren’t invited to a meeting on the US auto industry at the white house regarding electrification.
Musk took it personally and made several comments about President Biden and his administration, including personal insults to the president. Biden wouldn’t even mention Tesla or Musk after that.
Things escalated when Biden made the undoubtedly ridiculous statement that gave GM CEO Mary Barra credit for “electrifying the entire auto industry” despite Tesla being responsible for about 80% of electric vehicles in the US.
Finally, the situation appeared to have calmed down when Biden finally acknowledged Tesla as “America’s largest EV maker” in a speech earlier this year.
Both Musk and the administration have since made comments that indicated that they would be willing to meet.
It finally happened yesterday as the Department of Transport released a statement confirming that Musk attended a meeting on electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg led the meeting along with several other DOT officials, and most of the auto industry leadership in the US was present, including Barra, Ford CEO Jim Farley, and leaders of smaller EV startups like Lucid’s Peter Rawlinson.
It appears that they mostly discussed the government’s $7.5 billion investment in EV infrastructure and how the program is going to work.
According to a press release, “there was broad consensus that charging stations and vehicles need to be interoperable and provide a seamless user experience, no matter what car you drive or where you charge your EV.”
As we previously reported, the program already made clear that automaker benefiting from the financing will need to build charging stations that can be used by electric vehicles from more than one automaker.
This is not a problem for most automakers since they have almost all adopted the CCS standard in North America, except for Tesla, which uses its own proprietery plug for its Supercharger network.
However, Tesla has indicated that it plans to open up the network to other electric vehicles in the near future and it already started a pilot program to do that in Europe.
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