EVwire brief: Florian Reiners, the CEO and co-founder of Wiferion, the German wireless charging startup Tesla acquired in 2023, has left Tesla after three years The move might be a sign that Tesla's wireless charging work is close to being ready for rollout.
Reiners reflected on the past three years in a post on LinkedIn, stating that Wiferion had several buyers to choose from, though the company picked Tesla. For Reiners, going to Tesla allowed get back to hands-on engineering:
We had a few buyers to choose from. With most of them, my role after the merger would have come down to tuning P&Ls. At Tesla, I got to be a real engineer again and support the team in solving hard technical problems.
Many founders burn out after an acquisition. We didn't. We found people who shared our sense of purpose, a culture that felt like home from the start, and almost no politics. Looking back, I'm still a little amazed at how well it went.
Here’s Reiners’ post on LinkedIn:
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Reiners praised Tesla's engineering culture, describing the company as a workplace where a single engineer often owns work that other automakers would hand to a whole team. He also thanked Satish Thuta and AJ Booth for their leadership. He closed by saying it was time to build again, though he didn’t say what is coming next.
The timing of the exit is what caught our attention. EVwire’s Jaan pointed out a rather familiar pattern on X: key Tesla employees have exhibited a tendency to move on after completing a key project.
These include Vineet Mehta, Tesla's longtime director of battery technology and drive architecture, who left in 2025, a year after former Senior Vice President of Powertrain and Energy Engineering Drew Baglino left the company. Both worked on Tesla’s 4680 program, which, as we can see now, is already being rolled out to key vehicles like the Tesla Semi.
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Context:
Tesla bought Freiburg-based Wiferion, which built inductive charging systems for industrial robots and vehicles, in the summer of 2023 and renamed it Tesla Engineering Germany GmbH. Just months later, Tesla sold the operations and manufacturing side to Munich power supply maker Puls, which now runs it as Puls Wireless, while the engineering team stayed with Tesla. Reiners still listed himself as managing director of Tesla Engineering Germany on his way out.
Tesla's wireless charging work has started showing up in public filings. In August, two Tesla patents filed in 2024 surfaced detailing the Cybercab's inductive charging pad, including a single design that works with both 400V and 800V packs. Days later, permit documents for a robotaxi hub in south Austin showed plans for 80 wireless Cybercab chargers.
Source: Florian Reiners on LinkedIn
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