EVwire brief: Tesla is piloting a new dynamic waitlist feature at select Supercharger stations, designed to automatically organize charging queues during peak periods.
The pilot is currently live at five high-traffic locations across California and New York: Los Gatos, Mountain View, San Francisco, and San Jose in California, and the Bronx in New York.
Drivers can join the waitlist directly through their vehicle's touchscreen or the Tesla mobile app.
Tesla Charging shared the news on X alongside a short video of the feature in action, and is actively collecting driver feedback during the test phase.
Context:
The feature is aimed at reducing the informal, and at times awkward, queue management that happens when Supercharger stations fill up.
Instead of drivers eyeballing who arrived first, Tesla's software automatically assigns a position in the queue and directs each driver to a specific stall once one opens up. Drivers can also leave their vehicles instead of waiting inside.
Tesla Senior Director of Charging Max de Zegher noted that overall Supercharger wait times have improved in recent years thanks to larger stations, rapid network expansion, and better trip-planning software, but surge events like holidays can still create temporary bottlenecks.
He also shared an image of how Tesla drivers have typically handled Supercharger queues manually.
It works, sure. But it's pretty rudimentary.
The waitlist feature is also expected to extend to non-Tesla EVs that access the Supercharger network via the Tesla app.
Tesla's charging ecosystem does the heavy lifting here
The waitlist system is a quiet demonstration of what Tesla's vertical integration actually looks like in practice.
Because Tesla controls the vehicle software, charging hardware, mobile app, and routing systems under one roof, features like dynamic waitlist are relatively straightforward to deploy.
Tesla could easily detect the arriving vehicle, assign a queue position, estimate the wait, and direct the vehicle to a stall. All of it is done through in-house software.
Tesla described this as an early test, though a broader rollout is possible if feedback is positive.
Source: Tesla Charging and Max de Zegher on X
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