Tesla Reveals Unlimited Overnight Charging Plan And Wireless Car Charger
Tesla wants to incentivize its customers to use renewable energy, and one of the ways it plans to do this is with a highly affordable unlimited home charging plan ... though it'll only be made available to certain Tesla owners, at least for the foreseeable future. The EV maker announced the upcoming subscription option during the Tesla Investor Day 2023 event on March 1, revealing it alongside some other key details about the company's future as well as its ambitious "master plan" for pushing the global market to electrification.
Among the highlights from the presentation was an announcement that the next Gigafactory will be built near Monterrey, Mexico, and that it will build future Tesla EVs based on the company's newly detailed next-generation car platform. According to details provided by Musk and others at Tesla who participated in the presentation, the next-generation platform will bring some key changes to the Tesla lineup, including a smaller, lighter, more efficient, and more affordable architecture, paving the way for Tesla EV models that don't cost as much as the current-generation roster.
Tesla customers in Texas will soon have an unlimited home charging option
As a quick aside during the lengthy presentation, Tesla announced that its customers in Texas will get access to an optional $30 per month unlimited home charging plan starting in or around July 2023. The plan will specifically involve unlimited charging overnight at one's home, with the automaker noting that the state "has a ton of land" and that "the wind blows at night." By offering this affordable unlimited offering, Tesla hopes to encourage its customers to charge their EVs at home during the nighttime hours using renewable energy, ultimately representing one step of many in the societal shift toward greener options.
Tesla made it clear that this is just part of a wider plan to incentivize Tesla ownership and the use of green energy in general, though whether it will ever make its way to your own market remains to be seen. In this case, the company is able to offer the deal because of the huge quantity of inexpensive electricity generated by windmills in the state. The concept of incentivizing customers to offload resource consumption to more ideal times isn't new, of course — Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet service will soon implement a daytime data cap but allow for unlimited overnight downloading, for example.
Tesla may have teased wireless EV charging, too
As they say, blink and you'll miss it. Around the same time Tesla announced the overnight charging plan, it also showed an image of a Tesla parked in a home garage. Give it a second look and you'll notice the slim, shiny charger mounted on the wall — look again, and you may also notice what appears to be a wireless charging pad on the ground underneath the electric vehicle. The image was presented under the caption, "Can't forget to do cool sh*t," indicating that it's a concept image representing one of the cool things that may be made available to Tesla owners in the future.
The idea behind wireless charging is that rather than having to get out of your car, grab the charger, and plug it in, you can simply pull your EV into the garage like usual and go about your business, no additional effort required. Because the charging mat is located below the car, the vehicle will automatically start charging wirelessly when the vehicle is parked over it. This, of course, would be a far less creepy alternative to a different idea Tesla explored: a robot charger that autonomously moves in a serpentine fashion to connect itself with the vehicle, all the while triggering the idea of parasitic infestation in the more primitive parts of the human mind.