EV giant Tesla Inc. TSLA took to social media platform X earlier this week to warn customers against putting wet towels on supercharger cable handles to speed up charging their EVs.
What Happened: Placing a wet cloth on supercharger handles does not increase charging speed but instead increases risks of overheating or damage as it interferes with temperature monitors, Tesla said.
“Please refrain from doing this so our systems can run correctly, and true charging issues can be detected by our systems,” Tesla wrote via its handle dedicated to charging updates.
The company was responding to the hack of cooling charging cables with wet cloths to enable faster charging doing the rounds again on social media ahead of the summer.
Tesla’s charger slows down charging pace on sensing excess temperature as in summers when the sun heats the cable and putting a wet towel on the cable helps bring this temperature down, thereby allowing a higher charging rate, proponents of the hack believe.
Why It Matters: Earlier this week, Tesla said that the company had 59,596 supercharger connectors around the globe as of the end of the second quarter, or 24% more than the corresponding quarter of 2023.
The growth rate of superchargers, however, has slowed significantly since the company announced plans to lay off 10% of its global workforce in April. The layoffs impacted 500 members of the supercharging team and Rebecca Tinucci, Tesla's then Senior Director of Charging Infrastructure, left the company.
Superchargers grew only 3.5% from the end of the first quarter to the second, significantly lower than the quarter-on-quarter growth of 7.4% in the number of superchargers recorded through the fourth quarter. Even through the first quarter of 2024, supercharger numbers grew by 4.9%.
However, the company will invest $500 million in expanding the supercharger network this year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at the company’s annual shareholder meeting last month, while also keeping an eye on capital efficiency and the places they are deployed.
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