The Department of Transportation was announced On Friday another $636 million in funding to be given to 49 applicants for electric vehicle charging infrastructure — and Tesla’s application for nearly $100 million in funding for a big rig charging corridor was again scrapped.
Tesla’s name was not among the list of recipients released, and its project partner, the California South Coast Air Quality Management District, confirmed to TechCrunch that the company had applied for this round.
The setback comes as Tesla struggles to get its electric big rig program off the ground. The company has delivered some early versions of the so-called Tesla Semi to customers such as Pepsi and Frito-Lay. But his biggest commercial project has yet to materialize. The company is still building a facility in Nevada where it plans to build its electric pickup truck, which was unveiled in 2017.
Tesla first requested funding in 2023 from what is known as the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) program, part of a bipartisan infrastructure deal that President Biden had signed into law in 2021. At the time, the company hoped to use that funding, along with $24 million of its own money, to build nine electric pickup truck charging stations between its former headquarters in northern California to the southern Texas border.
Each of those stations was supposed to be equipped with eight 750 kW chargers for the Tesla Semi and four other chargers that would be open to other electric trucks — a requirement for federal funding.
The project, officially called “Transport Electrification Supporting Semis Operating in Arizona, California, and Texas,” or TESSERACT, was abandoned in early 2024 when the Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) announced the first round of CFI awards. The first round saw $623 million in funding to 47 applicants.
FHWA awarded another $521 million to 51 applicants who withdrew from the same group in August 2024. The agency also began accepting applications for a new round of funding in mid-2024.
Tesla continued to pursue the charging corridor idea even after it dropped out of the first round, TechCrunch reported in April 2024. Former vice president of policy Rohan Patel said at the time that some of the locations along the 1,800-mile route were “indifferent even without funding.”
The status of Project TESSERACT was unclear after that, however, as Tesla laid off more than 10% of its workforce and, in particular, disbanded the charging team.
There could theoretically be another round of CFI funds, as the bipartisan infrastructure law earmarked $2.5 billion for the program. The FHWA website for the CFI program currently says there is “[n]o estimated date” for the next “funding opportunity notification,” however, and it’s unclear what effect the incoming Trump administration’s priorities will have on programs like this one.
