The Department of Transportation announced Friday another $636 million in funding that will be awarded to 49 applicants for electric-vehicle charging infrastructure — and Tesla’s application for nearly $100 million to fund a big-rig charging corridor was once again passed over.
Tesla’s name was not among the list of recipients released, and its partner on the project, California’s South Coast Air Quality Management District, confirmed to TechCrunch the company had applied for this round.
The snub comes as Tesla has struggled to get its electric big rig program up and running. The company has delivered some early versions of the so-called Tesla Semi to customers like Pepsi and Frito-Lay. But its larger commercial program has yet to materialize. The company is still constructing a facility in Nevada where it plans to build its electric semi truck, which was revealed in 2017.
Tesla first requested the funding in 2023 from what’s known as the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) program, part of a bipartisan infrastructure deal that President Biden signed into law in 2021. At the time, the company was hoping to use that funding, along with $24 million of its own money, to build nine electric semi-truck charging stations between its former headquarters in northern California to the southern border of Texas.
Each of those stations was supposed to be equipped with eight 750kW 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 passed over in early 2024 when the Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) announced the first round of CFI awards. That first round saw $623 million in funding go to 47 applicants.
The FHWA doled out another $521 million to 51 applicants pulled from the same pool in August 2024. The agency also began accepting applications for a new round of funding in mid-2024.
Tesla continued pursuing the charging corridor idea even after being left out of the first round, TechCrunch reported in April 2024. Former policy VP Rohan Patel said at the time that some of the sites along the 1,800-mile route were “no-brainers even without funding.”
The status of Project TESSERACT was unclear following that, though, as Tesla laid off more than 10% of its workforce and, in particular, gutted its charging team.
There could theoretically be another round of CFI funds available, as the bipartisan infrastructure law allocated $2.5 billion for the program. The FHWA’s website for the CFI program currently says there is “[n]o estimated date” for the next “notice of funding opportunity,” though, and it’s unclear what effect the incoming Trump administration’s priorities will have on programs like this.
