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Tesla’s V4 Supercharger seems to appear in new project plans

John Harris | Twitter

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Tesla’s V4 Supercharger appeared in new project plans for a site in Danvers, Massachusetts, with a design that is strikingly similar to the company’s 72 kW Urban Supercharger. However, project details outlined in blueprints for the Danvers Supercharger seem to indicate this is Tesla’s next big development in its next-gen charging posts, but some questions still remain.

Tesla’s V4 Supercharger

Tesla’s V4 Supercharger will, of course, succeed the 250 kW-capable V3 Superchargers that were released in 2019. The V3 Supercharger was an outrageous update and a huge development to the expedited process of charging Tesla’s EVs. Rates of up to 1,000 miles of range added per hour are capable with the V3 Superchargers, but they are also only available to Tesla vehicles, which is where the V4 may be coming into play.

Along with the rumored CSS support that the V4 Supercharger will pack, Tesla seems to be revising a recently-released 72 kW Urban Supercharger design for the new stalls. In the project outline for the Danvers, Massachusetts Supercharger, the design for the “Alternative Supercharger Post” is strikingly similar, but there are a few details that lead us to believe this is what Tesla is planning to utilize for the new design.

Tesla’s Urban Supercharger can be wall-mounted and installed virtually anywhere

Initially, the Alternative design in the blueprints is massive: 6′ 4.5″, weighing 200 pounds. That’s significantly larger than the Urban Supercharger, which is compact and perhaps only four feet or less in height. It towers over the V3 Supercharger design, which is also present in the blueprints and seems to be the project’s more-likely outfitting when it is complete (courtesy of @JH_Beford on Twitter).

Credit: John Bedford @JH_Bedford on Twitter

We recently reported on some rumors surrounding the V4 Supercharger design, and it does appear to be somewhat similar from a very elementary perspective to what descriptions of the new shell would be. However, there are some things that still remain in question as the V4 Supercharger design has not yet been made public by Tesla.

CCS Support

The project design lacks any mention of potential CCS Support on the V4 Supercharger, which is what most people would expect moving forward from Tesla. The automaker has been utilizing a Pilot Program in Europe that allows other EV brands to utilize Supercharger stalls. This project is available in sixteen countries in Europe, and Tesla has made it clear that, eventually, the capability will be available in the United States. For now, it is too much of an advantage as Tesla continues to grow, and the company keeps it exclusive to Tesla vehicles in the U.S.

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However, as we are already a month into the second half of 2022, it gives Tesla less time to roll out the “new Supercharger equipment that will enable non-Tesla EV drivers in North America to use Tesla Superchargers.” These quoted words come courtesy of the White House.

CCS Support may not be on these designs for several reasons, and it could be that Tesla simply hasn’t finalized a design for that Supercharger. Additionally, this could be an entirely different design altogether, and while it could be the V4 Supercharger, Tesla may not have plans to put CCS Support on the V4. That could perhaps be saved for another design.

900v Architecture

Tesla’s V4 Supercharger will also likely support ultra-fast charging architectures like a rumored 900V setup for the Cybertruck. These higher-voltage architectures enable ultra-fast charging and can supply high-performance or high-workload vehicles with range in short amounts of time.

Tesla is also likely to head toward a 350 kW charging rate, which is present in Electrify America chargers. These chargers are perfect for high-voltage vehicles as they can charge vehicles faster, and most importantly, the vehicles can support them. Their higher voltage architecture can stabilize the charging process for these higher-powered chargers. The Porsche Taycan has an 800v architecture, which enables faster charging, less weight, and high performance, all at lower temperatures.

I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or questions, please email me at joey@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @KlenderJoey, or if you have news tips, you can email us at tips@teslarati.com.

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Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk shuts down talk of TSMC taking over Terafab

Musk says Tesla and SpaceX will build and run Terafab, with TSMC limited to renting.

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SpaceX Terafab rendering

Elon Musk has drawn a firm line around who will be in charge of Terafab, the giant chip factory Tesla and SpaceX are planning in Texas.

Musk replied to a post on X arguing that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) would most likely end up owning and operating the plant. “No, we will build and run the fab. Let there be ZERO doubt about that,” Musk wrote. “Maybe TSMC subleases part of the Terafab if they want, but nothing more than that.”

In plain terms, a sublease means TSMC could rent a section of the complex to make chips, similar to a tenant renting one floor of an office tower. The building, the equipment decisions and the daily operation would stay with Tesla and SpaceX.

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The comment shuts down speculation that started last week. On October 2, tech journalist Tim Culpan reported that TSMC was exploring ways to help run Terafab’s factories. Musk responded the next day that it was “just discussions, but something may come of it,” as Teslarati reported at the time. That left room for a scenario where the world’s largest contract chipmaker took the wheel. Musk’s latest post closes that door.

Elon Musk teases TSMC as potential Terafab partner

Some background helps explain why this matters. Tesla designs its own AI chips today but pays outside companies like TSMC and Samsung to manufacture them. Musk unveiled Terafab in March as a joint project between Tesla, SpaceX and xAI, arguing that existing suppliers cannot expand fast enough to meet his companies’ future demand. The goal is to produce enough chips each year to supply one terawatt of computing power, roughly 50 times what the entire global AI chip industry produces now.

Those chips are meant for Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots, the Cybercab and Full Self-Driving computers, along with chips for SpaceX’s planned data centers in orbit. Owning the factory means Musk’s companies would not have to compete with every other chip customer for time on someone else’s production lines.

Intel is still part of the picture. The company signed on in April to help design, build and package chips for the project, and CEO Lip-Bu Tan told Bloomberg this week that Intel will keep working on Terafab despite the TSMC chatter.

The project moved from concept to construction planning over the summer. In August, SpaceX confirmed the Grimes County site about an hour from Houston, sent the county a $10 million payment under its tax abatement deal and said civil work would begin shortly. The first phase carries a $16.8 billion price tag, and total spending across all phases could reach as much as $119 billion.

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TSMC chairman C.C. Wei has said a new fab typically takes two to three years to build and another one to two years to reach full output. Tesla and SpaceX have never run one, which is why TSMC’s expertise drew so much attention. Musk’s answer suggests he would rather learn that process in house than hand control of a project this central to Tesla’s robotics and autonomy plans to an outside company.

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Elon Musk

Trump to hand Elon Musk a top honor that traces back to JFK

Trump will award Elon Musk the National Medal of Science at Thursday’s White House summit.

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elon musk and donald trump in front of a tesla cybertruck at the white house

Elon Musk is set to receive the highest honor the U.S. government gives to scientists and engineers.

President Donald Trump will present Musk with the National Medal of Science on Thursday at the White House’s Science: A New Golden Age Summit, Fox News Digital first reported on Wednesday. Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su will receive the same medal, while Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. A White House official later confirmed the list to Reuters.

“The Trump administration is grateful for the contributions of these incredible leaders in science and technology. These recipients are helping ensure America keeps leading the world in innovation,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston told Fox News.

It will be the first time Trump has presented either medal in his two terms. Congress created the National Medal of Science in 1959, and the National Science Foundation, which administers it, says 529 scientists and engineers have received it since. A presidential committee reviews nominees, but the president makes the final call.

Thursday’s group of medalists run or founded companies, and three of them sit at the center of the Super Intelligence hardware race that Musk competes in. Huang’s Nvidia supplies the GB300 chips filling SpaceX’s Colossus 2 cluster, while Su’s AMD is Nvidia’s biggest rival in data center GPUs.

Worth noting that Trump’s uncle, MIT physicist John G. Trump, received the National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan for his work on ionizing radiation and its uses in medicine and industry.

The Pentagon taps Elon Musk to design the battlefield of the future

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For Musk, the medal is the latest sign of how far his relationship with Trump has come since their 2025 split over the “Big Beautiful Bill” and his exit from DOGE. Last week, he sat at Trump’s left during a White House lunch where AI executives signed a voluntary safety accord, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth named him to help lead the Pentagon’s Project Meridian study on the future of warfare. Musk has also adopted the administration’s new vocabulary, saying on Sunday that SpaceXAI will be renamed SpaceXSI after Trump ordered federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence.”

Musk has collected science honors before, including the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication in 2019.

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Lifestyle

Tesla FSD changed its mind mid-intersection, and it may have saved a life

Tesla shares dashcam footage of FSD Supervised stopping mid intersection to avoid a T-bone crash.

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Credit: @BLKMDL3/X

Tesla is putting another Full Self-Driving save in front of its 24.8 million followers on X.

On Tuesday morning, Tesla’s main account shared a dashcam clip with the caption “FSD Supervised preventing T-bone crash.” The footage came from an owner posting as TheNewGrid, who described what happened at a stop sign: “I looked at the car coming to the stop sign figured they would stop, my car went, then came to a stop mid intersection as they flew by. Had I been manually driving this would have resulted in a crash.”

The sequence is the notable part. FSD had already started crossing when the other driver ran the stop sign. Instead of pressing on, the car braked hard in the middle of the intersection and let the crossing vehicle pass in front of it. By the owner’s own account, they had made the same assumption the software initially made, that the other car would stop, and would not have corrected in time.

The clip is the latest in a run of safety posts Tesla has amplified over the past several days. On Saturday, the company shared a video from Selling Sunset star Jason Oppenheim, who sold his Bentley for a Model Y and said he was buying Teslas with FSD for 10 of his employees. Ashok Elluswamy, who leads Tesla AI, followed up by writing that Tesla self-driving “reacts to other people cutting into your path with super-human response times.” On Monday, a Cybertruck owner posted footage of FSD moving across three lanes from a red light to clear a path for an ambulance approaching from behind.

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This recent clip also lands a few weeks after Tesla began shipping Automatic Collision Evasion with FSD v14.3.9, a feature that can activate FSD on the driver’s behalf when a frontal collision is imminent or the driver appears distracted. Elluswamy said in September that “even earlier prediction of hazards, even faster reaction time and overall significantly better safety and collision avoidance” are coming with v15, the release Tesla has tied to round the clock Robotaxi operation.

The safety messaging matters beyond social media. Tesla has said FSD Supervised was 4.1 times less likely to crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometers on European roads, and it has been putting those figures in front of regulators. Eight EU countries have now approved FSD Supervised, with Croatia the most recent, but the EU’s bloc-wide vote originally set for October 6 has been pushed to December at the earliest.

FSD Supervised is still a Level 2 system, and the driver remains responsible at all times. Even heavy users find reasons to step in. Teslarati’s Joey Klender, who uses FSD for about 76 percent of his driving, laid out five recurring issues on Tuesday that still prompt him to intervene. Clips like this one show the other column of that ledger: moments where the software caught a mistake a human was about to make.

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